Mathews: California housing is a Kafkaesque nightmare. Ask him.

By Franz Kafka (as told to Joe Mathews)

I keep hearing you Californians calling your state's housing crisis Kafkaesque.

You are far too kind: I never imagined a nightmare this cruel, absurd or surreal.

I don't know exactly how I got to California. But I appeared here some weeks ago, in the form of an insect, like my protagonist in 'The Metamorphosis.' And I'm glad I did. If I'd known weather like this in my lifetime, I might not have died of tuberculosis in Prague in 1924, at age 40.

In my prime, I was a master of conveying oppressive and intangible systems that trap humans. California, and its housing markets, do indeed fit that bill. But I never had any idea that a dystopia could be as beautiful and wealthy as yours. California's talent for self-deception and absurdity leaves me in awe. I couldn't have conceived of a wealthy and beautiful place of 40 million people that claims it is welcoming the whole world, while refusing to house people.

You Californians talk a big game about how you support the environment. But by a surreal trick, the laws that supposedly protect the environment make it so difficult to build housing — especially near your transit hubs — that people are forced to the periphery, where the environmental costs are higher.

And while I am proud of my ability to create nightmares of labyrinthine illogic, I never managed to dream of anything so diabolical as your California Environmental Quality Act, which you call CEQA. One lawyer, Jennifer Hernandez, writes about CEQA with scary flair:

'Imagine spending five years and $5 million to defend against a lawsuit challenging a plan for where to put transit improvements and other infrastructure, and critically needed housing and related public services — and then to get sued again, and again, and again, and again, for trying to implement the plan. … And then imagine that the reason for this 'process' is a handful of construction trade leaders who don't care a bit that their workers can't live near their jobs, and can't afford to buy a home anywhere within 2 hours — along with enviro advocates who define the 'environment' as the view outside their kitchen window. And then imagine that the lawsuits can be filed anonymously, at a near zero cost, and without an iota of legal merit and can kill a project for 3-5 years by ending access to financing.'

That surpasses my most chilling passages!

Californians have forgotten just how fundamental housing is — not merely as shelter from life's cruelties but as a space to rest and think. As I once wrote, 'It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. … The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.'

I portrayed the paradoxical isolation of an overcrowded city in 'The Trial.' Your state is reminiscent of that, but at an overwhelming scale — of escalating homelessness, an estimated shortage of 2.5 million homes and showing prices twice the national average.

And oh, the terrible price you pay! I had some real health problems in my life — migraines, insomnia, constipation, boils and clinical depression. But your housing crisis is making you sicker than I ever was.

Millions of you have moved far from your jobs to find affordable housing that suits your family, but now your commutes are ruining your health. I know about commuting — while writing classic literature, I worked for insurance companies — but I couldn't imagine the traffic or the hyper-crowded BART cars you endure.

All these pressures can put households in, well, Kafkaesque predicaments. I know about families — my father was a tyrant. In my story 'The Judgment,' a father won't make any room in the world for his son, who jumps off a bridge.

But many younger Californians can't even have a child. So many of you delay marriage and child-rearing (in part because you can't afford a home) that your state's birth rate is now the lowest ever recorded. And good luck educating the kids while paying your giant mortgages. Your schools don't capture the full value of today's high housing values because you have constitutionally limited your property taxes.

Housing makes most of you prisoners in your own homes. Now, I once described an apartment as a prison in my unfinished novel 'Amerika.' But by not building enough housing, you've created such a run-up in prices that most of you couldn't afford the place where you're currently living if it came on the market.

Yes, I know that your state officials are proposing solutions to the crisis. But so many of the ideas (Affordable housing requirements! Rent control!) would only add to the costs of housing. Your local leaders don't approve housing because politics and financial incentives run against it. And instead of changing the calculus by encouraging them to do the right thing, your state legislators suggest new laws to coerce them.

When listening to those lawmakers, I thought of an old line of mine: 'It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.'

Do I have any suggestions for you? Nothing that isn't obvious. As I once wrote, 'Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.' Creating enough housing, whether it's in Prague in the 1910s or Pleasanton in the 2010s, requires creating enough housing.

If you don't, I fear you Californians will lose your taste for your very sweet land, just as the salesman-turned-insect in 'The Metamorphosis' loses his taste for his favorite foods — bread and milk.

I'd suggest that all Californians pick up my final, unfinished and posthumously published novel 'The Castle,' in which the protagonist K arrives in a village but struggles to get the permission to live there.

I never wrote the ending, but I planned to have the village grant him the right to make his home there only when he was on his death bed.

California, do you really want to come to an end as Kafkaesque as that?

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

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