Article

By John Lisovsky

One is an instance. Two may be a coincidence. Three annual fire seasons? In a row?

Climate change has given us this grim new time of year, and its rhythm warns us that it will not operate on a leisurely schedule. George Carlin quipped that it’s called the American Dream because you’ve got to be asleep to believe it. The smoke that approaches for a third straight year should wake us all from the California Dream of urban homesteads, endless tracts of single-family homes, and the urban/rural interface.

We paved over paradise, perched endless dwellings on hills and intermingled with forestry. We demanded power grids serve not a network of dense, well-contained cities, but sprawling suburbs flowing one into another. As our commutes into town warmed our climate one tank of gasoline at a time, the tinder got hotter and drier. When people live around things that easily catch fire, they will cause more fires. When we allow housing to be built where we know there’s an extreme fire risk — and draw people there with apartment bans in job centers — we do not merely stand by as tragedies like Paradise unfold. We are complicit.

West Los Angeles, where I grew up, is complicit. San Francisco, which bans apartments in over two-thirds of its residential land, is complicit. Palo Alto and Beverly Hills are complicit. People who complain about blocked views, shadows, traffic, noise, neighborhood character — those who worry about poor people moving in — are complicit. People who deny the past hundred years of empirical data about supply and demand, who have turned “developer” into a four-letter word, are complicit. Every community which said no to new housing because “we’re full,” because apartments would “destroy our charm,” has pushed people out into areas far from urban centers and closer to the wilderness, where fires are more easily ignited and less easily extinguished.

Our land-use patterns of the past 75 years, where the car is king and the carbon above our heads is not discussed, are a drunken bender in our civilizational life. We stand in 2019 at an inflection point. Suburban and exurban sprawl, particularly the intermingling with the wild frontier up and down California’s many mountains and hills, endanger actual human beings today. They also entrench fossil fuel emissions, which worsen tomorrow’s fires, floods, and sea level rise — for California, yes, but for regions the world over which share and exceed the risk we see here.

The ocean threatens the beach towns; the wildfires threaten the hills. There is only one direction to go, and it is up. Dense, infill development within cities puts people where they can be defended by municipal fire departments and where buses, bicycles and walking can replace cars and carbon emissions.

Earlier this year, state Sen. Scott Wiener’s clarion reimagining of what California should look like, and how it can embody the sustainable values it espouses, was stalled in committee. The year’s delay was petty, selfish and small-minded, but the More Homes Act will return in January. Our climate emergency has been underlined thrice by as many seasons of air so bad that children are taught the macabre California version of a snow day — the smoke day. Nostalgia of white picket fences and craftsman homes can only blow proverbial smoke in our faces for so long before the real thing shakes us out of imagination and into deathly reality.

We do not have another legislative session to waste in public comment about whether four-story apartment buildings next to subway and commuter rail stations constitute “Manhattanization.” We do not have another two years to waste wondering whether the only possible solution to our climate/wildfire emergency imposes too much on wealthy communities that have made a cottage industry of finding reasons to kill apartments. We do not have another election cycle to waste watching the mayor of Cupertino promise to build a wall around his city and have San Jose pay for it, or to watch the man’s constituents decry thousands of new units in Silicon Valley because they might bring “uneducated” people to town.

California is burning. Climate refugees will not come only from third-world countries; they were made last year in Paradise and will be made right here again — by us and our decisions about where to build housing. Infill development is no longer an aesthetic preference or a lifestyle choice. It’s no longer about being near amenities. It’s a question of which communities are safe from fire risk, and which go to bed wondering whether a mandatory evacuation order might come before morning. It’s a question, equally, of which communities reach net zero emissions, and which guzzle gas and cook our planet.

Building more housing is the moral question, and the moral imperative, of our time. We need more homes.

California’s intense fire seasons expose poor planning decisions [SF Chronicle]

Just How Corrupt Is Bill Barr? [NY Times]

Just the facts, in 40 sentences.

Sometimes it’s worth stepping back to look at the full picture.

He has pressured a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 American presidential election.

He urged a foreign country to intervene in the 2016 presidential election.

He divulged classified information to foreign officials.

He publicly undermined American intelligence agents while standing next to a hostile foreign autocrat.

He hired a national security adviser who he knew had secretly worked as a foreign lobbyist.

He encourages foreign leaders to enrich him and his family by staying at his hotels.

He genuflects to murderous dictators.

He has alienated America’s closest allies.

He lied to the American people about his company’s business dealings in Russia.

He tells new lies virtually every week — about the economy, voter fraud, even the weather.

He spends hours on end watching television and days on end staying at resorts.

He often declines to read briefing books or perform other basic functions of a president’s job.

He has aides, as well as members of his own party in Congress, who mock him behind his back as unfit for office.

He has repeatedly denigrated a deceased United States senator who was a war hero.

He insulted a Gold Star family — the survivors of American troops killed in action.

He described a former first lady, not long after she died, as “nasty.”

He described white supremacists as “some very fine people.”

He told four women of color, all citizens and members of Congress, to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.”

He made a joke about Pocahontas during a ceremony honoring Native American World War II veterans.

He launched his political career by falsely claiming that the first black president was not really American.

He launched his presidential campaign by describing Mexicans as “rapists.”

He has described women, variously, as “a dog,” “a pig” and “horseface,” as well as “bleeding badly from a facelift” and having “blood coming out of her wherever.”

He has been accused of sexual assault or misconduct by multiple women.

He enthusiastically campaigned for a Senate candidate who was accused of molesting multiple teenage girls.

He waved around his arms, while giving a speech, to ridicule a physically disabled person.

He has encouraged his supporters to commit violence against his political opponents.

He has called for his opponents and critics to be investigated and jailed.

He uses a phrase popular with dictators — “the enemy of the people” — to describe journalists.

He attempts to undermine any independent source of information that he does not like, including judges, scientists, journalists, election officials, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Congressional Budget Office and the National Weather Service.

He has tried to harass the chairman of the Federal Reserve into lowering interest rates.

He said that a judge could not be objective because of his Mexican heritage.

He obstructed justice by trying to influence an investigation into his presidential campaign.

He violated federal law by directing his lawyer to pay $280,000 in hush money to cover up two apparent extramarital affairs.

He made his fortune partly through wide-scale financial fraud.

He has refused to release his tax returns.

He falsely accused his predecessor of wiretapping him.

He claimed that federal law-enforcement agents and prosecutors regularly fabricated evidence, thereby damaging the credibility of criminal investigations across the country.

He has ordered children to be physically separated from their parents.

He has suggested that America is no different from or better than Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

He has called America a “hellhole.”

He is the president of the United States, and he is a threat to virtually everything that the United States should stand for.

Donald Trump vs. the United States of America [New York Times]

Before Warren, Harris, or Clinton, there was Victoria Woodhull, the first female presidential candidate [Washington Post]

Friends, neighbors, it’s good to see all of you. I know you, you know me, and just seeing all of your faces at this city council meeting reminds me why I love living in this town. Because I feel comforted by stasis and regularity, both fed by ignorance, and which combine to perpetuate injustice.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak tonight, and I look forward to contributing to our robust debate by making claims that are floating in an ether of confusion, prejudice, and unearned authority. But for those of you who may not know me, let me introduce myself. I’m a retired professional who rose through the ranks because competition in my field was minimized due to systemic discrimination against women and people of color. My job was well paid, did not punish me for my lack of soft skills, and convinced me that I know what’s best for other people, even if it seems like what’s worst for other people. I grew up here and, after leaving for a time to go to college and start my career, returned to this town, my true home, in order to raise a family and stop time from progressing. I’ve lived in the same house in the Elm Heights neighborhood for the past twenty years, and I just love everything about this town except for the problems that my politics have directly created.

Now that we’ve heard from all the members of the city council tonight, I think we as citizens need to make a few things clear. The first is, we aren’t Madison. We aren’t Boulder. We aren’t Terre Haute. So when I hear a member of the council saying, “Well, Waukesha made a few small but substantive changes in such-and-such an area and the results have been very promising empirically,” what that council member fails to understand is that we aren’t Waukesha. We aren’t Tacoma. We aren’t Amherst. We aren’t Portland, Maine. Are we Scottsdale? No, we are not. And so all this so-called “evidence” about how policies have worked in other towns simply does not apply to us. No evidence applies to us. Our town exists in a fog of mystery and enigmatic strangeness, and nothing that happens outside city boundaries should have any bearing on how we govern or exist.

The second thing the council must understand is that subject-specific expertise built up through a lifetime of education and research doesn’t mean much unless you are also able to make exaggerated claims that stoke fear and resentment, ideally combined with a kind of faux-folksiness that harkens back to an age that never existed. Am I impressed that you have a Ph.D. in city planning or education or environmental science and are using your expertise to make the commons more equitable, livable, just, and human-centered? I mean, maybe. But the thing is, you haven’t frightened me with your expertise. There has been no “Oh God, the Other is taking over and we must stop them from inflicting their strange ways on our all-American life” moment tonight. And so, I’m afraid, you have wasted all of our time.

If I haven’t convinced you yet of my point of view, this surely will: as a middle-class white Christian man who came of age during the most profound and sustained economic boom in our nation’s history, I understand struggle. I never received anything in my life, except a world-class public education that cost virtually nothing. I wasn’t handed anything, except two loving parents, a comfortable upbringing, and the general feeling that our nation’s institutions and structures were designed for the success of people like me.

So when the city council talks about poverty, when it talks about affordable housing, when it talks about Medicaid, what we’re really talking about is work ethic. What we’re talking about is a culture of give-me give-me give-me that, yes, I directly benefited from via the university I attended, but now that I’ve benefitted from public programs, I don’t want anyone else to benefit from them. The question is not, “How can we help other people?” The question is, “How can other people help themselves via policies that rely on magical thinking?”

Or, to put it another way, let’s make a list of public programs that have directly benefitted me. Those are good. Now let’s make a list of public programs that benefit other people. Those are bad. That’s what small government means, after all: the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of those who already have those things, because the idea that in a democratic society we are all equals is dangerous and frightening to me.

Please, stop talking, folks. I didn’t talk while you were saying things that I wasn’t paying attention to.

I’d like to conclude my remarks with a NIMBY rant about how, first of all, we should not take any action on global climate change, because making a carbon sacrifice is something we should outsource to people whose lives would be more greatly affected by that carbon sacrifice. And, second, we need to preserve the character of our neighborhoods, by which I mean prevent immigrants and people of modest means from buying or renting near where I live.

Thank you, and remember: you should pay special attention to what I think, because I’ve been saying offensively wrong things about this place for over forty years.

Every NIMBY’S Speech At a Public Hearing [McSweeney’s]