Partisan Attacks on California Are Harshing My Mellow
I have to take this from ... Florida?
This man wouldn’t happen to be insane, would he?
People like to say that the past was a more innocent time, but that often isn’t true. Berlin is more innocent today than it was in 1939, and Los Angeles is more innocent today than it was in 1971, during the Tate-LaBianca murder trial of Charles Manson. My family moved in that year to a house from whose driveway the hill where the murders of Sharon Tate and four of her guests took place was plainly visible. My sister and I were under strict instructions never to open the front door without peering first through a side window to see who it was.
California was an unusual place in the 1960s and 1970s—Manson, Est, “Governor Moonbeam,” “Berserkeley,” etc.—as expressed melodramatically in the writings of Joan Didion and more affectionately in the writings of Thomas Pynchon. If you were from there and moved someplace else you set yourself up for a certain amount of ribbing. It didn’t bother me because it was good-natured. The teasing dwindled in the late 1980s but it’s back now, and it’s nastier, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, displaying in December’s debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom a map purporting to show where people shit in the streets of San Francisco. The latest victim is Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was impeached this week for no good reason. He went to my high school! (A year behind me. I didn’t know him.) The motive for all this California-hating, of course, is partisanship. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.
Totally agree with the thrust of the article, but...
"In answer, all I can say is that more people choose to live there than in any other state."
Uh, you know we're suffering a population decline, right? Which is basically entirely about our crummy housing policy. Lower-income residents are moving out, and being replaced by higher-income people in smaller numbers. Average household size (as in number of people) is shrinking, while average dwelling unit size is rising. The cost of the services consumed by the upper middle class keeps rising because the people who deliver those services have to commute in from three hours away, and there are just fewer of them over time willing to do it.
The essence of "gentrification" is that there isn't nice new housing for rich people to occupy, so instead they displace poor people: https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/understand-citys-pace-gentrification-look-its-housing-supply
Fundamentally this is all about the jobs-housing balance. My own county, San Mateo, has added roughly 10-12 jobs, for each new housing unit, year after year, for _decades_.
This goes back to your pretty bad take a few weeks back on housing supply. I would again urge you to go talk to some experts on the topic of housing in California. Call up the Terner Center at UC Berkeley, or talk to Chris Elmendorf at UC Davis or Paavo Monkkonen and UCLA.
We need to re-legalize construction of smaller dwellings, everywhere, so that folks who sling coffee, clean the streets, and so on, can live side by side with doctors and lawyers and engineers, and send their kids to the same schools. We've become economically segregated.