California Feudalism

“Feudalism was about the concentration of wealth and power in a relative handful of people,” say New Geographer Joel Kotkin and big-data whiz Marshall Toplansky. By that definition, California is increasingly feudalistic, they argue in a new paper, California Feudalism.

“At its essence, feudalism was about hierarchy, and the domination of land ownership by a relative few,” says the paper. In contrast, “a strong, land-owning middle class” has played a central role in more egalitarian societies, ranging from ancient Greece to the United States of the 1960s. California’s land-use and energy policies run counter to such a land-owning middle class, which helps explain why California’s homeownership rate peaked in 1960 and today is one of the lowest in the country.

Kotkin and Toplansky are not the first to compare restrictive land-use policies with feudalism. The Antiplanner’s 2016 paper, The New Feudalism, noted that under the old feudalism the government or a small number of people owned nearly all of the land, while under the new feudalism, more people own land but the government strictly controls what they can do with it. More than 30 years before that, private property advocate and vice-president of the Ethan Allen Institute John McClaughry applied the same term to the same type of regulation in an environmental law review article.

Kotkin & Toplansky’s paper has a lot of new data for California, noting that San Jose and San Francisco-Oakland have the first and third highest average per capita incomes in the country, while four of the nation’s ten lowest-income metropolitan areas are in the California interior. The paper calls the housing crisis the “key driver of future feudalism” and points out that less than 10 percent of population growth has been in the urban cores “favored by California’s policies,” while 40 percent has been in the outer suburbs, yet those state policies prevent the construction of new suburban homes.

The paper says that claims that more high-density housing can make housing more affordable ignore the fact that high-density housing “is up to five times as costly per square foot than lower-density construction.” In fact, according to a figure accompanying the report, high-density high-rise housing can be 7-1/2 times as costly per square foot as single-family detached homes.

On almost the same day as the release of the California Feudalism report, the Wall Street Journal reported that more than three out of four Americans now regard renting as more affordable than owning a home. Since most single-family homes are owner-occupied while most multifamily housing is renter occupied, this suggests that many Americans have given up on owning their own single-family home. The feudalists are winning, and people who advocate for “YIMBY” policies are helping them out.