Like, I’ll totally agree that California NIMBYs are ridiculous and have committed the state to a poorly chosen path, but I don’t think you guys appreciate how very explicitly central “a civilization where everyone lives in a small-town environment with direct exposure to undeveloped nature” has been to the California Dream
Like before even the postwar Golden Age buildout under Gov. Brown the Elder that really instantiated this suburban paradise, the prewar boom of LA was very commonly framed – embraced by boosters to draw more residents – in terms of a job-rich city that uniquely didn’t have “slum” housing.
(You don’t even hear about “slum clearance” – the postwar practice of demolishing blocks at a time and giving the former residents intentions of something better that much anymore, but large areas of downtown-adjacent land in American cities was hyper-dense and low quality tenements or often formerly comfortable-class housing that had been subdivided all to hell)
California had an idiom for “life at high residential density” – the crowded, warrenlike Chinatowns of LA and especially SF since the Gold Rush, chaotically full of improvised enterprise, drug addiction, and murderous gang violence!
In the early 1980s, Long Beach – the industrialized working class shore to the south of LA, kind of its Queens, was like “ha-HA, we have filled this wonderful location at low bungalow density, time to upzone so as to keep this a functional area for working-class life!”
Of course the thing is the 1980s in Southern California went on to feature a massive illegal immigration wave (Cheech Marin’s 1987 Born in East L.A. is called that because it’s about an American-born bilingual Mexican Angelino experiencing this) which often landed in Long Beach AND the crack- and gang- heavy nadir of South LA-area Black communities.
Which is to say, in actual historical precedent that informs cultural sentiment, dense housing in California (let’s talk *Oakland*) consistently means “the white average-Joe neighborhood becomes overrun with inscrutable, addiction-riven, gang-murderous Others”
And the whole environmental stuff – there’s a clear line from John Muir and the Sierra Club through Paul Erlich and The Population Bomb to the Bay Area types who want to cap tech jobs or the people who worry about water (or road!) use coming from new development that the way to keep properly stewarding the land without exhausting finite resources was to limit population.
You can work racial or wevs angles too, a lot of the West Coast issues with natives and Chinese workers came from the way that the coast’s founding culture really came from a “Free Soil” philosophy, common among smallholders and “mechanics” in the (then-“West”), one of the two strains that went into the Republican anti-slavery stance along Boston moralism (New York, as the major port city of an international economy powered by cotton, was fairly pro-Confederate), that this was supposed to be a country to enable white men’s ability to establish self-sufficient petty dynasties of their own, and that indulging all this nonwhite work – creating a national economy oriented around slave-produced agricultural exports rather than white artisan industrial development, Pacific landowners recruiting natives or Chinese in a labor shortage rather than letting white wages rise so the workers could establish their pioneer fortunes – were, fundamentally, taking their jerbs.
And the pastoralism! This was the pleasant climate where the ranch house really blew up, integrating the outdoors and living area. Backyards – and home gardens – were key.
(In a LOT of ways Portland as I came to it at the dawn of the 2010s suddenly reminded me of things I had read about midcentury LA far closer than the one I saw in the 2000s)
Pete Seeger in 1963, “little boxes made of ticky tacky”, Joni Mitchell in 1970, “paved paradise and put up a parking lot”, these were laments for greenfield development coming before the activist-driven 1970s downzonings that saw that greenfield development was the ONLY way for California to add housing.
