California Here They Come!

Say "Sold Out" at the show and everybody else goes away.  What number does San Rafael have to reach before we too can say “Sold out?”

Talking about transit plans and suburb conversion is really the 2nd question.  We skipped past the more important starting point:  Should we permit the market to determine how many more people we can and must house?

Supervisor Steve Kinsey recently wrote, "California Here I Come", gushing about Plan Bay Area’s goal to add 2,000,000 new residents to the Bay Area communities including our San Rafael.

It is as though Mr. Kinsey and friends think that once Lucy and Ricky and Fred and Ethel arrive, they will move into new apartments we are to build for them (well, we can't really imagine the Mertzes in a house), and then that is the end of it.

But it isn't.  Since Al Jolson sang "California Here I Come" 92 years ago, the human migration wave to California has not abated.  These two million proposed new residents are not a one-time “Katrina” displacement. Rather, they merely represent a snapshot of this ongoing century-long migration that has been limited only by the supply of housing.

Now, by substantially increasing that supply, we remove that safeguard and risk the overpopulation of our home town and California overall.

The housing proposed by our regional government in Oakland is reckless.  California is a desert reaching its tipping point where it barely sustains its vast population today. To add as many millions as choose to come...from New York, the Midwest, and foreign countries including Texas...is a poor idea.

And when we rationally respond that San Rafael (and Marin) does not need all these newcomers, the Fast Growth lobby suddenly plays the affordable housing card.  They use the poor as a human shield to try to defend their plan, when in reality San Rafael's poor have merely a lottery chance to get some of this housing being built for the California-Here-I-Comes.

Unsustainable sustainability is on the menu, cooked from the roadkill of Slow Growth.

Yes, suburban life is slated for extinction, and cheerleaders are waving pom-poms for Rampant Growth. 

Thank goodness we don't have a larger population today!  And thank goodness we still have time to turn back the thousands of new residents our regional government wants us to add to San Rafael.

Our schools are bursting at the seams.  How can we possibly add so much housing that San Rafael would need two new unfunded schools...just for starters? 

But that unelected entity in Oakland refuses to say, "Well, just make X thousands of homes and then you are done."  Quite the opposite:  Every four years they will assign us even more people to add, just like Catch-22's Colonel Cathcart increasing the number of missions that combat pilots had to fly…a target continually moved to make sure no pilot ever reaches it.

When ABAG assigns us people and jobs to add, they may as well assign us an amount of new rainfall we have to add.  It is just as practical.

We have no duty to increase our population.  We have no capacity to do so in ABAG's breathtaking scale.  ABAG assures us that we still have local control.  We need to elect new leaders actually willing to use that local control.

San Rafael should say we don't want to take on thousands of newcomers, just as Capt. Yossarian said he did not want to fly anymore. 

Someone told Yossarian, "Just suppose everyone thought the same way you do."

Yossarian responded:  "Then I'd be a damn fool to think any different."

(Randy Warren is a candidate for San Rafael City Council in this November’s elections)