Nimby: “Long ago, New York City urban planner Robert Moses wrote that beaches ‘lend themselves to...shacks built without reference to health, sanitation, safety, and decent living.’ But what did he know, really? Isn’t that just another way to describe low-income housing?”

Last week, the city of Coronado avoided a showdown with the state of California, and agreed to build the 912 housing units demanded by the Regional Housing Needs Allocation program. (If it hadn’t, it might have been fined, or worse, obliged to take in the poors.) Commented state attorney general Rob Bonta, “If we could get it done in Coronado, an island city where a military base and a port sits on more than half of it, we can get it done elsewhere, too.” But not every city has what Coronado has: a stretch of beach so large and flat that it once hosted an entire “tent city” for vacationers, complete with electricity, trolley service, and primitive kitchens. (Amazing to think that we once had to try to convince people to visit, isn’t it?) And this same stretch of beach will soon host what Coronado Housing Commission head Jack Nimby calls “new tents, er, house-style dwellings for alien, er, foreign, um, new residents.” At first, says Nimby, there was pushback from locals against the prospect of filling its famous beaches with “permanent visitors.” “But then I reminded them that nobody goes to the beach any more, ever since Mexico poisoned the water with raw sewage and gave everybody diarrhea. And just like that, we had our solution: a filthy place for filthy outsiders. Always remember: Coronado cares.”