When NIMBY Craziness Goes Bananas : Airport improvements? A mini-mall? A fancy new restaurant or a day-care center? Environmental do-gooders say no, no, a thousand times no.

People say we’re against everything. But we’re only against 99% of everything. --Gerald A. Silver President, Homeowners of Encino Open a newspaper, and as sure as God made little green apples you’ll find a story about some homeowners’ group, kvetching about . . . well, just about everything.

Remember the fruitcakes who demanded that the Historical Commission preserve a Studio City carwash as a “cultural monument”? Or the Northridge folks who wanted the Board of Zoning Appeals to designate as historical a vacant parcel that was once the site of the procreative exertions of a Hereford bull named Sugwas Feudal? Who can forget the Santa Claritans who, accompanied by a psychic, went to the site of a proposed landfill in protest, to “pull up spirits that were dormant there”? And what about declaring that piece of obsolete 1950s architectural kitsch known as Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake a historical monument?

Improve the Burbank Airport? No way! Build a mini-mall in Studio City? God forbid! How about a fancy restaurant? Of course not; the diners will get drunk and urinate on neighbors’ lawns. Tear down some old stores on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks and put up a commercial building? Ixnay. Let those boarded-up buildings at the Scene of the Crime bookstore sit there forever, doing no one any good.

Street vendors? Yuck! A day-care center? Perish the thought. A courthouse in Chatsworth? Don’t even think about it. A few low- and moderate-income units in the new apartments on the site of the Rancho Los Encinos hospital? When hell freezes over! So how about just putting a star on top of the marquee at the old Studio City theater, now converted to a Bookstar store? No, no, a thousand times no!

And so it goes in the San Fernando Valley.

It used to be that NIMBY--Not In My Back Yard--was a descriptive term for such folly, but that’s now inadequate. A whole new acronym had to be coined: BANANA--Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody.

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How did this craziness come to pass? Where do these rich suburbanites--who would scream bloody murder if someone touched their ample assets--get the chutzpah to claim a right to hijack other people’s land and meddle in everything from advertising on RTD buses to helicopter routes? Are they really crazy? Like a fox.

What’s afoot here is greed and abuse of power. This outrageous behavior is rooted in Southland housing prices which--even with the recession--are still stratospheric compared with the rest of the country. A West Valley home goes for more than $250,000. Suburbanites who bought $50,000-$70,000 homes south of Ventura Boulevard in the 1970s are sitting on $500,000 paper equities which they mean to protect by any means necessary. They’ve got theirs, and now life’s prime directive is to maintain the status quo, even if it means screwing everybody else, including their own children, who have been effectively shut off from house ownership in their home areas.

With wealth comes political power. By law zoning is a legislative act. Courts go to great lengths to uphold it as part of the democratic process.

Often that makes no sense. A legislative enactment usually applies to the entire community, so that if the electorate at large is displeased it can elect new representatives or take matters into its own hands with an initiative.

But zoning controversies usually involve a single parcel, so the local majority can easily victimize an individual landowner who has one vote to their thousands with which to pressure the elected decision-makers.

Politicians know that they have little to fear from the courts. By rubber-stamping unreasonable exercises of land-use regulatory powers, even when constitutional rights are impaired, California’s compliant courts bear a heavy responsibility for our predicament.

As the dean of the country’s land-use lawyers, Richard F. Babcock, put it: “In California the courts have elevated government arrogance to a fine art.”

They also know that suburbanites vote in large numbers. In an era of declining voter turnouts, that can be the whole ballgame, and never mind professional planners’ concerns. Politicians are no dummies. They live by the iron laws of politics formulated by the late Sen. Everett Dirksen: First law--get elected. Second law--get reelected. And so when homeowner organizations let it be known that they’re against development on “their” turf, the local pols snap to.

When Joy Picus spilled her guts under oath during a deposition taken in the Warner Ridge case, she provided an object lesson that for all the City Hall window dressing, land use in this community is driven by political maneuvering and base pandering to the whims of suburban voters. What was most amazing about that scandal was that leaders of homeowners groups came out in support of Picus’ municipal sleaze.

For all the enviro-babble emanating from homeowner associations doing their best to raise drawbridges over the economic moats surrounding their communities, valid environmental concerns are rarely involved in these controversies. As the late UCLA law professor Donald G. Hagman used to say, environmental pretenders masquerade as defenders of the environment when all they are defending is the status quo that constricts housing supplies and thus drives up the values of their homes.

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The price of all this self-seeking is steep. California colleges and universities are unable to recruit out-of-state scholars, in spite of housing subsidies. Able executives are resisting transfers to California, as dramatized by Los Angeles County’s unsuccessful attempt to hire a coroner who, despite an $89,000-a-year raise, was unable to duplicate his Pittsburgh home here.

Businesses are leaving California for a variety of reasons, but more than 75% of them mention the cost of housing for their employees as a factor. Also, middle-aged, established Californians are selling their homes and leaving in droves for other states where their cashed-in equities buy upscale homes free and clear, with money left over. California is thus bleeding talent, while the in-migration increasingly consists of poorer, less educated younger people who consume more public resources than they produce. That does not bode well for our futures.

Meanwhile, the next generation of Californians has been largely shut out from home ownership, particularly in the more desirable areas. Fewer than 20% of Angelenos qualify for financing of a “median” local home. Young couples--assuming they can come up with large down payments and the requisite income--must take on an onerous commute from far-off, still-affordable places like Simi Valley, Santa Clarita, the Inland Empire or Riverside, thus promoting urban sprawl and worsening traffic and air pollution.

None of this is to say that developers ought to have their way as they used to in the past. Their vision is myopic, and they have done much to earn their unfortunate reputation. But love ‘em or hate ‘em, they are the only game in town. Wealthy suburbanites and their political groupies may talk a good game, but it’s developers who provide needed housing and other facilities, and their reasonable needs have to be respected, as well as their constitutional rights.

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In sum, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and the price of the constriction of Valley housing is getting too high. The organized homeowners who are the beneficiaries of this crazy system are dumping burdens on society while reaping huge unearned profits in the form of swollen home equities and are hypocritically posturing as environmental do-gooders.

If this is indeed an era of limits, if personal gratification must be tempered by environmental and communitarian concerns, the resulting burdens have to be fairly allocated.

At the very least, our land-use legal system should not operate as an inversion of a Robin Hood who steals from the poor and gives to the rich.

So when you hear self-appointed homeowner association paladins pontificating about the latest thing that their constituents simply won’t put up with on “their” turf, tell them to put a sock in it. If nothing else, you may be doing your children a favor.