My Dark California Dream

I go to work in San Francisco every day. I'm not an entrepreneur but as an engineer I am benefiting from the rise of tech. I look around the city as I walk to the office, seeing all these new condos spring up, seeing the work done on the new terminals and all the activity around me and it feels like a city that's alive and growing.

My family and I frequently travel all over California to check out all its beautiful places and I love this state. I grew up in San Diego so it's not like I'm a tourist. With the exception of the drought, I think California is getting better all the time.

Interesting personal take on recent California history. But the latent racial anxiety that is an important part of this story (and is ironically captured by the title of this piece) would be outrageous if it wasn't so comical. The author glosses the racial and ethnic diversity that makes California special and he seems like a good guy. But he ignores the ugly racial politics that still lurks in a diminishing but active part of the electorate. This headline from earlier this year, as much as anything, sums up the "darkness" that colors much of the nostalgia expressed by nostalgic Californians, especially those of the author's and author's parents' generation:

"It's official: Latinos now outnumber whites in California"

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-census-latinos...

One of the things I love most about California is its racial and cultural diversity. But a lot of that transition from the "agreed-upon, commanding" version of "modernist California" to the "post-modern phase" was embodied politically by a white flight impulse among people like my grandparents who beatified FDR then in the 1950s and 1960s started voting for conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan when he was elected governor and ended up reliably supporting a Republican establishment that sanctified Prop 13 and championed funding cuts for the public institutions that formed an important part of the foundation of the California dream. They got theirs and they were loathe to pay it forward for a state that they felt was being overrun by people who didn't share their values and were not like themselves.

With the election of Jerry Brown and the dominance of Democrats in the legislature, California seems to have turned a corner fiscally and a lot of the doom-and-gloom headlines that gleefully pointed to the deficits of the previous decade have faded away. California still faces a lot of challenges. At least it is facing up to them.

The author is so focused on lamenting California's demise that he's missing what is still here.

I fixed up an old '73 VW westy bus and we've been doing all the things he said can't be done anymore. The cali dream is alive and well, I was out surfing today. El Nino is predicted this year and may spell the end of the drought. Things are looking up, and the solution to the sense of loss he's taking about is to be creative. Go to Kings Canyon or Anza Borrego instead of tourist-trap Yosemite. Its not that hard.

I wanted to like California, but every time I visit (mostly LA) I end up spending hours stuck in traffic getting places. It kills it for me, it makes the joy of nice weather, palm trees, the laid back attitude, the views, the beaches, kind of not worth it. I tried the Metro, but it didn't go where I wanted to go somehow. I tried the buses, but there were too crowded and they got stuck in traffic just as much as the cars.

Hm, the happy note on the end about the good parts of progress was light on the massive increase of income inequality. A city with foreign investment and state of the art medical facilities is good and well, but is unrelated to what makes San Francisco San Francisco, which is a generosity toward difference, and a welcoming "come as you are" philosophy. If nobody except the highly affluent can live here, we've lost our way.

I'm a guy living on the east coast. I've wanted to move to Cali for almost a decade now. As a developer, there are 4 times as many job prospects in California. The weather doesn't hurt either. I bought into the American dream. Go to school. Get a job. Buy a house. Now I'm seeing if I can break even on my investment. I'm hoping the authors opinion is biased.

Don't worry, it's about time for another dot-com crash. After the last dot-com crash, traffic in SF dropped so much that rush hour disappeared. Half the twentysomethings moved out. Downtown San Jose emptied out. Just be patient.

Which big company will be the first to go? Twitter? (And why is Zynga still around at all?)

TLDR: you kids get off my lawn.

I mean the author admits this multiple times, that he's nostalgic for "1960s California" out of nostalgia rather than any actual reasons it was better.

Article has the wrong title ... "Same as it ever was. Same as it ever will be."

Only, much more of everything. This is, inevitably, for the worse.

Now he knows how the Native Americans feel.

What can I say about this article?

I recently moved here, like many other people in tech. I didn't come for the draw of nature--which I love--but for a higher paying job and a chance to escape a poor, decaying, east coast city that increasingly felt like an urban hell. The whole undertaking was supposed to be a leg up, moving to that next level of adulthood (whatever that means in 2015). I am a well-paid, well-educated engineer in my early 30's. I am not a founder, nor do I intend to be, at least around these parts. California was a promised land, and I was glad to buy a one-way ticket there.

Now that I am here and a "resident," I faced with an ugly truth: the utter impossibility for me to ever buy any kind of property in the city, however modest or dilapidated, even if my salary somehow doubled overnight. The very thought of what it takes to "make it" here borders on the obscene. I'm lucky to pay $1,300 (which is cheap) for a one-bedroom in the city with 3 other people; outside, the prospects aren't much better.

The SF (and sadly the bay area in general) of now is a place where boomers made the rules. I can't help but feel impotent when thinking about the long-term political changes that will need to be effected in order to benefit newcomers and the working classes that are trying to make a home here. The old guard has such a stranglehold on the political machinations of this place and the chips are overwhelmingly stacked in their favor. I'm registered to vote--and I plan on it--but I know deep down, nothing will truly change until the Daniel Duane's of the city finally flush down the bowl and don't resurface. People like him had the great luck to be born during an era where places like this weren't fully exploited yet. I can't fault people like him for taking advantage of the opportunity to buy when housing was cheap and relatively plentiful. Anyone with aspirations to own a home and have a family would do the same without a second thought.

The NIMBYism and political blockading of the old guard is unconscionable. The housing crisis plaguing not only SF, but the peninsula as well, is directly related to their shortsighted, self-serving political ends. It's as if they--"they" in this case are my generational bogeyman--never even considered how their children would live. Short of inheriting a property, "tough shit" is the answer to the housing question.

My choices now are to stay, make some money, and take it back with me to somewhere cheaper, or hope for a simultaneous bubble-burst and earthquake which will depress home prices and maybe scare some alte kakas to leave.

I want to stay here, but it's really damn near impossible.

So let the Daniel Duane's lament about their California dream of the past. I only know about what we've been left by the legacy of his ilk, and it ain't good.

This was a good article, and a lot of it resonates with me, since I did grow up in SF in the 70s and 80s. It occurred to me, reading the article, that Northern Californians may be unusually ill prepared to handle the changes that occurred in the State. People often say to me "well, you grew up here, so you aren't as shocked by the prices", but it actually may be the opposite. Someone who grew up outside SF sees moving here as a choice, a decision to accept the outrageously high real estate prices as the cost of living here. But the truth is, the high prices in SF are just as much of a shock to people who grew up here. Of course, this is a slight of hand, as it actually is just as much of a choice to stay here as it is to move here, but it is more jarring to have to leave your hometown due to a fairly sudden stratospheric rise in housing prices than it is to decide not to move to a place you've never lived (especially if it involves leaving family or lifelong friends behind).

Another factor is that the very low prices may have instilled a lack of materialism in California kids that left them, as I said, unusually unprepared for what was to follow. When a school teacher, humanities professor, or social worker can afford a 3 bedroom house in palo alto with a nice sized backyard In that sort of environment, their children will often grow up believing that it wasn't really worth chasing the money, that in fact, you shouldn, that this would be to waste a gift. Yes, you'll still need an income, but why would you sacrifice a life where you enjoy your work and do good, if all that requires is that you live in a modest house in middle class Palo Alto or Noe Valley than a mansion in Pacific Heights or Hillsborough? What none of these people were prepared for is the reality that living in "middle class" Palo Alto (long, long gone) or Noe Valley will be complete off limits, and that a house in the Excelsior may even be just out of reach.

One thing that did make me cringe was the old, tired trope that doctors and lawyers are priced out, and that "only techies need apply". Rank and file "techies" were an integral part of the old SF that Dan Duane says he misses - hell, programming was even discussed as path to find the serene focus in "Zen and the article of motorcycle maintenance." Programmers and other techies were types who had renounced the big salaries of corporate law or banking to do something more creative and interesting. This view of tech was alive and well in the late 90s, and shows up in a lot of PG's early essays.

C'mon, Dan, the median salary for lawyers and doctors is waaay higher than for your typical "techie".

The thing is, California died a long time ago. The state which elected Ronald Reagan as governor is long, long gone. I have family there, and every time I visit I'm struck by what a bureaucratic nightmare it is: everything is regulated, registered, taxed, adjusted, but most of all controlled.

As far as I can tell, from my visits, California is dystopia. A different sort of dystopia than Washington, D.C. or Boston, but a dystopia nonetheless.

There's enough money in the world to pay me to live in California, but no-one would pay it to me.

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."