A California town’s pretend mountain lion habitat typifies fake suburban environmentalism

The mountain lion (Puma concolor) ranges across California, prefers low population densities and coexists uneasily with humans. No wonder it’s become a mascot of the California NIMBY (Nimbus californicus), another species marked by widespread distribution, sparse settlement and instinctive misanthropy.

Thanks to some timely snarling from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, the super-rich Silicon Valley enclave of Woodside this week retreated from declaring itself — “in its entirety,” to quote a municipal memo — a critical mountain lion habitat. This was meant to exempt the city from a new law requiring it to become the habitat of a few more humans by allowing a small number of new homes.

As remarkable as the audacity of this gambit was the precision with which it represented the mass delusion afflicting the state. Despite years of preposterous prices and spreading squalor, California remains locked in a failing struggle with the destructive whims of affluent suburbanites who willfully mistake their big backyards for testaments to environmentalism rather than aristocracy.

The cougar maneuver epitomizes the mentality that allows the state’s signature environmental law to be used to prevent metropolitan development, pushing people into exurbs necessitating extreme commutes and inviting catastrophic wildfires. And it’s in the name of a species doing well enough to expand its extensive range and be considered of “least concern.”

The notion that Woodside’s patch of the Peninsula is crucial to the survival of mountain lions — or, indeed, crucial to anything — is absurd. But it’s no doubt accustomed to thinking of itself as important.

A city of about 5,000 just up the road from Stanford University, Woodside is notable mainly for being on the extreme end of the pastoral pretensions that can be found in many of the state’s wealthy inner suburbs. The median home value is $4.5 million, about six times the already inflated statewide figure, but that fails to hint at the likes of Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s $200 million faux-imperial palace, estate and — as local officials would have it — big game preserve. Woodside’s median income is over a quarter-million dollars in a state with the nation’s highest poverty rate, which is in turn largely thanks to the anti-housing fervor it typifies.

But as anti-housing officials across California invariably do, Woodside’s mayor, Dick Brown, told a local newspaper, the Almanac, that he is not anti-housing at all. Rather, “We just don’t want to have somebody in Sacramento saying we have to put a multistory high-rise in a rural community.”

That’s funny, and not just because Brown’s putative one-horse town lies less than a half-hour commute from the headquarters of Apple, Google and Facebook. Despite the mayor’s positioning of Sacramento as the oppressor, the capital’s dysfunctional housing market and homelessness crisis are in part repercussions of a Bay Area exodus fueled by NIMBYism.

The proximate cause of Woodside’s outburst of fake environmentalism is the eminently moderate Senate Bill 9, which allows some single-family homes and lots to be split into a grand total of two. Authored by state Senate leader Toni Atkins and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last fall, SB 9 is a distant descendant of state Sen. Scott Wiener’s thwarted effort to actually legalize apartments in job- and transit-rich areas — a bit closer to but still far from Brown’s high-rise fever dream.

Bay Area and Southern California NIMBYs caricatured Wiener’s bill as an effort to “Manhattanize” their West Coast utopia, which we now know had little to do with the proposal itself. That’s because they have greeted every attempt to make a dent in the housing shortage as unconscionably radical no matter how much legislators water down their ambitions.

And water them down they did. Even Atkins’ bill, a shadow of its predecessors, required two sessions and a thorough riddling with loopholes to lurch through the Legislature. The consequence was to embolden local governments like Woodside’s to resist the housing the state desperately needs with uncanny creativity and predatory ferocity.