A warning from six years ago.
A Human Wave Is Breaking Over California. It’s Flooding the Freeways and Schools. It’s Bloating the Cost of Housing. It’s Disrupting Power and Water Supplies. Ignoring Reality Hasn’t Worked. Maybe It’s Time for a Plan?
January 25, 2004|Lee Green
By birth, by foot, by automobile, from other states and other countries, legally and illegally, people have arrived in California for decades in unrelenting swells, human surf breaking steadily on a vast shore. Occasionally a big set rolls in and harasses state and local officials trying to determine how many new classrooms to build or where to bury the trash, but Californians take it in stride. You can complain, but what good would it do? You can complain about winter, too, but it comes anyway.
We tolerate endless strip malls, foul air, contaminated runoff, window-rattling boom boxes and the weekend crush at Costco and Home Depot. We remain composed in the face of runaway housing prices, electricity shortages, crowded schools and–well, maybe not crowded schools. That one rankles. But what we suffer even less well than crowded schools, the thing that makes even the most tolerant Californians notice that their cities have become overstuffed, is all the endless, miserable, stinking, standing traffic. In Los Angeles, in San Diego, in Sacramento, in the Bay Area, freeway traffic sits like an automotive still life, then inches along as we fume in the fumes. On a roadside in San Jose after a fender bender, a driver grabs another driver’s small dog, Leo, and throws the helpless animal into oncoming traffic.