San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Defiant Huntington Beach rides risky wave of denial
Who says you can’t build anything in California? Huntington Beach is constructing a wall of denial around what’s left of its soul.
The Orange County city has long been associated with the outlaw side of California. Named for a railroad robber baron (Henry Huntington), Huntington Beach grew through oil speculation, aerospace, housing development, and a free-spirited surfing culture.
But in this century, Huntington Beach has become the anti-California, its independent vibe curdling into a nasty mix of irresponsibility, litigiousness and conspiracy-mongering.
Surf City USA feels like Scofflaw Town. Today, Huntington Beach is bitterly defying state policies from housing to voting rights. Behind this defiance lies questions about the city’s willingness to embrace a more diverse California. While the other Orange County cities with more than 200,000 people — Irvine, Anaheim and Santa Ana — are majority nonwhite, Huntington Beach remains 63 percent nonHispanic white. And its policies limit the ability of younger, more diverse generations to gain a foothold.
The city also has aligned itself with President Trump in his battles against the state. Most troublingly, the city is pursuing litigation to exempt itself — and California’s other 100-plus charter cities — from state sanctuary protections for unauthorized immigrants. In essence, Huntington Beach dresses up anti-immigrant policies with claims that it’s defending local control. That’s headspinning chutzpah, given that the area’s politicians have criticized other California localities that protect immigrants rather than support Trump’s mass deportation policies.
Huntington Beach’s attacks on state policies go beyond immigration — and are often accompanied by claims that the city is somehow a victim of the rest of California. In January, the city sued the state to challenge a new law that forces local communities to streamline housing development. But when the state responded by suing the city for failing to meet legal requirements for planning and building housing, Huntington Beach apologists complained that they had been unfairly singled out.
“Huntington Beach’s dismissive approach to housing — claiming there is no problem and that the state should just mind its own business — is Exhibit A for why we have a crisis in this state,” state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said in a statement after the lawsuits.
Huntington Beach’s scofflaw instincts extend to other issues. Take marijuana. For California’s legalization of marijuana to work, cities should embrace the legal industry, while cracking down on the black market. But Surf City, like too many other cities, has done the opposite: prohibiting the establishment of legal, nonmedical marijuana sales, while doing little to enforce the law against illegal cannabis businesses in the city.
Huntington Beach also has resisted the state’s voting rights act. While other California cities have created council districts so their elected officials represent different communities (and are more likely to be nonwhite), Huntington Beach has stuck to at-large elections, which mean council members are elected by all city voters. The city has accused those seeking an election change of pursuing “reverse discrimination.”
Unfortunately, Surf City’s racialized opposition to state norms isn’t confined to the city limits. Huntington Beach’s former assemblyman, the 2018 gubernatorial candidate Travis Allen, is a favorite to become the next chairman of the California Republican Party. He traffics in phony Trump-like claims about immigrants and voter fraud. But Allen’s act has so far proved too Trumpian for Trump, who endorsed Allen’s Republican opponent, John Cox, in last year’s governor’s race.
Surf City also faces scrutiny about hate groups. Last fall, the federal government charged four members of a Huntington Beach white supremacist group, the RAM or Rise Above Movement, for inciting riots and attacking counterprotesters at rallies around the country — including the infamous white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. RAM was also linked to violence at a 2017 pro-Trump rally in Huntington Beach. Huntington Beach has no monopoly on hatred; organizations that track hate groups say white supremacist groups can be found across California. But after the arrests, news reports referred to previous links between Huntington Beach and hate groups dating to the 1980s, when skinheads were all too visible on the pier and downtown.
City officials said that Surf City has an unfair and outdated reputation. That reaction is understandable. But Huntington Beach also might have used the arrests as an occasion for reflection — and to reassess the messages the city is sending by defying more inclusive state policies on housing and immigration. Instead, Huntington Beach has doubled down.
Hate’s up, Surf City. Are you sure you want to keep riding this wave?
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.