David Lazarus is showing to Southern Californians what Bay Area readers already knew: the man really understands the problems facing working Californians, and is not afraid to write about them directly and engagingly. In January he took on Prop 13 and called for it to be revamped, if not scrapped. Today he has shifted his focus to the struggles renters face in LA.

As any of us who have lived in the area realize, rents are nearly unaffordable in the urban center of LA – the place where it’s easiest to live without a car. Lazarus opens his column with the story of a single mother who makes $38K as an admin assistant and who can only afford a rental way out in Lancaster. This is a familiar story to me – I know a LOT of Californians who make a similar commute. And as oil prices soar toward $4/gal, it is becoming more difficult for working Californians to get around.

For the last few decades, Californians have been told the solution is more of the same – more sprawl, more freeways, more commuting. The obvious solution – to build more housing in the urban core – is opposed by those who believe, as a USC professor lamented in Lazarus’ column, “density is a four-letter word.”

Lazarus helps explain why the anti-density movement is blocking what I described last summer as the redefinition of the California Dream for the 21st century – that unless we invest in greater urban density, we will inscribe inequality permanently on the urban landscape.

For example, one of the major obstacles to affordable rental housing construction in the urban core is the archaic parking requirement:

One reason housing prices are so high is a requirement that newly built multiunit dwellings (and condo conversions) provide at least one — usually two or three — parking space per unit. This inflates the cost of each apartment and discourages construction of smaller, more affordable units because developers would be required to provide even more parking.

“The fixation on parking in Los Angeles has driven up the price of housing and increased congestion on our streets,” said Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA. He said including two spaces with a unit can add about $45,000 to construction costs.

One solution would be to waive the parking requirement for smaller apartments, thus creating an incentive for developers to place more such units on the market. And because there’d be no parking cost built into the rent, such units would (in theory) be cheaper than apartments that come with extra room for vehicles.

This could have the added benefit of increasing demand for public transportation — presuming, that is, people would trade car ownership for reduced rent. Increased demand would hopefully spur development of commuter-friendly projects like a long-delayed Westside subway line.

But Gail Goldberg, L.A.’s planning director, said any proposal that includes cutbacks in parking tends to go nowhere. “People feel like there’s already not enough parking and that people are intruding into their neighborhood. This is a difficult discussion to have.”

Here we see the core problem: those who established themselves in these neighborhoods in the 20th century, under a now-obsolete version of the California Dream, refuse to admit that their perspectives and expectations need to change. Whether they know it or not, those who oppose density are helping establish a “homeowner aristocracy” – where the benefits of society go only to those who were lucky enough to buy a house before 2000, or who inherited from someone who did. In order to maintain the fantasy that urban neighborhoods can have enough parking for everyone who wants a car, LA is now making it unaffordable to rent a home if you are not making an upper middle class income, and those who can’t afford it are forced to drive – and bear the brunt of peak oil’s arrival.

San Franciscans might empathize. The squeeze on parking spaces there is legendary; a garage is almost a mythical prize. And yet, as many more San Franciscans are realizing, there is really no good reason to own a car if you live in the City. MUNI has its problems, but it gets people around. Carsharing services like Zipcar or City CarShare allow one to access a vehicle on the few occasions they might need it, reducing the need for parking spaces and car ownership.

As more and more scholars are coming to realize, car ownership has high costs for workers – “you work on Friday to pay for your auto”. Adding in the environmental and climate costs of long car commutes, and anti-density policies are clearly having a catastrophic effect on our state. City centers can thrive with less parking, and it brings the added benefit of not bankrupting the workers who keep that city going.

Lazarus suggests that alongside going after the parking requirement, we pursue mixed use development:

A more politically practical remedy may be to ease zoning requirements for mixed-use properties, thus allowing creation of urban villages featuring retail outlets at street level and moderately priced living spaces overhead.

This is already happening to some extent above a handful of subway stations, such as the Wilshire Vermont Station project in Koreatown. But creation of dynamic transit villages throughout L.A. remains a distant prospect at best.

It’s unfortunate that this seems a “distant prospect at best,” especially because so many other West Coast cities already embrace mixed use. Seattle, where I lived from 2001 to 2007, is an excellent example of mixed use, and in my last years there I got along quite well without having a car at all. SF and Oakland exhibit effective mixed-use policies. So does my current home of Monterey – virtually everything I need, from the library to the supermarket to bars and entertainment is a short walk or bike trip away.

Much of Southern California looked like this as well, at least before 1950. Since that time, under the leadership of conservative Republicans, SoCal pioneered the single-use, car-based sprawl that has now brought the American economy to the brink of collapse. SoCal gambled that cheap oil and affordable land would last forever. That gamble is now quite clearly lost – so why should we listen to the anti-density forces who basically would have us double down?

If we are to renew the promises of the California Dream – affordable, clean, pleasant living for all the state’s working people – we are going to have to turn to density. We need to invest in public transportation, apartments and condos, and mixed use policies. If we do, we can restore the promise of economic security to the people of our state. If we do not, we will create a pattern of inequality that will likely dominate our society for the entire century.

For nearly a hundred years, the “California Dream” has had a particular meaning: owning a detached single-family home with a bit of land around it, being able to drive anywhere you need or want to go without encountering traffic, and with enough money left over to spend on soaking up the sunshine. The cheap and widely available Model T crystallized this dream in the 1920s, combined with cheap and widely available land. The Depression wound up intensifying the dream, as Californians in bread lines and rural relief camps yearned all the more strongly for that dream they glimpsed in the Roaring Twenties. World War II provided the jobs and savings to make it a reality, and by the 1950s and 1960s the California Dream was in its Golden Age. Any white family that held down a steady job could buy a home and have more than enough left over to fill its garage with cars and its rooms with consumer baubles.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Golden Age had dimmed, as roads became crowded and housing became expensive. In response Californians tried all kinds of methods to prolong this version of their dream, from Prop 13 to NIMBY activism against new projects that were seen as ruining the detached suburban paradise, to reasserting the automobile and the freeway.

Here in the 21st century, though, this California Dream seems to have finally run its course. In Southern California especially – always the true home of this dream, its Bay Area expressions notwithstanding – cheap and available land simply no longer exists. Roads of all kinds are hopelessly clogged and new freeway lanes fill with traffic as soon as the ribbons are cut. Housing prices are beyond the reach of most Californians; only creative and ultimately dishonest lending supported real estate these last five years.

It’s fitting then that as the 20th century California Dream is dying, the 21st century Dream is slowly being born. And as two important articles in Monday’s Los Angeles Times suggest, SoCal is the birthplace of this new dream. But the old attitudes die hard, and in their meeting lies the root of the political battles that will define our adult lives.

Politics, of course, were the keys to the earlier California Dream. It took the Progressive coalition of labor, reform Democrats and Republicans, farmers, and middle-class professionals to break the power of the railroads and the large landowners over California’s economy in the 1910s; without this the easy construction of public roads and mass ownership of private homes would simply not have been possible.

Just as important was the political revolution of 1958. Sick of Republican do-nothing rule, Californians turned en masse to liberal Democrats like Pat Brown and Jesse Unruh to manage and preserve their prosperity, to build the freeways and aqueducts that sustained their suburban dream, to build the schools and colleges that would allow their kids to live the dream as well.

But when this dream ran into trouble in the 1970s, Californians faced a crossroads. Would they redefine the terms of the dream, to be more inclusive, but less focused on freeways, cars, and the single family home? Or would they find ways to artificially prolong the 1950s for as long as possible by protecting the existing homeowners at the expense of those on the outside and those not yet born? As we know, the latter course was chosen. Prop 13 created a homeowners’ veto over virtually all of state government, ensuring that California would never be able to do anything with its government that did not meet with the approval of a vocal minority of self-interested homeowners.

The 1978 system was about more than a tax revolt. It was about preserving the 1950s vision of white suburbia from any and all efforts to change it. Although Prop 13 wasn’t responsible for NIMBY efforts to kill affordable housing, or new hospitals, or LA subway lines, or urban density, it was done at the same time and for the same reasons.

The consequences are clear to us all. Our health care system is collapsing. College is unaffordable. Our roads are gridlocked and alternatives are only sporadically available. Our climate is changing for the worse – and Republicans are working to prolong all of those problems, and delay their costs for a few decades. California life has become unaffordable – only 60% of Californians own a home, with only 47% of LA County residents being homeowners. Us younger folks don’t ever expect to be able to afford a house.

Which brings me to the first of the LA Times articles, “Southern California is Becoming a Tight Fit,” which focuses on how multi-family homes like condos and apartments are now being built in larger numbers than single-family homes. Economics are the main force behind this:

Condos and apartments are cheaper to build than houses, largely because less land is required per unit.

They are also cheaper to sell or rent, and with the median price of a single-family residence in Orange County at $724,000, many potential buyers can afford only condos, [Kristine Thalman of the Cal Building Industry Association] said. They also appeal to younger buyers.

“They can live in a high-rise, go downstairs to a bar and restaurant and go to the baseball game,” she said

Greater urban density, then, IS the revised California Dream. For a wide spectrum of Californians to ever be able to afford to own their own home – long recognized as one of the keys to economic security in America – then we need more apartments and condos.

The environmental benefits of urban density should be obvious. If you can walk to the shops, to the library, or to public transportation, you’re driving less and thereby helping mitigate global warming. For many of us younger Californians, this is a preferred way of living. I much prefer living in an apartment building to the ranch home in Orange County I grew up in, being able to walk to where I need to go instead of having to drive everywhere. The popularity of cities like San Francisco and Oakland and central LA with people my age is proof I’m not just a lone nut.

But in neighborhoods where this new density is being built, like Studio City and Sherman Oaks, residents who still cling to the 20th century version of the California Dream are trying to strangle the new 21st century dream in its infancy:

In Studio City, where mid-century houses and small apartment buildings are being replaced by mega-condo projects, residents are worried that the village-like nature of the community will be squashed under a crush of large new buildings and thousands of new residents….

“We’re just trying very hard to preserve some semblance of human-scale life here,” said Barbara Burke, who is a vice president of the Studio City Neighborhood Council but who said she was speaking as a homeowner. “The congestion is huge.”

The idea that only low-density suburbs provide “human-scale life” is belied by the experiences of cities from Paris to Philadelphia, from Manhattan to Mexico City. But the notion that suburban homeowners have some sort of absolute right to that lifestyle, that they have a political veto over any attempts to shift urban planning in a newer direction, remains strong. Until we can convince these homeowners that they have nothing to fear from the new density, that only with density can any kind of California Dream realistically exist in the 21st century, they’re going to continue to fight us, and try and prolong the 1950s as long as they can, no matter the cost.

This LA Times piece raises an important point, however – that greater density in SoCal also tends to bring greater traffic congestion. What is BADLY needed is an alternative to the car – public transportation that serves these new densities, that is quick, efficient, and effective in getting residents where they want or need to go.

And that takes to the other article I wanted to highlight, also from the Times: “LA Could Look to Denver For its Transit Template.” The article explains the Denver metro area’s 2004 decision to begin the FasTracks project:

In November 2004, voters in the Denver metro region went to the polls and, much to the surprise of some political observers, decided to tax themselves to begin the nation’s largest ongoing expansion of mass transit.

If all goes as planned, the Denver region is expected to build 119 miles of light rail and commuter rail by 2016. Among the projects are six new lines from Denver to the suburbs, including one to the airport, the extension of two other light-rail lines and a new rapid transit bus line.

It’s a relatively unusual approach. Constrained by a lack of money, most cities build one or maybe two lines at a time. In Denver, they’re betting the entire system can be built at once.

Building it all at once is costly, but key – instead of a piecemeal line by line approach, an entire system provides a ready network that will allow residents of new urban density to move around the region with a significantly reduced dependence on the automobile.

Could LA adopt a similar approach? The article notes that in 1980 voters had attempted to do exactly that, voting to tax themselves to build RTD’s (now MTA) ambitious rail and subway plan. But this plan immediately ran into resistance from the NIMBY forces, who successfuly asserted a homeowner veto over this farsighted plan. LA’s subway to the sea was halted in its tracks by Westside opposition, for example, in the mid-1980s. But that opposition has now disappeared, with Henry Waxman working to lift the federal injunction on tunneling in the area, and cities like Beverly Hills clamoring for a rail line extension to their town.

The problem now facing LA is financial. The article notes that Antonio Villaraigosa has kicked around the idea of bringing a financing measure to voters. But why shouldn’t the state be expected to help develop the 21st century California Dream, as it did in the 20th century?

Localities cannot build the infrastructure that the new California Dream needs. The state must help. Democrats understand this, but Republicans actively are fighting it. And that brings us to the ultimate point I wanted to make, to show how this new California Dream is already at the root of our politics and will be for some time.

If we are to build an affordable, economically secure, and prosperous 21st century California Dream, we need new infrastructure investment. We need a robust regional rail system for SoCal. We need expansion of BART and a revived MUNI. We need high speed rail. We need clean buses.

Republicans, however, want none of this. To voters they present a face of defending the homeowner veto, the 1978 system that says the 1950s version of the dream will be maintained forever. But in reality they want something much darker. To California Republicans, their goal is instead a homeowner aristocracy. Where government exists merely to protect those lucky few who own homes and can service that debt – and nobody else. They actively fight efforts to make homeownership affordable, to make transportation more accesible. They want to shackle Californians to their cars to benefit their oil company friends, and lock the majority of Californians out of homeownership out of selfish greed. They use the budget fight to pursue this agenda, seeking to gut environmental legislation as well as public transportation.

As Democrats, as California progressives, it is our task to fight back against this. Our task is to help build the 21st century California Dream – a sustainable society where our agricultural lands are protected so that we can eat locally, where we live in new urban densities dependent on our feet, our bikes, our trains, so that we don’t ruin the climate we stayed her to enjoy. A California where people of all classes and racial/ethnic backgrounds have the opportunity to own a home and experience the economic security that offers. This dream suffuses our politics and our personal goals. California must adapt if it is to survive. Our job is to lead that project to fruition.