We’ve learned that a surefire way to draw ten thousand visitors and dozens of comments to a Strong Towns article is to write about the housing affordability problem that plagues much of America—but nowhere more severely than coastal California. Of course, California housing issues are the subject of social media obsession and frequent conventional media coverage from local outlets all the way up to the New York Times. But one news story that crossed our paths this summer seemed to simultaneously embody the absurd extent of the problem, and point to what the Strong Towns movement has to offer to the conversation that’s unique.

I wrote in July about the denial in San Bruno, CA of a proposal to build hundreds of apartments on what is currently a disused parking lot. The developer moved heaven and earth to win approval: offered tens of millions of dollars worth of concessions to the city, complied with a local transit-oriented development plan which was recently approved by voters themselves (San Bruno is not a NIMBY bastion!)… and then was denied anyway on account of a somewhat strange technicality in the city’s laws. This is a place where the forces that would normally impose some sort of gravity on the situation, pulling things back toward normal, don’t seem to apply anymore.

In a November follow-up post, I check in on the latest developments in this saga, and offer more perspective on who benefits when we create as many hoops to jump through to build a building as San Bruno has (hint: it’s not who you’d think).

Specifically, what I hope to offer by examining stories like this is an understanding of the costs of fragility. A fragile system is one in which only one thing has to go wrong to cause a breakdown. Under the postwar suburban experiment, we have introduced an incredible amount of fragility to our governing institutions and processes, often by making them complicated in the seemingly noble pursuit of orderly, predictable planning. The extent of the symptoms is worse in California, but California’s underlying dysfunction is not unique. We all have the same financing mechanisms, similar regulatory straitjackets, the same incentives that punish small-scale change and encourage big, capital-intensive projects which, when they fail, only fail in big ways.

California can’t afford to go on with a politics in which every single housing development becomes a referendum, an existential battle over the state’s future identity. This is a politics that empowers only big actors: the local government that can demand tribute, and the large-scale, corporate developer that can pay it. Everybody else gets to watch helplessly, or at best, inveigh for a few minutes at a public meeting.

Under a Strong Towns approach, no neighborhood would be immune from change. And the next increment of neighborhood evolution would be something a small-scale builder or rehabber can participate in as of right: by picking up a quick permit from City Hall, and then picking up a hammer. -Daniel Herriges, Senior Editor