Valuing Inland California

A well-housed, climate-friendly state can't just happen on the coasts

California Housing 9: Where We Go From Here 14

I started this substack with a list of 2022 priorities. 2022 is almost done, and I am almost done with the list. Stay tuned to see if I make it - and for the 2023 list coming in January!

A few months back, I spent a Saturday in one of my favorite places - Eastern Contra Costa County, aka East County. Those of you who have read The Road to Resegregation know how important this place is to me - and how important I think it is to the Bay Area and California.

I lived on and off in East County for a few years while writing the book, and have been back many times over the past decade - to visit friends I made during my field work, or to show my wife around and head up the wondrous Highway 160 into the Sacramento Delta. As much as I liked and respected the place, it generally remained someone else’s story - one that I tried to tell and advocate for, but not part of my life beyond the very specific history we have together. 

This time was different. This time, I was out visiting friends that are recent parts of the suburban migration. One was my oldest friend, a Marin County guy like me, now living near the wetlands of Oakley in an above-garage ADU and teaching school. Another is one of my favorite people in this housing research and writing business, someone who moved to Antioch with his family in search of peace, quiet, homeownership and perhaps a swimming pool. 

East County is now home to roughly 350k people. That’s almost the size of Oakland. It’s hyper diverse, a veritable San Leandro of the Delta. It’s also a major center of African- American life in the Bay. Antioch, not Richmond, is the largest black community in Contra Costa County. Sixty years ago Antioch was a sundown town.

Please start seeing Inland California

I say all this not just because I think people need to know more about East County. I say this because too many voices in the housing world still don’t seem to get this part of California - the deep suburbs of Inland California where communities of color have gone for almost a half century searching for a bit of peace, quiet, stability and perhaps a swimming pool. I spend a lot of time trying to get housing justice and pro-housing folks to put down their weapons and make peace, but ironically both groups often fail to understand and value places like Antioch. 

Both groups can see Antioch and the hundreds of places like it from Eastern San Diego to the Sacramento suburbs as a symbol of what went wrong in the cities. If only we had done things differently a half century ago, maybe things would be different. We should have stopped gentrification and prevented so many families of color from having to leave! (Yes, we should have). We should have built the original BART plan and lots of TOD in the 70s and provided a ton more housing so people didn’t have to move 100 miles away! (Yes, we should have).

But we didn’t. 

We also didn’t value creating secure and diverse forms of supported homeownership (not a high priority for either group sadly), so people took what they could get where they could get it.

Now these sprawling, low-density, car-oriented old desert and farm and gold rush towns are home to millions.¹ Most of these millions of humans are people of color, and they deserve to be part of the imagined housing future of California just as much as anyone else, no matter what the climate models say, no matter the size of their trucks, no matter whether you know or like these places.

One way to start seeing these places is to get beyond the lens of displacement. Sure, many folks living in Patterson or Rancho Cucamonga or Elk Grove came from LA or the Bay. And surely some would have stayed if they could have bought a house. But to only see these communities as a by-product of injustice is to deny the folks who live there real agency. Many folks are now 2nd and 3rd generation East County or Stanislaus or Riverside or San Bernardino. Many went searching for something they couldn’t find back in the old neighborhoods - quiet, anonymity, walking trails, suburbia. In the case of many immigrants and refugees from the wars in Central America and Southeast Asia, the city was only ever a way station on the road back to something more rural, more familiar, some place that felt safe after decades of uncertainty and the horrors of genocide.

We also need to get beyond the lens of constant judgment in housing - about homeownership or car usage or anything else, the kind of stigma that housing progressives of both the justice and abundance variety will lay on places like Antioch or Riverside. Let’s not pretend that Californians are making housing and mobility choices based on a bunch of great options, unless they are rich. This judgment isn't helping us get to justice or abundance or both - it just makes folks dislike you.

Any housing / transportation policy that brings both justice and abundance to our Golden State has to start to value the existing lives of Inland California. This doesn’t mean supporting sprawl, or continued failure to build housing in the Coast. But it means seeing Inland California as central to the solution, both for social justice and climate justice. 

These are communities that can become some of the most bikeable in the state, especially the electric variety. They have land and water often, and with the right actions can build climate friendly housing, spaces for cleaner jobs, affordable housing and homeownership opportunities. High Speed Rail and other infrastructure investments could turn them from their current sprawling and unequal form - which they share with most of our state - into something more compact, liveable, sustainable and equitable, but only with real investment.

We must have solutions that work in these communities, solutions that see them as part of the solution, rather than as part of (or a symptom of) the problem. As I write in the Road to Resegregation, it’s best to think of Inland California as incomplete. Perhaps we shouldn’t have forced them to grow and accommodate two generations of working and middle class folks of color. But we did, and now we owe it to them - and to ourselves - to help them finally build the communities they need.

Inland leadership 

The good news is that folks in and from Inland California know their future matters and aren’t waiting for us Coastal folks to learn to appreciate them. They are increasingly leading the charge, not just in their own communities but statewide. 

I don’t think it is a coincidence that many of the most aggressively progressive and innovative organizations are women-led. Lift to Rise is making the Coachella Valley a leader in thinking about affordable housing pipelines and community-driven leadership. Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability understands planning and development as holistically as any activist group I have found anywhere, and somehow manage to do cutting edge work from Merced to Bakersfield and even into Coachella. Leaders like Marion Kanaan and Ashley Swearengin have made their respective community foundations into centers of innovation and cross-sector / cross-party collaboration that coastal California can learn from. And folks like Kerman’s own Ish Herrera have dedicated their careers to bring innovation, justice and new economic possibilities to California’s heartland, including the much needed economic transition only partly underway.

It’s not only that folks are leading in those communities, but folks from those communities are increasingly leading in state policy circles. You may not know it, but some of our brightest young minds in housing policy come from the legendary 209, aka the Northern San Joaquin Valley. Stay tuned for a future Substack where you will hear from them directly, and about why it is so important that folks from Inland California are making policy for everyone, even if we never gave their home communities either the respect or resources they deserved.

In the meantime, if you don’t know Inland CA, go visit, and make sure you stay for lunch. I recommend starting at Tortas Ahogadas El Tio in Oakley and going from there. Did I mention the food was hella good?

1. In the 2020 Census, more than 3 million people of color lived in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties (the Inland Empire) alone. Add in the millions more living in the Central Valley, the Bay Area exurbs and the suburbs of Sacramento and you get a large and mostly not white Inland California.