chapter 6
impact litigation
Preparing the lot for the new low-rise took three days: working under a master surveyor, we staked it out, got it leveled, and installed the foundation slab. The house had been sitting vacant ever since the original owners—a Lockheed welder and a Warner Brothers archivist—had died in the early part of the century, their estates in some kind of gnarly tangle. They’d been estranged from their kids and the house had been neglected, the roof springing leaks that led to pervasive black mold after a few years’ worth of heavy spring rains. The city had scraped it down to the foundation slab a couple of years before, leaving it as an eyesore behind a rusting old fence, that had basically crumbled when we tore it down so we could get the heavy equipment onto the lot.
A structural engineer declared the slab still good, and we used old city infrastructure maps to unearth the gas, power, sewage, and water mains, then worked around them to extend the slab for the new building’s larger footprint. The original dwelling was a two bed / one bath on a one-acre lot. The new low-rise would be three stories tall, with six two-bedroom apartments and one four-bedroom apartment on the top story, and no garage. The city inspector had wrangled with the city manager’s office for a long time about that, but state rules about internal refugee housing explicitly overrode parking requirements for new housing and even made funds available for developing transit and cycling networks for every garage-free property installed under their rules.
The real excitement started when the panels rolled up. They came from a factory in Mojave, the same one that was providing the materials for the relocation of San Juan Capistrano. The sinterers only fused the concrete and polystyrene balls when the grid was saturated, scavenging solar energy that would otherwise go to waste.
I’d done a science fair project on them in middle school, producing three blocks on my own: one conventional clinker-based block, one low-clinker block cured in a conventional kiln (Gramps’s oven), and one that was sintered with focused light—a big magnifying glass I borrowed from Huerta Middle School’s science lab. I showed that they were each of equivalent strength, but that the third block had less than 1 percent of the carbon footprint of the conventional block and less than half of the low-clinker block, while weighing only 30 percent as much as either.
I know it’s weird to nerd out about blocks, but I was a total block nerd and I knew that the Mojave plant had its own on-site research team that was always tweaking the formula, making them lighter and stronger and more resilient to temperature extremes and quake stresses. I was addicted to their videos of test buildings being subjected to the most awesome tests, watching wrecking balls bounce off them and shake platforms making them shimmy without cracking.
The panels arrived on short-haul heavy movers, slow flatbeds with giant hydrogen cells behind the cabs, in a convoy from the railhead. Then we discovered that the crane that was supposed to arrive at the same time had suffered a breakdown and there wouldn’t be a replacement for a full day, which would screw up the job that the heavy movers were supposed to do the next day, setting off a logistical cascade that might take weeks to resolve.
The news sapped our excitement and broke our momentum. The slab was ready, the panels were here, we were all here with our work gloves and our water bottles and our temporary commissary and our shade structure and porta-potties. For the want of a crane, the building was lost?
I scanned the QR code on the tie-down with my screen to look at the manifest again. The panels—8′ × 4′ concrete sheets—weighed less than fifty kilos each.
“Uh, guys?” I said, tapping my screen.
We unloaded them in less than a day, using our gloved hands, our biceps straining and sweat pouring down our faces, grinning and laughing and ignoring the project manager’s pleas to work slower so we didn’t hurt ourselves. Periodically, someone would tap out and fling themselves on their backs under the shade structure and get doused in ice water and dosed with electrolyte solution and coco-chocolate energy bars before getting back to the line. The stacked panels filled the lot, turning it into a maze around the foundation slab, just wide enough to get the crane and forklift in the next day, and as we finished a gang of five local massage therapists cycled down the road with cargo bikes carrying their massage tables. They explained that they’d caught us doing the unload on social and decided to come by and say thanks. Everybody got a twenty-minute back-and-shoulder rub under the shade structure and someone showed up with cartons of beer and music and then we all stayed up later than we should have, given that we were scheduled to actually put the house up the next day.
Despite the late night, everyone was back on the jobsite at 7 a.m., this being the earliest the city would let us start—noise abatement was one of the few exceptions to state emergency housing overrides. We slapped at mosquitoes and started to stage the panels based on the order we’d need to slot them in. A couple of the work-crew-mates had spent a Blue Helmet year in San Juan Capistrano and knew the panel construction technique backward and forward. Our foremen were a couple of the refus from the caravan who’d been general contractors back in the San Joaquin Valley. The rest of us had watched the training videos and done the online certification and in theory we knew what we were doing—the panel system was designed to be dead-stupid simple in any event.
Naturally, there was a lot of last-minute delay between the time we thought we’d start standing up panels and the first panel going in: triple-checking everything was level, comparing the panels with the plans to make sure the ones with built-in conduit for plumbing, HVAC, and power services were lined up in the right spot, and so on. But finally, around eight thirty, we were ready to go.
The first panel went in like butter, slotting perfectly into the groove and pin system in the foundation slab. It was now structurally sound, and as the tightening crew gave each of its lock bolts a half turn, it became rigidly fixed in place. This was the keystone, and we cheered as it went up but then quickly broke into the subteams that the apps sorted us into, each with its own piece in the logical path. With twenty-five people, we could finish the main work on the first floor by sunset, and while the upper stories would take longer, that would let interior crews work on the first floor, adding fixatives to the panel intersections, connecting and testing the plumbing, gas, HVAC, and power. Give us ten days, we’d be ready for paint and furniture. It was going to be so amazing, like a magic trick.
And then …
Just as we were wrestling the next tranche of panels into place, a Burbank City car rolled up on the jobsite, and an older guy I vaguely recognized from the city manager’s office jumped out and sprinted for the foremen. They hit the emergency stop buzzer and we all froze, trying to remember what the protocol was for emergencies. But of course, there was no emergency, so we just ended up jostling around the guy from the city and the foremen, and that’s how we learned that a state court had issued an emergency injunction ordering us to halt work.
Naturally we all wanted answers, but the guy from the city kept shaking his head and saying he didn’t know any more than we did and to go digging online if we wanted more. In the meantime, he warned us, violating the injunction would put us in contempt of court and we’d face serious legal consequences—including jail time—if we did it.
“So don’t do it,” he said, staring around at the crowd that had packed tight around him. He still had toothpaste around his mouth, like he’d been shaken out of bed and sent down here by an urgent call at oh-dark-hundred. I felt for him. This wasn’t his fault.
“Come on,” I said, loudly. “He’s just the messenger. Give the poor guy a break. Let’s go figure out what the fuck is going on.”
One of the women on the crew held up her screen. “Check it out, it’s not just here. Every work site in the city has been shut down.” People all started to talk at once but she waved her hands and they quieted down. “Looks like everyone’s heading to the DSA office on Burbank Boulevard. I’m gonna head there.”
“Good idea,” I said. I wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t far, and there was a really good bakery right next to it, the kind of place you had to get to by 9 a.m. if you wanted to get one of the croissants. It had been founded by Lou the French’s old head baker and if anything, they were even better than Lou’s, which was, you know, wow.
On the walk over, we self-organized. Someone volunteered to stand in line for baked goods and everyone sent them money and orders, while others scrolled their screens and reported on what they found.
* * *
Between us and the other work crews, we cleaned out the entire stock of Patisserie D’Or and the inside of the Democratic Socialists’ hall smelled like warm butter and rising bread and chicory coffee.
Best of all: Phuong was there. She’d been in a crew building a mid-rise off the downtown strip, on the site of an old gas station on Glenoaks by the library, and they’d all found bikes to ride over. Phuong greeted me with a very warm hug and a dry, quick kiss where my neck met my chin and earlobe, which made me shiver all over. She’d been too late for croissants, so I gave her half of mine and that earned me another kiss, this one on the cheek. It was so distracting I forgot why I was there until Phuong climbed up on a table and tapped into the PA.
“Hey folks, over here!” We all turned to look at her (what a sight!).
“Here’s what we know.” She held up her screen. “This morning, federal judges across the country granted over seven hundred injunctions to halt emergency housing projects authorized by the Internal Displaced Persons Act and state internal refugee bills. The court orders all responded to complaints under the Climate Emergency Act that demanded environmental impact reviews of the projects.”
People groaned and scoffed. I marveled. It was pretty clever, actually. The Climate Emergency Act was pretty fierce when it came to blocking property-development projects—every bit as fierce as the Internal Displaced Persons Act was about green-lighting emergency housing for refus. In hindsight, it was obvious that there would be an immovable object / unstoppable force conflict between these two.
“I know, I know. It’s bullshit, as are the claims. They all boil down to ‘humans are bad for wildlife, more humans are worse for wildlife, this housing will move more humans here, therefore it’s an environmental violation.’
“DSA National and the Alliance for Displaced People have lawyers working on this and they’re going to give a statement in a few. We’ll throw it up on the big screen when they start. I just wanted to get you up to speed before then. As you were.”
The conversation rose quickly to a roar. I helped Phuong down and discovered that she was shaking a little.
“You okay?”
She gave me a tight smile. “I’m okay. It’s the combination of being pissed as hell about this bullshit and the public-speaking thing.”
“But you’re really good at speaking!”
“That’s what they tell me, but it always freaks me a little. I secretly think that I might be good at it because I’m a little freaked.”
“Ay-yi-yi.”
She laughed. “I know, I’m a bit of a mess.”
“No way. You’re completely badass.”
She gave me a hug. “Look, I gotta go, but what about dinner tonight?”
“Yeah! Ethiopian again?”
“Eritrean.”
“Shit, right.”
“No, what about dinner at my place? You could meet my roommates.”
I immediately forgot all about my frustrations with the housing build-out and just about floated to the ceiling as I watched Phuong plunge back into the crowd to caucus with other DSA organizers. I was brought back to ground by a buzz from my screen. I screwed in a bug and answered it.
“Hi, Ana Lucía.”
“Brooks, are you at the DSA place on Burbank?”
“Yeah. You heard then?”
“From Antonio and Gabriella”—our refu foremen. “I’m a couple minutes away.”
She arrived just in time for the livecast from the DSA lawyer. They were young, with super-short hair that made their big eyes and big mouth seem all the more mobile and expressive. I liked them immediately. I mean, everything was fucked, but everywhere I looked there were these great people who were good at what they did and cared about the same stuff as me.
Ana Lucía arrived with Jorge and Esai and we found a spot where we could see the big screen.
“Am I good to go? Good. Hey out there folks—comrades!—it’s been a hell of a morning.” They shook their head like they couldn’t believe what a morning it had been. “Seven hundred courtrooms! There were lawyers in seven hundred courtrooms filing these bullshit injunctions this morning.” They picked up a brick of printer paper and let it thump on their desk for emphasis. The paper was festooned with protruding stickies that vibrated after the impact. “The lawyers work for a lot of different firms, but they’re all very expensive, and they all have a long history of working for offshore clients, and I don’t just mean non-U.S. persons. I’m also including tax-exiles who bailed during the first and second Uwayni administrations.
“None of these firms are known for their pro bono work. Someone had a lot of money to spend on this. The briefs are really similar, but they’re not identical. Each one is tailored to the project it was filed against and cites specific details of the local context: endangered species, microclimates, historic environmental designations. These may be bullshit, but they’re well-done bullshit.
“What I’m saying is, this wasn’t just about spending a lot of money—it was doing a lot of work. A lot. I can’t even imagine how many associates they’d have had to put on this, even with AI tools to help with the drafting.
“By now, you may be asking yourself, why spend all this money and do all this work, just to shut down some infill projects? It doesn’t make sense. Plutes may spend money on stupid shit, but generally it’s stupid shit like superyachts, or Rembrandts, or dark-money political ads. This is off-brand for them.
“Now, none of us know for sure what this is about and we won’t until someone on their side leaks it, which will probably happen eventually. But I’ll tell you what I think, and this is just me talking: if these turn into cases and they start winning them, they can use them as a wedge to roll back the whole Green New Deal; any high-density housing, high-speed rail, hell, any mass transit will be blocked because it threatens wildlife habitats.
“If they’d tried this five years ago, Congress could have just sat down and amended the environmental protection statutes to clarify things. But no one’s getting shit through this Congress, and even if the House and Senate flip in a year and a half, President Bennett’s gonna veto whatever they send her on this.
“Comrades, I don’t think this is a one-off. I think it’s a starter pistol. I think there’s a lot more to come.”
They switched to Q&A then, taking questions from DSA offices and people at home for an hour. The questions were panicked, the answers were grim. A lot of these injunctions could be killed on the merits, but there were so many, and the DSA and all its partner orgs only had so many lawyers and some of them were bound to slip through. The questions were like a real-time tour of the five stages of grief.
Denial: “This has got to be illegal, right?”
Anger: “Fuck those guys, we shoulda put them all in jail in the first Uwayni administration.”
Bargaining: “Can’t we just pick the most important cases and use them as precedents to win the rest?”
Depression: “This is it, I guess, we should just give up on saving the planet. The human race is too stupid to live.”
Acceptance: “All right, so we’re going to be delayed by a decade and lose an extra billion lives, but that just means we’ve gotta work harder.”
Eventually, the lawyer called time, saying they had to get back to fighting the cases, and we were all left sitting around the DSA meeting hall, feeling shitty and angry.
I spotted Ana Lucía leaving and squirmed through the crowd to catch her. “Hey,” I said.
“Brooks. Can you believe this shit?” She looked so grim and determined.
“I know. Makes me furious. But I guess we just work harder, right?”
She didn’t say anything. Her face was indescribable, this mix of fury and sorrow. It made me feel guilty, like I’d done something wrong. I didn’t know why. She just looked at me for a while.
“Hey,” I said again. “Hey. This is terrible, but it’ll be okay. First generation that doesn’t fear the future, remember? We got this.”
Fury won the battle with sorrow in her. “You have this, Brooks, because you have a home. We don’t. And now we’re not going to get one. Fuck. Fuck this so much!” She screamed it to the blue Burbank sky.
“Ana Lucía, I know, this is complete bullshit, but we’ll all pull through. You do have homes. There’re the People’s Airbnbs, and we can turn my garden back into a camp, do whatever it takes. Civil disobedience. You belong here, too. You’re Burbankers, just like me. I’ll fight for you, just like you’d fight for me. Solidarity, right?”
The anger leaked out of her. “Brooks, that’s really nice and idealistic, but we can’t live in your guest rooms and backyards forever. People have families, both your people and my people. They have lives. Our lives have been on pause ever since we left, and we’re sick of it. We need to go somewhere that we can restart them.”
“Where? You just heard that every emergency housing project in the country is on lockdown.”
“Not in Oregon. The sacrifice zone is wide open.”
“The Oregon sacrifice zone? You’re going to walk to Oregon to make your permanent homes in a part of the country where they’re averaging two hundred days of wildfires per year? And that’s better than here?”
She shrugged. “The fires will stop when everything burnable is ashes. All that bullshit about not fearing the future gets a lot less convincing when you have nowhere to call home and everyone you love is sleeping on a stranger’s sofa. Brooks, everyone needs a place they belong.”
It hurt to hear her say it. I wanted her to call Burbank home—not just for her, but for me. I wanted to be from a place that would welcome people like her. The place that Phuong inspired me to create. But of course, she was right. Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, no jam today. It wasn’t fair for me to ask her to put her faith in a Burbank that might never come. After all, the campaign for injunctions on refugee housing was national, but the complaints for Burbank were all on behalf of locals. Who was to say that their version of Burbank wasn’t the true one?
“I’m really sorry, Ana Lucía,” I said.
She softened, just a little. “I know you are,” she said. “I am too.” Her screen dinged. “I gotta go.”
* * *