Paved Paradise

Chapter 1

Housing for Cars and Housing for People

The quality of life in cities has much to do with systems of transport, which are often a source of much suffering for those who use them. Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape.

-Pope Francis

In 1991, a generational tale of parking's role in American life began in Solana Beach, California. This story isn't just, or even primarily, about where we should put our cars when we're not driving them. It's about how the need for parking holds an insurmountable power over the decisions we make about the places we live, a claim of such self-evident weight it takes precedence over much else that we say we hold dear. Because it's hard to find a consensus view about whether the parking shortage real, imagined, or addressable, the need for parking is an evergreen retort, straddling the line between a real right of access and a contrived and disingenuous excuse. One Southern California developer told me that this dual nature was one of the things that made parking such a tricky and emotional trip wire. "It's like a plain pasta that takes on the flavor of whatever sauce you put on it. It's a proxy for so many other things, and a real thing in and of itself, and that dance of parking as proxy and parking as parking adds up to a lot of badness and dysfunction." In other words, sometimes people are talking about parking, and sometimes they're talking about something else.

When it came to building affordable housing in Solana Beach, they were definitely talking about something else.

Solana Beach is a posh suburb of San Diego. Time-share condos around pools, houses around cul-de-sac driveways, shops by the highway. Marine layer in the morning, blue skies in the afternoon, and the sound of the Pacific crashing on the beach below the cliffs. Solana Beach, stated The San Diego Union Tribune, was "six square miles of sunny coastal ambiance," a place that epitomized the bewildering patterns of postwar suburban development in Southern California.

But there was nothing sunny about the 1928 motor court at 204 South Sierra Avenue, at the heart of the city's down-on-its-heels main drag. The walls were damp; rats and cockroaches roamed the rotten floors at night. Toilets broke and showers lacked hot water. The absentee landlord, Leon Perl, lived in Beverly Hills.

Miguel Zamora, a thirty-nine-year-old tenant from Guadalajara, rented a one-room studio there with his wife and four kids. He fixed things himself and paid for it himself. He repaired the plumbing. Installed a water pump. Put in a new lock.

In January of 1991, Solana Beach began inspecting the property, issuing violations to which, the city said, Perl was only minimally responsive. By the fall of 1992, the city had filed an eighty-three-count criminal complaint against the landlord for the illegal conditions. Perl decided it was more trouble than it was worth, so he moved to bulldoze the place. Eviction notices went up on the cracked wooden doors in November.

The tenants were evicted and the building demolished, and the city settled out of court with Perl. The Legal Aid Society, representing the tenants, secured a commitment from Solana Beach to develop replacement housing for the thirteen evicted households by 1999.

By 2005, just three homes had been built. Not until sixteen years after the evictions did Solana Beach, where the median home now costs more than $2 million, put forth a site for developers to house the remaining ten families. The spot the city picked was not quite as good as the site of the original motor court-by then a dirt lot in the middle of a resurgent downtown strip-but it was close to the beach and less than a mile from the commuter rail. It was a city-owned parking lot. A perfect place to build affordable housing.

At least, that's what Ginger Hitzke thought. In 2008, the thirty-three-year-old Hitzke was trying to establish herself as an affordable housing developer. She had started working as a receptionist in a developer's office a decade earlier and, at the start of the recession, was ready to try to build things herself. Hitzke was an improbable figure in the world of Southern California real estate. She grew up poor. Didn't go to college. She was a woman in a male-dominated field. She had just $14,000 in the bank when she went out on her own.

But when a friend scanned and sent her a newspaper clipping about the Solana Beach project, she thought: This is my model. A small project in a small city for a good cause. Unlike most affordable housing projects, whose tenants might be granted apartments by lottery, the Solana Beach housing was associated with specific people, kicked out of town almost two decades earlier. People like Miguel Zamora.

Hitzke scraped together $10 million in financing and Solana Beach gave her a shot. She called the project the Pearl, a reference to the slumlord whose evictions had set the process in motion.

There was a reason she had no trouble getting the job: the fixed costs of building things in California are so high that ten affordable units is not an attractive proposition to most developers. In Solana Beach, as it would turn out, the risks were not smaller because the project was small.

I visited Hitzke in October 2020, in a suburb on the other side of San Diego called Lemon Grove, where she worked. She talked fast, swore frequently, and broke up her sentences with a high, staccato laugh. Only when we talked about Solana Beach did her voice sink. "I think people take a bit of joy that I failed so spectacularly," she reflected. "I was in the LA Times and now I've got fucking Slate on the phone. People call and say, 'Are you okay?' And I say, 'Fuck you. You know I'm not.'"

Her office was on the ground floor of one of her apartment buildings, Citronica Two, and it reflected her boisterous demeanor. Her door was etched with the words boss lady/patrona, and her desk sat beneath a bright mural by a local artist named Maxx Moses-a kind of impulse buy. In 2019, stoned at the Warhol exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hitzke had experienced a deep longing for art in her life. When she got back to Lemon Grove, Moses was outside her office looking for walls to paint. So she had a mural behind her chair. Nearby, a painting in a gilded frame depicted her as a recumbent, dark-haired Glinda the Good Witch, showering rainbows over an Emerald City modeled after the building. The wand had an H, which looked a little like the Hitzke Development logo and also a little like Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign logo. Ginger loved Hillary. She drove a caravan of teenagers to Iowa to campaign for her. Her Twitter bio read "Fabulous Real Estate Developer + Fat Lady. Proudly race-mixing since 1994. Suburb abolitionist." Hitzke is white; her husband is black; the couple has two sons.

Abolishing the suburbs, well, that was a work in progress. Ginger Hitzke's affordable housing project in Solana Beach was dead. Cause of death: parking.

"Parking has been the number-one topic that surpasses all other things that go along with what you hear when you're trying to develop apartments," Hitzke said. "Crime, property values, community character, parking is an everyday-God, I hate the topic so much." She burst out laughing. "I laugh because I hate this topic so much."

Originally, Hitzke had planned to build eighteen apartments on the site of the Solana Beach municipal parking lot. She would provide thirty-one parking spots to make up for the loss of the public parking, plus add twenty-two spots for residents, inside a fifty-three-space underground garage. Parking fees would help offset construction costs. There would also be a small retail space. She imagined filling it with a little grocery store.

It's worth taking a moment to understand just what compelled the fifty-three-spot underground garage that would drag Ginger down. First, there were twenty-two places for residents-a parking requirement of local zoning here in Solana Beach, like almost everywhere else in the country, to make sure residents wouldn't park in the street. Second, there were the thirty-one spaces in the municipal parking lot, which Hitzke was under pressure to rebuild, underground and at great expense. Because this site sits just one thousand feet from the Pacific Ocean, it falls under the jurisdiction of a group called the California Coastal Commission (CCC). The CCC was born of a virtuous impulse to prevent developers from cordoning off the seaside for the exclusive use of nearby residents. It was created by ballot referendum in the 1970s and later given permanent authority over construction along the state's 1,100-mile coast, including for inland sites.

The CCC was part of a burgeoning, powerful California slow-growth movement, which successfully restricted development in some pristine natural areas, such as Big Sur. But it had a malevolent counterpart: a group of metropolitan homeowners who brought that righteous sense of preservation to urban and suburban neighborhoods. Using tools like parking requirements, single-family zoning, historic preservation, minimum lot sizes, and lawsuits under California environmental law, the state's homeowners wrote the playbook for how to exclude new neighbors-and look righteous while doing it. They were astonishingly effective at keeping new residents out of coastal cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Of course, people didn't stop coming to California. Newer, younger, and poorer residents just spilled out away from the coast, into fire-prone forests in the north of the state and scorching deserts in the south. Drive till you qualify for a mortgage, and then spend the rest of your life driving to work.

That was Ginger Hitzke. Though her office was just outside San Diego in Lemon Grove, Ginger lived with her family in Temecula, seventy miles north. There's an inverse correlation between real estate prices and summer temperatures. On a blistering July day, the temperature rises ten degrees from Solana Beach to Lemon Grove, and another ten degrees in Temecula. Before the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, more than half of workers in Temecula spent more than thirty minutes a day getting to work. Some days, Ginger was part of a burgeoning class of California "supercommuters," who spend more than three hours a day commuting. (More than 7 percent of the workforce in her county was in this category, more than three times the rate in San Diego County.)

Which is why, ironically enough, Ginger had to rebuild that parking lot in Solana Beach. Because without parking, there's no beach access for the millions of Californians pushed inland by coastal housing restrictions. The fewer people permitted to move to places like Solana Beach, the greater the egalitarian cachet of its free parking. So the California Coastal Commission, charged with preserving the coastline, is also the state's greatest defender of beachfront parking lots. It's an irony that plays out at every national park, at every mountain trailhead, at every beach and boat launch: for most Americans, there is no access to nature without parking. This is why Yellowstone's Old Faithful sits inside a giant horseshoe of parking lots. In Texas, beaches are presumed to be parking lots, and local authorities can keep cars off the sand only if they provide a parking space for every fifteen feet of beach closed to traffic.

Restrict or charge for nonresident parking-as towns in the Hamptons or on Cape Cod do-and wealthy residents can keep the beach to themselves without having to say so. In white neighborhoods along Rockaway Beach in New York City, street curbs that abut the beach are categorized as "fire zones"-a blanket parking prohibition, all down the block, under the spurious logic that fire trucks need the clear curbs to turn around. In a 1995 sketch for Michael Moore's TV Nation show, the comedian Janeane Garofalo led a band of multicultural Brooklynites up to the hedge funder enclave of Greenwich, Connecticut, to try to subvert the town's rule restricting park and beach access to residents only. The beach-day crew was barred by police from entering the town parking lot, so they attempted a marine invasion in a flotilla of dinghies, to boos from locals. Three years later, a law student who had been turned away trying to jog in a Greenwich park filed a lawsuit against the town, and in 2001 the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled beaches and parks were public forums and access could not be restricted. But towns like Greenwich simply established hefty parking fees instead: while Greenwich adults can buy a $40 permit for season-long beach access, out-of-town visitors must pay $40 for a single day of beach parking, plus $9 per person in the car. Up the coast in Stamford and Fairfield, nonresidents pay more than ten times as much as residents for a beach parking pass. In Westport, Connecticut, residents pay $50 for a season beach pass, while visitors from New Haven or Bridgeport pay $775. Comparatively, the California Coastal Commission's mission is a noble one. But only because poor people are not allowed to live along the coast in the first place.


While her affordable housing project was shaping up in Solana Beach, Ginger Hitzke was working on the complex in Lemon Grove in which her office now sits: two five-story apartment blocks called Citronica One and Citronica Two. Those names, like Ginger’s nearby Citron Court, are both a play on the name of the city and a tribute to Ketel One Citroen vodka, which nursed Hitzke through the debacle in Solana Beach. Both buildings were adjacent to Lemon Grove’s commercial center and a light-rail station that went straight to downtown San Diego.

Citronica One survived a close shave with suburban parking requirements. Ginger was sweeping up the crumbs of California's affordable housing tax credits, and she could get only enough money together to build the project with one level of parking. A city politician told her, "We're not going to let parking get in the way of this development." She couldn't believe it. The enduring shock of California politics, for Ginger, was how many people would put their heart and soul into getting elected, only to get cold feet when it came to actually making a call. "Never has a public official who makes the approvals ever said to me, 'How much will your rent increases be?' Never cared about a single thing, but I cannot tell you how many times they ask where everyone will park when they come over for a birthday. No one cares about the quality of life for the tenants. I've never had someone say, 'How tall are your ceilings? Are you doing the minimum?' Ceiling height makes a big difference!" Instead, the focus was always on parking. "We care more about housing for our cars than we care about housing for ourselves. Period."