The moral arc of the American dream

Many saw King’s dream as threatening in his lifetime.  As we honor his work and sacrifice, we should ask: How much are we living up to his American dream, and what aspects of it are still viewed as a threat?

James Truslow Adams popularized the term “American dream” in 1931, with a definition focused on collective advancement: “Life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone … regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Over time, the commonly used definition of the American dream became more focused on individual prosperity. 

Throughout history, people pursued American dreams in wildernesses, farms and cities. Since the postwar boom, the concept has been primarily attached to suburban single-family houses with yards.

Those who achieve their individual American dream through hard work, luck, or both have a right to enjoy it. The problem comes when we let the “Individual American Dream” hold back the “Collective American Dream,” and even use the Collective Dream’s moral weight as ammunition by conflating the two.

This tension is evident in the debate over Senate Bill 9 — a new state law that allows individuals to build duplexes in certain places where it was previously only legal to build detached single-family houses. Under some circumstances, it also allows individuals to split their lots in two and build up to two units in each lot, for a maximum of four units.

As someone who lives in a fourplex in San Carlos, I’m thrilled more people will have the opportunity to experience my version of the Individual American Dream — an independent space on a walkable street sheltered from high-speed arterials, in the middle of a growing jobs center with good schools, with neighbors in adjacent units who can lend you a ladder or let out your dog — all for a fraction of the cost of a single-family home, and with a smaller environmental footprint.

As a supporter of the Collective American Dream, I am also glad to see SB 9 chip away at single-family zoning — a policy invented to circumvent a 1917 Supreme Court ruling that struck down laws forbidding Black people from buying in white neighborhoods. The idea was that making it illegal to build multifamily homes next to big houses would keep historically underprivileged communities out of the neighborhood — and it generally worked.

I was therefore dismayed to see my city enact an emergency ordinance that “pumps the brakes” on SB 9, citing “a current and immediate threat to the public peace, health, welfare and safety of the city’s single-family neighborhoods.”

I asked the council and staff to define the threat, but no one spelled it out. I am left to assume it means former President Trump’s take on easing zoning restrictions: “bringing who knows into your suburbs, so your communities will be unsafe and your housing values will go down.”  

“Who knows” is anyone without the $364,000 household income now recommended to buy a single-family home in our county, or a single person or small family — by choice, or not — for whom a big house doesn’t make sense.

A public commenter said there is indeed a threat here, to the Suburban American Dream.

If your Individual American Dream is owning a suburban house, SB 9 takes nothing away from you; it only makes more affordable versions of the same dream available to more people. 

But if our Individual American Dreams depend on keeping neighborhoods literally exclusive, and if our cities label residents of multifamily homes a threat, we are trampling on the Collective American Dream most of us hope to uphold.

Change can be uncomfortable. But if we believe King’s view that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” we can’t expect to preserve our cities in amber — we need the flexibility to dismantle policies based on exclusion to build a better world.

We don’t have to give up our Individual American Dreams for the Collective Dream to flourish. But we do have to stop getting in the way.

Karen Tkach Tuzman is a California Democratic Party delegate representing Assembly District 22.