Posted 11:04 PM by Floyd

This week a road construction crew is repaving the road (California Highway 84) in front of my house. The side effects of this project are relentless beeping noises, the smell of fresh tar, and a wait in line if I want to turn left out of my driveway. This is a normal experience for many people, but it's a bit unusual for me because I live in a rural area.

That last sentence was a lie. I do not live in a rural area. I have been to rural areas, in Indiana and elsewhere, and my town looks nothing like it. There are no agricultural animals, no long highways with acres of crops on either side. Woodside is what you get when you take highly desirable land in a large and wealthy area and partition it so that no one can build on less than one acre.

I did not invent the lie; it's spoken often enough here in Woodside, and probably in similar communities throughout the country. Its purpose is to justify the politics dominant in Bay Area suburbs. Local politics has nothing to do with the great and vexing issues of our age; war and peace, civil liberties, abortion are all irrelevant. What the typical Woodsider wishes to do is to prevent people from driving their cars on local streets; to prevent new houses and construction from being built; and to harass anyone who might wish to alter their existing property.

There is an acronym called NIMBY which stands for Not In My BackYard. I don't really consider the politics I am about to describe as NIMBY politics, because I think of NIMBYism as the avoidance of something unpleasant, a game of hot potato. You might think it is selfish for someone to object to a new prison, power plant, or halfway house in their neighborhood. But at the same time you would have to concede that you would not want one of those things close to you.

Let's invent a new acronym ANWIC: Anything New Will Instantly Cease. The ANWICer does not want to see a new house go up or a n+1th car drive by. To be fair, objecting to these nuisances is rational; an empty street is better than a busy one, an empty lot may appear nicer than the house replacing it -- and the process of constructing said house will be noisy and annoying.

But ANWIC is an attempt to undo the natural process of development and growth. Because people wish to build houses, to drive cars, and in general to live in the Bay Area, development can be prevented only by intransigence, and a fierce unwillingness to permit any growth anywhere.

ANWIC is mean-spirited and selfish. For instance, several major thoroughfares in the nearby town of Palo Alto have a speed limit of 25 MPH. It is impossible to drive at 25 MPH, and it is certainly ridiculous to do so on a four-lane street that connects the main drag with one of the major highways. But Palo Alto doesn't care -- they don't have to drive through the town, they just live in it. Even worse, the city makes continual threats to narrow one such road to one lane in each direction!

Because ANWIC is misanthropist, it needs a painted-on happy face. There are many ANWIC euphemisms, which I am sure are familiar to just about anyone who lives in a similar burg:

• "Preserving the rural character of our community"
  
• Protecting open space
  
• Traffic calming
  
• Planning commission
  
  What is there to plan in a town of 5000 with no industry
  and one block of businesses?
  
• "Appropriate for our neighborhood"
  
  Object to homosexuals or blacks, you're a bigot;
  object to two-story houses, you're a saint
  

Nothing is sacred to the strangling scum who would stop anything from being built anywhere. For example, the stereotype is that rich liberals adore education. Every time there is a ballot issue to allow some school to dig into your pockets, the placards urging yes votes are ubiquitous. A few months ago the Phillip Brooks School (a private institution) wanted to move to a 90-acre site in Woodside. Local residents strongly objected. (For instance, there were letters to the local paper complaining about all the grade changes that would take place. I suppose Phillip Brooks students should be happy to sit on a slanted floor, and after a few weeks the compensatory leaning would be automatic.) There was some negotiation
back and forth; ultimately the plan was rejected because it would not "protect open space".

This is a school. From Woodside's actions, you would think "Phillip Brooks" was the name of an especially rapacious strip mining corporation. An expensive private school campus is beautiful and complements the space around it; that's why on any weekend there are people wandering around Stanford.

Ultimately these tactics mar those who use them. When you mention the name of an expensive suburb like Palo Alto or Los Altos or Atherton, local middle-class people sneer at them as snobby. Now in the individual, I find the wealthy people who live in these communities friendly, outgoing, and democratic. It is their political actions which are selfish, exclusive, and hypocritical.