“Build outwards, not upwards.” That line, from gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, might be the best summary of what California needs to do to solve the housing crisis.

As The California Post has reported, realtor.com estimates that there is a national housing gap of 4 million units.

California’s political class has decided that the way to address that shortage is to build ugly urban high-rises.

That’s the thrust of SB 79, the brainchild of state Sen. Scott Wiener, which overrides local governments and zoning regulations and allows the building of high-rise apartment buildings near transit hubs.  

But progress has been slow, and that’s partly because high-rise apartments are not anyone’s idea of what a long-term investment in housing should be. Californians, like other Americans, want single-family homes — homes with space, yards, driveways, privacy and the kind of pride of ownership that comes with a picket fence.

That’s not what left-wing policymakers want us to have. Ever since the 1960s, when Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger sang against “Little boxes made of ticky-tacky” that “all look just the same,” elite opinion has looked down on single-family homes.

We are told that they are conformist, bad for the environment or even that they are symbols of white supremacy. But they remain central to the American dream, for people of all backgrounds. 

Instead of finding ways to make high-rises attractive, California policymakers need to find ways to encourage the development of single-family homes.

That means developing more capacity for water storage and energy production. It means building more roads and more public transportation routes — routes people will actually use, not high-speed-rail boondoggles.

We can do it. We have the resources. What we do lack is the political will — including the will to overcome California’s “green” orthodoxies. California has plenty of space. But we have an aging infrastructure that is not going to be made any better by adding more high-rises in urban centers.

We need a 21st-century upgrade of the systems that made the 20th century possible.

We can do it while preserving our farms, our forests and our state’s magnificent parklands.

It would require many of us to rethink what we have been taught about suburbia. We can reinvent it, with electric vehicle charging stations and high-speed internet connections and everything to keep people together even if we live further apart.

Outward, not upward. Let’s give it a chance. 

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