CAMBRIA, CA--Here on California’s central coast is the ideal place to escape the summer heat and take in the full measure of silliness that our fellow citizens elsewhere in the nation come to expect from the Golden State. The latest news out of my little second-home town is that the California Coastal Commission, which is currently appealing a court ruling that it is an unconstitutional body, has threatened to impose a complete ban on new construction until the town of Cambria comes up with a solution to its chronic water shortage. This suits the town residents just fine, because it has no intention of solving its water problem.

The artificial shortage of water has become the favored method of constricting growth both here and in other parts of California. Lot owners who apply today for a building permit for a house in Cambria must get a water permit first, and the current waiting list for a water permit is more than 20 years long. That’s if you can get on it. The local water bureaucrats closed the waiting list to new applicants 10 years ago, and have not said when, if ever, the waiting list will reopen. Dams and reservoirs are environmentally incorrect these days, but recently when the fog lifted someone noticed that the nearby Pacific Ocean contains lots of water, and that desalinization technology has become affordable. No way, says the majority of the town; if we built a desalinization plant, it might allow more growth. Can’t have that.

A myriad of contrivances like this have created a chronic housing shortage in California, and skyrocketing housing prices. Not to worry. Avant garde environmentalists have the answer: Communes. Only we don’t call them communes any more. Today, they are called “Intentional Communities.” Like all good Kantians, truly enlightened people today lead “holistic” lives, which means they don’t believe in modern plumbing.

A local tabloid describes an “Intentional Community” in Oakland, where seven people live in a house so small that extra “bedrooms” needed to be created out of the attic, garage, and hallways. All the raw materials for the house were found through scavenging. As one “intentional communitarian” explains: “We dig in dumpsters and scrap yards in order to recover materials needed for water catchment systems, beehives, worm boxes, and furniture.” Worm boxes?

The house adheres to “the gray water paradigm,” which means that the plumbing has been disconnected so that all wastewater goes out to the compost piles and artificial wetlands in the back yard. This is called “permaculture.” Bet the neighbors and the local health department love this. Just offal! No word as yet out of Washington whether HUD will be funding similar units.

One of these intrepid permaculturists described the liberation she found living in an Intentional Community:

“I’m glad that I have been saved from the sense of safety and stability my own house might have afforded me.” No doubt millions of other Californians long for a similar liberation from the American Dream.

Not long ago the Sierra Club was embarrassed when it called for the development of American cities at the population density of Calcutta. A peek at “Intentional Communities,” and maybe a whiff as well, shows what such a utopian life would be like.

---- Steven Hayward