American Lawn: Is Grass Better Than Concrete?
by Emil Guillermo

We’re coming up to the Fourth of July. It’s summer. It’s hot. You want to know what freedom is about? Pour me another lemonade and let’s watch the grass grow tall. I don’t feel like mowing any damn lawn.

This is why we fought the British, after all. We’d be making tea from the grass clippings right now and eating crumpets if it weren’t for that fife-and-drum revolution. But thanks to a little bloodshed, we’re free to have a lawn, or free not to have one. We’re certainly free not to mow one.

And it’s okay if we want to let a few weeds go wild. No need to be too anal about things.

It’s even okay if we want to dispense with that bit of Americana, the artificial homage to nature known as the suburban front lawn. Just pave it all over with concrete. It’s in cinch with all the tract building we’ve done. You want a paved over lawn? So be it. This is America.

But now comes an item that suggests that some government officials have taken the notion of “America the Beautiful” a little too far.

In San Jose, Calif., the lawn lovers of the homeowners’ association have won out. The city fathers have made it illegal to pave your lawn.

Starting today, you can forget about freedom. It’s lost out to the patriotic principle of neighborhood beauty.

Too innocuous to get your soup boiling? Well, consider that the new law impacts immigrants, primarily Asian Americans from Vietnam. Which brings up a question: Could the new law be unintentionally racist?

You must understand that housing has always been a major issue for immigrants. In the 1920s, Filipinos housed 8-10 people to a room. Sometimes more. Other groups have similar stories. Immigrants have learned to make do. And it’s not much different now than it was back then.

The Northern California housing market is so hot that the median price of a home is the highest in the country at $300,000. In San Jose, the capital of Silicon Valley, the median is even higher. With the high-tech industry booming, demand for housing has impacted housing stock so much that even renters are affected. If sales prices are through the roof, rentals are into the stratosphere. Some workers have even taken to renting out floor space in people’s homes. Not just rooms, mind you. Floor space -- you get one corner of the dining room and some bathroom and kitchen rights.

This isn’t as bad as renting a bed by the minute, but it comes close.

But why rent out a floor if you’re lucky enough to have a relative or friend who has a home? Just move in. Live in the garage. Park the car out front.

Which brings us back to the lawn problem.

The McLaughlin area in San Jose is a middle-class area. It’s not the nicest area; not the worst. It’s made up of older tract homes with front lawns protruding to the sidewalk like green toupees. But let’s face it, you’ll never mistake it for a national park.

Out of necessity, people began parking on the lawn. When you have two or three families living out of a single family house, it changes the landscape a bit. It looks like a freeway at the height of rush hour.

Four years ago, the city council passed an ordinance forbidding people to park cars on lawns, with violators fined $50. But that didn’t address the real problem of the housing shortage, so residents who needed the parking more than the green space began paving over the grass. A positive sign -- call it “immigrant ingenuity.” Can’t park on the lawn? Okay, no more lawn.

But then a group of homeowners known as the McLaughlin Corridor Neighborhood Association complained about what they called “private parking lots.”

“When [the immigrant pavers] do this, they drag down property values,’’ said Ed Voss, president of the neighborhood group, to the San Jose Mercury News.

It’s a typical response. However, one could argue that the housing market is so hot, it’s impossible to drag down property values in the Silicon Valley. He could have also said, “There goes the neighborhood ... ” But then we know what that would be code for.

At the heart of it, maybe there’s a little of that mixed in. Voss got 150 residents at a recent meeting hopping mad about all the cars and all the multi-family living. And the city did what most cities do. Instead of trying to address the real problem -- the area’s housing crunch -- it took the easy way out.

The city could have done more toward helping relocate families to suitable housing. It could have created more neighborhood parking. It could have attempted some cultural bridge between the two sides -- the Anglo empty-nest types and Asian full-nest types. A little understanding of cultural differences and how Asian families revere the extended family would have been helpful.

But instead, the squeaky wheel -- the homeowners -- got what they wanted. In the name of beauty, they got their ugly, selfish law. They made the immigrants’ solution illegal.

Call this one a grassroots story about the new anti-immigrant sentiment. It’s the nativists’ complaint. It’s no longer about limiting immigration, cracking down on all the inventive ways to enter America, or the costs involved. Nope. The new nativists’ complaint: Keep your grass!

The modern anti-immigrant sentiment is over how immigrants live. So now it’s the parking, the grass and the extended family. What’s next?

For now, in San Jose, you must keep your lawn. Just remember: If you don’t have a front lawn, you can’t have a cross-burning.