Four decades ago, writer Cyra McFadden perfectly captured the aura of self-absorbed entitlement that envelops Marin County, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Her 1976 satirical novel, “The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County,” was, columnist George Will wrote at the time, “a Baedeker guide to a desolate region, the monochromatic inner landscape of persons whose life is consumption, of goods and salvations, and whose moral makeup is the curious modern combination of hedonism and earnestness.”
A constant tenet of Marin County’s guiding ethos is resistance to growth, manifesting itself in a kind of environmental apartheid. Under the guise of preserving a serene environment, Marin County’s residents and politicians use every means possible to avoid building new housing that would allow more population growth, particularly low- or moderate-income dwellings.
They’ve been remarkably successful. Between 1969 and 2015, while California’s population was doubling, Marin County’s grew by just 28.4 percent.
About a year after McFadden’s book was published, the county’s resistance to growth backfired. It had refused to develop new water supplies, believing that it would throttle housing development, but when a severe drought struck, it faced the prospect of having almost no water for lush landscaping, hot tubs and other necessities of Marin life.
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