Wild Bees: The Lost Right to Build Your Own Home
In 2010, I decided the land needed honeybees and had my husband make me two top-bar hives. I chose this system rather than the more standard Langstroth hive because the top-bar hive is more similar to the type of hive bees would build in the wild. While the Langstroth hive has allowed beekeepers to produce more honey and also led to genetic modification of bees as well as the artificial insemination of queens to select for certain traits, for me, it represents an attempt to factory farm these special insects and I didn’t want them here for their honey, I desired their companionship. Besides, I’ve always considered myself a bee-guardian rather than a beekeeper. Honestly, even after 10,000 years of human attempts at domesticating the honeybee, can we really claim we can “keep” the bees?
We managed to have the two hives flourish on our land for about four years, after which I lost the upper hive to ants that had taken shelter in the live oak stump where we’d installed the hive. I tried several times to get a new swarm of bees to take in this hive, even moved it to a different location, to no avail. The lower hive, however, continued to live in our meadow for another twelve years, and even through the fire.
I’d named this hive Erleichda, from the word used in Tom Robbin’s masterwork, Jitterbug Perfume. It means, “lighten up.” Erleichda thrived in our meadow, and I was grateful when it survived the fire, but when I returned from my time in Chicago last summer, I discovered it empty for the first time. I’d been lucky enough to witness at least 8 swarms from that hive and had spent hours sitting next to them, talking to the bees, and asking them for advice. I was heartbroken when they left. After investigating the hive, we discovered that the viewing window had fallen off while we were gone, and bees don’t live where there’s too much sunlight. It appears that they left for a better shelter. I’ve often wondered where they went and if they made it. Again, I felt like I’d let down yet another of my animal companions.
This past March, just after the vernal equinox, I decided to clean out the hive. I knew swarm season was coming and I hoped that I might be able to convince one to move in. I found mice, larva from other insects, and a huge mess in there, but I managed to get it ready. Swarms often happen here after Easter, so I wanted to be prepared. I didn’t hold out too much hope, I’ve never actually managed to lure a wild swarm, but still, it was worth a try.
A week after Easter, right on time, my husband came running up to me saying he’d found a swarm, only they weren’t moving into the hive I’d prepared for them; rather, they were moving into a partially fire-damaged madrone tree near one of his trails/firebreaks alone the fence line. I followed him down the trail, past a field of blooming blackberries, their flowers blanketed in buzzing bees, and there it was, the perfect tornado of swarming bees, funneling themselves into a hole at the base of the madrone. The sound was amazing, I could have sat in the middle of their vortex all day. There’s nothing like a swarm. Two weeks later, they’re still there and it appears they’ve made themselves at home. They heard my call, but rejected my domesticated shelter, choosing instead to live with us, but in the wild, building their own home to meet their needs.
The Right to Return Home
As I sat at their entrance this morning, having my regular coffee and conversation with the bees, I realized how much easier it was for them to return to the land than it’s been for us since the fire. The county promised to make it easy for us to return home to our land, to be “made whole again” as they’d put it.
Four years since the fires, the officials of Santa Cruz County have been anything but helpful, in the end, enacting a system where only the wealthy can easily return.
This is not to slam the actual Recover Permit Center. They have done what they can given the extreme code regulations our county has passed over the years. We have a Facebook page for CZU Fire Victims and every day I see stories of people bankrupted by the process of trying to rebuild the home they lost or stymied in regulations and still unable to get their build permit to RETURN to land they’d lived on for DECADES prior. I highlight these words because in my mind it’s unfathomable that you could live somewhere for decades, raise a family even, and not be able to return after a natural disaster because the county won’t let you without major extra expenses. Many of these requirements are to bring the infrastructure up to code, however these costs are not built into your insurance plan. Yes, there’s a small amount of what’s called Ordinance and Law in most policies. My own policy was 10% of the amount I’d insured the house for code upgrades, or $69,000. However, most of the upgrades being required are things like widening roads/driveways for CalFire, adding sprinklers and hydrants, solar panels, and some sort of upgraded septic system. That list is over $200,000 for many properties, and you haven’t even begun the architecting/building of the home.
The thing is, many of the homes lost in the fire had been built by hand, some even by the owners who then lost them later. Back in the 70s, you could build your home up here, bit by bit over time, creating a place to raise your family with your own hands. Decades later, it burned down and now the county has made it impossible to build your own home even if you wanted to. They’ve certainly taken away the freedom to build the home you’d like. Restrictions on bedrooms, number of structures, types of building materials, even certain types of homes are regulated. You can’t live in a yurt, an RV, or even a strawbale home. Many of the more sustainable forms of housing are off limits. Why would Santa Cruz, one of the most progressive and “environmentally” aware cities in America, make it so hard to live on the land in a yurt or sustainable home?
When we’d decided that we didn’t want to go $500K-800K more into debt to rebuild what we lost (yes, that’s how much we were underinsured to replace our home and garage) we were happy to discover that the county was considering granting permanent residence permits to Tiny Homes on Wheels, or THOWs as they’re called. At the time, the ordinance was still in committee, but our insurance was running out when it came to a rental. Besides, we wanted to go home. You could get a temp housing permit for a THOW after the fire, but only if you wanted to rebuild. Since we thought they’d pass an ordinance soon to allow us to live in a THOW fulltime, we went for it and purchased a beautiful little unit from a RVIA (Recreational Vehicle Industry Association) certified vendor. It’s safe, gorgeous, and one of the best houses I’ve ever lived in. We went through all the hoops to get our temp housing permit and the utilities were all inspected and signed off. We moved in and waited for the county to pass their ordinance so we could make it official in the long term, aka permanent.
I wrote to planning committee often, explaining that their legislation was a godsend to fire victims and a fabulous way to get many of us back home in an affordable and sustainable manner. Even better, as the insurance industry stops insuring homes here, THOWs are insured as vehicles, which is a type of insurance we can still get at affordable prices in California. In the end, Santa Cruz County did pass the THOW ordinance and I began the process to get a permanent residence permit, only to discover that yet again, the county had failed to create a fair and reasonable process for affordable housing.
Not In My Backyard
The Santa Cruz County THOW Ordinance allows for tiny homes on wheels that are 1) DMV certified AND 2) approved by the HCD or California Housing and Community Development. It’s this second part that threw us for a loop. The RVIA certification is all the DMV needs to register the THOW with the state. Between that and the inspections done on the infrastructure (power, water, and septic) when we originally applied for the temp housing permit, granting us a permanent residence permit is a no-brainer when it comes to safety. However, someone in the county planning office demanded that all THOWS also be licensed with the HCD. This is an additional certification that only a few dealers (ahem, select dealers within California at that) have acquired. Thus, the unit we bought from a Wisconsin dealer will not qualify. If I want to live here in a THOW, I have to remove my new home that I love and replace it with a model approved by the state. Hmm…I wonder what vendors lobbied for that part of the regulations?
This is a common story in California, the most restrictive place in the nation to build housing. Between the progressive obsession with safety and the abject capitalist cronyism the state is known for, we’ve created a housing situation that is now a crisis rivaled only by the Depression era. The median sold home price in Santa Cruz right now is $1.5 million. You read that correctly. This is for a used home. The reasons are numerous, but a big one is the fact that due to a desire to restrict development under the guises of “safety” and “environmentalism” it is too costly to build new housing. We’re now at the point where they’re turning parking lots into apartments in hopes that single people and students will live in those rather than by the dozen in single-family homes all over the county, thus freeing those up for families. But what family can afford a mortgage of $1.5 million, much less save for the downpayment?
Moreover, do humans want to live in the apartments deemed appropriate by the county? Like the bees that chose the hallowed-out tree to the ready-made bee-apartments on my land, what if humans would like to live in the wild? What if humans prefer to live with the land? The county had the opportunity to create something that would have benefited so many of us when it came to the THOW legislation, and instead limited the way it could be implemented. In a place where tent cities are regularly swept away, homelessness is on the rise, the median home costs $1.5 million, that also lost another 900 homes in the fires, why would they work against us in this way? As of today, only 69 of the homes lost in the fire have been granted occupancy permits and this is mostly because the requirements to rebuild are too expensive. Few have that money, which is why the THOW ordinance was a great way to make us whole again, and they FAILED. Why, when they had a chance to help so many of us get back home, did they refuse to help us? When I spoke with the planning office, the man was adamant that they would not grant me my permit unless my house has the HCD authorization. When I asked how many THOWs have been granted this permit, he said ONE!!!
They spent over a year debating a program that has helped only one family. Oh my God.
That’s not progress, it’s belligerent incompetency. It is a willful act of cruelty against humanity.
Not in my backyard (NIMBY) is a term normally used for those who refuse to let others live near them in housing they deem unacceptable, whether it be a yurt, RV, tiny home on wheels, or even a 5-story apartment building. NIMBY has come to mean something else to me—it means I can’t live in MY own backyard in the way that I see fit. I raised a family on this land, yet the form of housing I’ve chosen, the form I can afford, is not allowed, even if I own the land. I’ll have to tow a perfectly good home off my land and replace it with a model deemed appropriate by the county, in other words, one that is built by a vendor that has paid the state for an additional license to be allowed to sell units that can be used as housing in the state. Will that make me safer? Is it better for the environment to build a new house in a factory and ship it here while shipping mine somewhere else? Did anyone do the carbon math there? Why not approve what we have and be done with it?
The more regulations enacted by your county, the higher housing costs. Now that people are no longer tethered to cities like San Francisco and NYC for their office work, the affordable housing issue is spreading across America like a manufactured plague. Those places that have the most stringent NIMBY based housing regulations are seeing their real estate costs soar. Those who own the homes are happy, gleeful even. They will protect their equity with even more regulation against building. Those who don’t own, are left out, and can’t even live in an RV on land they own, nor an adorable RVIA certified THOW (however, they can rent them out on Hipcamp, but that’s another essay entirely).
For unlike the bees, we humans have few places left where we can build the home of our choice. We have domesticated ourselves to a point where shelter, the most basic of human needs, is no longer a given.