Maybe a Good Scolding Will Bring Them Back

Post-war Levittown, PA (photo: J Reps)

The suburbs boomed after World War II, and Progressives have been decrying them ever since. The latest harangue, by the Chroncile editorial page:

Editorial: No, Californians aren't fleeing for Texas. They're moving to unsustainable suburbs [bold added]

California isn’t shrinking. It’s growing unsustainably.

Dense urban centers like San Francisco and Los Angeles are seeing outmigration. But smaller, car-dependent cities like Fresno and suburban and exurban communities — often in fire country — are booming. In the tiny city of Lathrop, 9 miles south of Stockton, a new 5,000-acre community is in the works that will include 11,000 single-family homes. Home sales in Sacramento’s suburbs are also exploding, as well as in drought and wildfire-prone Sonoma County and Southern California’s Inland Empire and desert communities.

Newfound work-from-home options for high-paid office workers are driving some of this movement. But these migration patterns were already in place long before COVID-19 untethered these workers’ housing from their jobs.

Rental prices may have come down slightly in San Francisco, but they’re hardly affordable. Los Angeles remains impenetrable as well. People are chasing the California dream where they can afford it. And right now that’s in the distant ’burbs.

There’s an old-fashioned word for this pattern of migration and development: It’s called sprawl. And it’s kneecapping the state’s climate change fight.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. Big California cities still have room to grow. We need them to if the state is going to have a sustainable future. Dense housing near jobs, transit and entertainment has a much lower carbon footprint than car-centric suburban homes.

But the path to get us there is iffy. California may not be growing as fast as it used to, but its future doesn’t look much different than its past: suburban and unsustainable.

No, Progressives, your scare tactics won't work ("drought","fire country"), not to mention your sniffing at the plebes ("sprawl", "unsustainable"). And what's with the suburbs fostering climate change? Sacramento, which you control, has ordered us all into electric cars in a few years, so transportation won't be a source of bogeyman carbon.

It's your emptying cities which frighten us with homeless encampments, rampant burglary, drugs, usurious rents, filthy mass-transit, filthy streets, and labyrinthine regulations, which all come with extra taxes for the privilege of living and working in your precious highrises.

As COVID-19 taught us, we don't need to go to the City for leisure. As more employers move out, we won't have to go to the City for work, either.