California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

Fun fact: most immigrants from Mexico are not poor-relative-to-Mexico.

If the USA and Mexico set different thresholds for the poverty line, with the Mexican threshold being lower, then people above the Mexican poverty line but below the USA poverty line could emigrate. This would raise the poverty rate in both countries, but this is an artifact of the two countries differing definitions of poverty. But if you measured poverty in the entire USA+Mexico region using a single definition of poverty, you would see it decrease, assuming those immigrants are better off after moving. (Note that actually measuring poverty this way is difficult due to factors like differing currencies with exchange rates varying over time, so the concept of a unified poverty definition is mostly just theoretical.)

It's possibly the middle class Mexican citizens who have the resources to make the journey across the border in the first place.

At least partly true, in that immigration is a net benefit to nearly everyone.

It's a complex issue.

NAFTA fucked rural Mexico as a tidal wave of cheap corn flooded the economy and killed the smaller scale agriculture, just as it did in the US. You also have periods where economic crisis and monetary devaluation in Mexico wipes out a lot of middle class type people. A lot of laborers and construction guys came because of this.

You also have an insurgency in many parts of Mexico where the cartels have taken over and often little functional government exists. People there bug out if they can.

Many of the "peasant" immigrants are from Central America and pass through Mexico.

As far as economic impact, it's a complicated issue there too. The big land interests in Western States generally control the senate delegations pretty tightly. A lot of people are making a lot of money off of illegals, so if there were some major change, you'd see some sort of guest worker visa or change to labor laws (especially minimum wage, workers compensation and overtime) to keep the farms picked and slaughterhouses running.

And let's not forget all the cities in the US that send their homeless to CA, usually to SF or Berkeley, where the police and citizens are more tolerant than most places.

I befriended a homeless guy I saw every day walking to/from work. He never asked for money. I struck up a conversation, offered to buy him food and we talked for months, every few days (when I would sometimes buy him food). He had been a machinist in PA, got laid off, and got to N CA somehow. The weather made it easier to live outside, year round. I pushed him to get an ID, which is needed for pretty much anything, and he did. I haven't seen him in a couple of months, so I hope he got into a shelter.

So, the weather and tolerance is a big reason people come to CA when they are homeless or near homeless.

"The poorest people are rural whites and southern/inner city African Americans. "

I don't agree.

There are very large numbers of Central/South Americans who come to Cali, largely unskilled, and they occupy the biggest part of the economic underclass.

Think of how many are not even 'on the books'? I'd argue it's very difficult for an undocumented person to make that much.

It's not a 'moral' statement, it's just a reality of the blending of people from different civilizations in one pot.

Large scale migration from poor countries will definitely be a factor.

And as one commenter above noted - the 'weather' does as well.

Nice weather attracts more vagabonds. This is true in Canada s well, BC has way more street people than Ontario where it's extremely cold and extremely uncomfortable for street people in the winter. Again, not a moral statement. Just fairly rational human nature.

Well a lot of people own houses and are happy about it. There is plenty of uproar about it from renters. Mountain View just passed a rent control measure for example.

There is an uproar, but there's an equal and greater uproar in the opposite direction whenever there's a new housing attempted to be built. Existing homeowners and establishment rally against it and they're quite organized.

Couple this with the fact that California is entrenched in bureaucratic red tape, and you can see why nothing ever gets done about it.

It's a split issue. Renters want prices to go down. Owners want prices to go up.

Who wins the political clash? Are there more voting owners, or voting renters?

Generally there are more owners, though California has one of the lowest home ownership rates at around 53%. Cities draw this average down -- most suburbs have higher ownership rates.

With this in mind it shouldn't be a surprise that owners outvote renters.

A large portion of that is likely because many approach house ownership as a investment rather than a living expense.

Very few buy gas from the pump with the expectation of selling it again once the price rises.

Housing as an investment object is a disease of the mind.

> In areas with high housing costs, this should be the primary political issue.

Probably the best way to think of America is a society of land speculators. Europe was full, so we moved over the pond to settle a new land. During the expansion westward, communities built their towns up in the hopes that theirs would be the one that makes it big.

Today, renters are treated as slightly suspect drifters with 'no sense of community,' which is a coded way of saying they're okay with falling property values. Which is threatening in a society where the majority are invested in real estate. It's not too hard to look at policies and see the implicit high property value bias. Environmental regulations, property tax moratoriums, public schools, interest rate policies, urban growth boundaries, public transportation; they all tie in, if a bit obliquely.

So I'm not surprised in a country where 63 percent of people own the home they live in, that high housing prices aren't a political priority. When we've all collectively made a bet that home prices go up, should we be surprised when policies are voted in to support that opinion?

Always comparing,never evaluating against an outside standard. We'll never break the n log(n) barrier

Should we be comparing the US of 330 million people versus tiny nations that have artificial advantages due to their small size and homogeneous culture? Which pushes further into how you compare such dramatically different examples in the first place.

Consider Finland. Five million people, 82% white, extremely anti-immigration, and they don't have to defend themselves for the most part. The US military shield has mostly taken care of that for them (thus their 1.3% of GDP military spending despite having a frequently hostile Russia on their doorstep). So you want to compare their outcome, to the US?

Comparing a wildly diverse nation of 330 million against Sweden, Norway or Finland type nations, is absurd. Those are the absolute elite outcomes of the world and Europe in particular.

Compare Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Minnesota, Virginia, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington, etc. to those nations. They all have median incomes equal to or higher than Switzerland (and that's before adjusting for the better cost of living in those states vs a Switzerland type nation) and are much closer on a population basis. Those are the elite outcomes of the US collection of states.

Or would you rather compare various of the bottom 25 US states to the relatively impoverished half of Europe nobody ever wants to talk about? Bulgaria, Belarus, Russia, Moldova, Hungary, Ukraine, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, etc.

The fact is, most developed nations struggle to match the median incomes of the poorest US states. Japan as one example has a median income 20% below Mississippi and Louisiana (and it's likely to continue losing ground to those states). Germany is about on par with Kentucky.

They're called exurbs

For many people, having family nearby saves so much money that a much lower cost of living elsewhere won't offset it. Having to pay for childcare (vs. having Grandma do it) alone is enough to wipe out the savings of moving to Dallas.

Except they all face the same tax burden which, as a California resident until recently, is quite high: sales tax, property tax, income tax...they tax everything there, and there are few exemptions. Even at $60K the taxes in CA will eat you alive. Great weather (in SoCal), but the sunshine tax, it seemed to us, was perhaps as much as 50%!

So, living in places like that and paying that much is definitely not normal.

For 1900 $/mo, you can get a bedroom in a really nice 2 or 3BR place in the desirable neighborhoods or a studio/1BR in the undesirable neighborhoods (sunset/richmond). I don't understand why the people in that article are living like that (Poor credit? Desperation to find a place fast? Ignorance of the existence of Craigslist?), but they're very, very far from being representative of SF real estate.

That could be true, but the poverty rate doesn't really tell anything about it.

A purchasing power metric (that includes cost of housing) would indicate that.

According to the report, a lot of what triggers this is the massive need for housing assistance.

Context, yes. They can tell me about how they are struggling to make ends meet because of their two car payments and interest only mortgage. That's totally the same as having your kids die from diarrhea, because they get their drinking water straight out of a dirty river and you don't have access to simple medications.

So perhaps move those poor americans to the third world. They'll feel like top 1% with those dollars.

The other thing of course to remember is just shipping food out of the US and into the developing world is how you break local farming economies. Who wants to buy food from the local farmer when there's ample free food from relief programs.

Development is hard.