For too many among us, the California dream has turned into a nightmare and a farce | Opinion

“Twelfth Night” is set in motion by a shipwreck in Illyria, corresponding roughly with modern-day Montenegro, a real place shrouded, particularly for Shakespeare’s fellow 17th-century Londoners, in romanticism. What ensues is a festive comedy with a few jarringly dark notes, including a song, sung by a fool, built around a melancholy refrain: “With hey, ho, the wind and the rain ... For the rain it raineth every day.”

California, another real place shrouded in romanticism, retains an irresistible allure even for people who should know better — like, say, me. Many years after my surprisingly prescient self-deportation from West to East Coast, I wrecked my ship here again in search of something better, or at the very least balmier. I arrived just in time for the most torrential winter in years — the one that almost broke the nation’s tallest dam, Oroville, appropriately named after the state’s seminal promise of unearned riches, the Gold Rush.

This winter, or at least the first merciless month of it, reminds me of that one. But California and its people have a way of considering our disasters in isolation.

Opinion

The rest of the country caricatures California by its catastrophes, as a place precariously perched above the Pacific and perpetually on the brink of deservedly joining it — so much the better to resist its dangerous draw. Californians are more likely to commit the opposite error, surrendering to an idyllic myth to an extent that regards every disaster as an anomaly rather than a state of affairs.

Given that half a dozen years have elapsed since the state’s last biblical floods, we could almost be forgiven for treating such extremes as aberrations. The trouble is that the deluges have punctuated not a series of pleasantly damp winters but rather some of the driest on record, a gathering disaster of a different kind.

One favorite local interpretation of the latest storms is as a sign that California must undertake more herculean efforts to capture, divert and store the runoff and thereby alleviate its momentarily indiscernible megadrought. This is a state with some of the most monumental waterworks in the nation, a vast system of statewide snowmelt redistribution from north to south, fish species on the brink of extinction and aquifers sucked dry. So it’s a remarkable testament to California exceptionalism that we still think we haven’t manipulated the natural hydrology enough.

An even more determined denialism surrounds the state’s most shameful and more deliberate crisis, the housing shortage and consequent homelessness. California recently became the nation’s most homeless state, with less than an eighth of the U.S. population but nearly a third of its homeless people and half those bereft of indoor shelter of any kind. But anyone who dares point that out in public will soon hear from a host of Californians that the real culprit is drugs, insanity or Reagan — problems that, for those who didn’t notice, have also afflicted every other state in the Union.

Those forced to account for California’s increasingly disproportionate share of the dispossession often argue that robust social services and pleasant weather make people happy to sleep outside in California — indeed, that most of them must have traveled from afar for the express purpose of shipwrecking themselves in this veritable homeless paradise. Never mind that research shows most homeless people are local, that the presence of 171,000 of them is comment enough on the quality of our social safety net and that, as we have just finished relearning, the weather isn’t always so pleasant.

Admitting that, however, might require acknowledging the role of maintaining the pastoral fiction of California in our most populous cities and suburbs by suppressing development, particularly the most affordable kind. Those unwilling to live next to an apartment building are no more likely to tolerate a homeless shelter or subsidized housing, leaving more of our homeless neighbors without a roof than in any other state.

With so many Californians exposed to the elements, it behooves our consciences to believe that the elements aren’t that bad. So thousands camp along the American River’s course through the capital, home to one of the least sheltered metropolitan homeless populations in America. When the recent storms swelled rivers and felled trees, untold numbers were displaced all over again, and at least two were killed.

California, as Gov. Gavin Newsom is fond of pointing out, is the only state with its own dream. “There’s no Alabama dream, no Kentucky dream,” he has said. “There’s only the California dream.” But the people facing the storm just miles, blocks or steps from the seat of our government are living a California nightmare. We can dream that this is Illyria, but for too many, the rain raineth every day.