It's interesting to read the attempts to assign California's problems to either left-wing or right-wing political thinking.
My take is that something like NIMBY issues fails to map well on to either the traditional left-right spectrum or the libertarian-favored political matrix. You can argue about whose interests are driving California's problems, but IMO it's a great example of how impoverished and useless these conceptual frameworks have become.
This is 100% correct. In a sane world, the divide would be class-based, but the socioeconomic groups who are adversely affected by NIMBYism don’t turn out to vote.
In the beach town I live in, a little north of LA, a proposal to rezone some areas on our hillsides for affordable housing development was voted down in a referendum last year. Now, as our once-vibrant downtown becomes increasingly seedy (recently, a young father was stabbed to death by a homeless man in an upscale restaurant as he held his young daughter in his lap), the people who opposed the rezoning are pushing to crack down on the homeless by arresting them or by bussing them out of the city. All because they oppose actual structural reform, since it would bring the value of their house down to $900,000 from $1,000,000 or whatever.
Eventually, they’ll realize that changes are necessary, because even the nice areas of our cities will become impassable in a way that cosmetic fixes can’t solve. The question is when. The longer it takes, the closer to “collapse” California will get.
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