California’s quality of life is the worst in the country? | Hacker News Reader

California’s quality of life is the worst in the country?

mercurynews.com

82 pointsmasonic105 comments

Here are the criteria: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/quality-of-...

Among the measures used to evaluate states' natural environments are drinking water quality, air quality and total toxic chemical pollution per square. The ranking also considers how much each state puts its citizens at risk for long-term, chronic health effects from pollution. Social environment, on the other hand, investigates how involved people are in their communities. Two of the measures, community engagement and social support, are based on surveys where people shared how often they participate in community events and how often they spend time with family members, friends and work colleagues. Political involvement was also determined by evaluating average voter turnout at the 2016 presidential and congressional elections.

North Dakota -- a desolate wind-swept plain littered with fracking wells -- is #1 for Quality of Life, which makes me seriously question the metrics used here.

That says more about you than about the study.

Have you ever lived in a place like that? With real community? Neighbors that care about you? Who know who you are? Who notice if you are having an issue? Who go out of their way to help you if you need it?

Could you, right now, walk over to a neighbor and say "I need to go to xxx for reason xxx, could you watch my kids for 2 days?", and expect them to either say yes, or help you find someone who can?

While I don’t have kids, a friend of mine in San Francisco does. She’s good friends with the neighbors who have a son the same age as hers. If she had to leave suddenly, I’m certain they’d do anything they could to help.

Outside of Silicon Valley where I grew up, in the Santa Cruz mountains, we also had neighbors we could trust who would help us if they could.

I do feel that Silicon Valley is less friendly than nearby Santa Cruz, but anecdotally we do have neighbors who will help.

Knowing a few neighbors is different from knowing entire community, participating in town events, walking around the town and seeing familiar faces everywhere.

Certainly. That just isn’t what was discussed in the original comment. If it’s about knowing lots of your neighbors then I would say I haven’t had that in California.

I have lived in extremely rural areas, and driven to destinations deep in North Dakota to buy pickup trucks.

I do not associate any part of North Dakota with midwestern neighborliness. Perhaps you do?

I think it's subjective if this adds or decreases life quality. For me, the anonymity in an urban area adds to life quality.

It doesn't seem too unreasonable that states with lower populations would rank so favorably given the criteria described.

Less people could mean less air pollution and fewer contaminants in municipal water supplies from runoff. This would theoretically decrease the occurrence of pollution related illness. I would imagine that fracking in ND, though a huge business, only occurs in a few key areas of the state, thus limiting it's negative affects on quality of life.

Smaller communities are also known for their close social circles. When there are only a handful of people in a town, it is not uncommon to interact with the same individuals regularly. If you look at the rankings, Alaska ranks number one in the "Social Environment" category. Only in a large city can one feel alone despite being surrounded by people everywhere they go.

I do agree with your point though. The criteria is very narrow and doesn't discuss many of the aspects of what "quality of life" is in the minds of most people. What about entertainment? Employment? Poverty levels? Prices? These things are important to people and I think fall under the umbrella of "quality of life" in general.

I'd imagine those other factors you cited wouldn't favor California by all that much, entertainment being the exception (and one narrowly concentrated in certain metropolitan areas); in my experience and observation (having lived in California all my life up until about a year ago), employment, poverty levels, and prices are all dismal at best.

That's an interesting point about social environment and engagement. As a native Californian, I struggled socially when I was living in the DC metro area for 5 years. Simply put, it was the weather. If there was rain (which was nothing like the light sprinkle I was used to) or a slight dusting of snow, I did not want to go out. I slipped on icy sidewalks (breaking my tailbone); got regularly drenched while walking to the metro; and had my fair share of heart-stopping moments driving in inclement weather. As someone who's already introverted, it became very easy for me to just hole up in my apartment.

Wow, after a year you could have learned how to deal with the weather better. Better shoes, defensive driving classes, etc. All for less than the cost of one month's rent.

I live in California and love it, but bad weather is just something you need a few tools to deal with.

I've mentioned this a few times here on HN, but I fled California (San Francisco) in January for Nashville, TN and couldn't be happier. I moved over my California LLC and businesses to a Tennessee LLC (no state income tax). People for the most part are super friendly (almost awkward friendly), and that southern hospitality is really a thing.

Costs are out of control, lawmakers and California state laws are backwards and anti-business, taxes are high, and open borders / sanctuary cities (my personal political opinion) are detrimental.

Counterpoint: Tennessee is very religious and also backwards as hell[1], and if you aren’t white you will have a difficult time fitting in.

[1]Just one recent example: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/tennessee-lawmakers-pass-...

Counter-counter point: the valley is filled with over inflated egos and developers whose sole business model is stealing people’s private data to sell ads. They tend to think tech wouldn’t exist without them when in reality their only contribution to the world is a few crappy web frameworks.

Edit: looks like I struck a nerve with the valley script kiddies. Keep on downvoting. You’re the reason n-gate.com was created.

those things can both be true

  whose sole business model is stealing people’s private data to sell ads

Well, a few actually do make things or provide identifiable services. They just don't get much press.

Backwards is relative. Being religious, anti-globalization, or conservative doesn't make you a horrible person. The bay area is probably the most intolerant place I've ever been. I've personally seen people unfriend friends because of politics without even being able to have a thoughtful and educated discussion about the issues. The bay area is group thinking "madness of crowds" at its worse.

I encourage watching Peter Thiel explain why he left San Francisco (albeit for LA): https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=5V8YXmkBHok...

Opinions contrary to the hackernews bubble are met with the same intolerance.

Let’s be real. Aren’t you just trading one groupthink (liberal west coast) for another groupthink (conservative south east) that meets your desires? Do you really think a thoughtful and educated discussion would have really helped?

Wow you’re trapped in a bubble. The valley is the most close minded place I’ve ever lived. Live in NYC for a bit, it’s the polar opposite.

It varies from place to place. The Bay Area is liberal groupthink, but Portland, OR is liberal but not groupthink (when I lived there 10 years ago, anyway).

I reject your notion that all ideas deserve equal treatment.

If I come to you and say “a woman’s place is the kitchen” and you unfriend me, it would be super dumb for me to claim that you are being intolerant for not taking me seriously by entertaining my opinion. On the contrary, it is me who is being intolerant, and I cannot fault you for not tolerating my intolerance.

Is it really so strange to factor political beliefs into your decisions about who to spend time and invest in relationships with? A lot of friendships are based on compatibility in things like hobbies, musical taste, or sense of humor. I don’t see anything wrong with that, and some political issues are (I would argue) more fundamental and important than what sports teams I follow or what types of movies I enjoy.

I know many in Seattle who draw an extreme image of the South and for the most part it feels highly political. In that case I remember that Intolerance of other points of view is the definition of bigotry. It's important to not color an entire state of people with specific moral values.

I'll spare you the effort of going through this because I went through the methodology behind it:

Qualify of life is based on 7 factors:

Natural Environment (50%):

- Drinking Water Quality (13th)

- Low Industrial Toxins (20th)

- Low Pollution Health Risk (45th)

- Urban Air Quality (50th)

Social Involvement (50%):

- Community Engagement (44th)

- Social Support (38th)

- Voter participation (49th)

The whole Social Involvement section, which is 50% of QOL, is basically completely bunk. The first two are based off surveys that I'm sure have methodology issues, and who cares about voter participation? My quality of life isn't affected by whether or not my neighbor votes in the presidential election of which your vote in California has no impact. I also have no doubt if voter participation was adjusted for demographics, named age and race, California wouldn't do so badly.

The air quality stuff is fair game, but California is a big state and there are lots of places with better air, in addition to the fact that I can think of 50 things which impact my "qualify of life" more than the things listed: Traffic, Parks, Restaurants, Walkability, Bikability, etc.

I left California last September. Moving someplace cheaper allowed me to get back into housing. That was all I expected to get out of it. Other than getting off the street, I didn't expect significant improvement in quality of life. I moved to a small town that did not have all the stuff I wanted. I expected to kind of put up with it in order to be able to afford housing.

But after getting here, our mantra has become "Thank god we have moved to civilization." There is no bag ban here. The library system here is better than anything I saw in California. Public transit is better. There are multiple things open 24 hours a day within a short walk from my rental.

Unemployment is high and there is a homeless problem, things I would like to try do something about. But homelessness was high all over California and I was one of the homeless there.

I really love the place I moved to and I am just jazzed to be here. At this point, I can't imagine going back to California.

The problems here look solvable to me. The problems in California look entrenched and like they can't be solved without some things changing in terms of state policies. That seems unlikely and it seems to me that even if someone can figure out how to fix it and somehow pull it off, the transition would be painful.

I really liked California for a lot of years. It saddens me to feel this way about the state.

Where did you move to? I do agree that many of the problems in California will not be easily solved.

I'm in Southwest Coastal Washington.

[There is no bag ban here]

Seriously? Single-Use Carryout Bag Ban a concern for you?

Yup.

http://michelerebooted.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-lawful-awful...

There is also this theory that it's caused a Hepatis outbreak: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/hepatitis-crisis/sd...

People who are homeless would often use plastic bags as a bathroom, and then throw it in the trash. No more plastic bags, so they can't do that...

Not sure what real evidence there is for it, but I always love an unintended consequences story.

I'm a proponent of the idea that the bag ban is a contributing factor to the hepatitis epidemic. I don't think it is the only factor. The epidemic also started about the same time the multi year California drought broke. That was an especially wet winter, with deadly storms and flooding. I think the heavy rains likely also contributed to the epidemic.

There are probably other factors as well. I believe homelessness has been on the rise in Southern California. Concentration of poverty tends to go bad places healthwise.

I'm not so sure that's a cautionary tale about unintended consequences as much as an illustration of the lack of public toilets. Do we really want people doing their business in plastic bags?

I have two objections to this post:

1. No numbers provided, in terms of actual impacts on poor people. Just a vague angry waving of fists and calling drafters of bag bans "assholes".

2. Carbon footprint isn't the only thing that's cut down with bag bans. Plastic waste itself is a massive problem - plastic is forever and it's getting everywhere, including our water. In my home city of Mumbai, India, plastic bags choke up drains and sewers, and contribute to monsoon flooding every year - and it's definitely not the rich that suffer most when the city floods. Reducing the amount of plastic that's produced might even be worth a slight increase in carbon emissions in the long run. That is if we can find emissions savings elsewhere, which luckily, we can by cutting out the McMansions and SUVs mentioned in the post.

In mostly poor communities, I'd support even free paper bags along with a plastic bag ban. In richer communities, yeah a plastic bag ban + non-free paper bags can be construed as "anti-poor" but virtually everything else in those communities already is anti-poor anyway (minimum plot size zoning, walkability, public transit availability etc).

It just makes my blood boil to see the way groceries are bagged in communities with no bag bans - it feels like they use a new bag per item.

> The people who are hurt by this are people who walk to the store, bike to the store or take public transit. These people now need to buy a backpack or something to carry their stuff.

I don't understand this part. When they leave the store after shopping, they will be carrying full bags, so they have to have some way of carrying full bags when they walk, bike, or take public transit home from the store.

An empty bag is a lot easier to carry than a full bag, so why wouldn't whatever method they use to carry full bags away from the store work for carrying empty bags to the store?

I was homeless in California at the time the bag ban became law. I did buy a $3 backpack for shopping. In fact, I bought a series of them because I have a serious medical condition and cleanliness is a big issue in my life.

If you are in a car, tossing a bag in the trunk or back seat is no big deal. In fact, you can just leave one there by default. But if you are walking, biking or taking transit, you need to remember to take it, you have to carry it and keep track of it. It requires more organization, more mental energy, and more physical energy. You don't have to plan ahead, keep track of things, etc if there will be free bags provided at the time if purchase. This also means that spontaneous purchases are problematic for those without a car in a way they are not for those with a car.

Even if you aren't homeless and don't have the cleanliness concerns I have, it is sort of a death by a thousand paper cuts for people who are typically already poor, overburdened and struggling to cope.

I agree and think that these sorts of laws create hassle without much benefit. There are probably a hundred more impactful things that could make a measurable impact in the earth without pushing cost and hassle on people dealing with enough of both.

In my county, (not in California) a former fat guy turned crossfitter on the legislature pushed bans on all sorts of stuff, including transfat. Counties only control regulation for food places less than 20,000 square feet, so mr. healthy food put every bakery in county out of business (literally) and left us with factory manufactured crap in supermarkets, etc.

The point is, flashy nonsense doesn’t help when you have real problems.

When the plastic bags reach the ocean, they resemble jelly fish, so they look like food. Whales have been found dead with dozens of plastic bags clogging their digestive system. [1]

So coastal areas in particular are a priority to reduce the use of plastic bags. I'm disappointed California hasn't forced grocers to use biodegradable bags in the produce departments as well.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-whale-idUSKBN15I2E...

I never finished my degree, but I am an environmental studies major. I began decrying the horrifying stuff we are doing to our oceans many years before that was trendy, when it just made me an opinionated nutter.

But all my free grocery bags get reused as garbage bags. There is no ban on the sale of garbage bags. If I were not getting free grocery store bags, I would be buying small garbage bags and going through about the same number of plastic bags.

We have multiple islands of floating plastic in the ocean. IIRC, one is like the size of the state of Texas. The plastics problem for our oceans is quite serious. But it is hardly limited to plastic bags.

I don't know what the solution is, but I have lived without a car for at least a decade. I am walking the walk to the best of my ability in terms of living light on the land. I think the big picture choices I have made more than make up for whatever small conveniences I find are essential to keeping my quality of life high.

> But all my free grocery bags get reused as garbage bags. There is no ban on the sale of garbage bags. If I were not getting free grocery store bags, I would be buying small garbage bags and going through about the same number of plastic bags.

You don't even need grocery store bags to use as garbage bags. I've found that composting and recycling allow me to get away with using the produce plastic bags for my remaining trash. I don't even bag all of my produce, just stuff that could be damaged easily or hard to gather together, like green beans or small peppers.

Slightly amusing that on the Quality of Life Rankings page [0], the hero image they went with is of.... California.

0: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/quality-of-...

I'm 33. Literally no one my age or younger I know owns a home unless they live in a smaller city somewhere in mid-america.

I'm a senior engineer at a large tech company. I cannot afford a home where I live unless I want to live in a shitty condo, which I do not. I cannot work remotely, so moving is not an option unless I want to find another job, which I'm considering.

Once baby boomers start retiring and moving to assisted living homes, a large supply of houses will enter the market. This should hopefully alleviate some of the cost issues. But millennials are a ticking time bomb. So many millennials have no hope for lucrative careers, unless they're engineers or in finance, which is a small percent.

I suggest lobbying your state and local representatives to allow fast and easy approval of building more high-density housing and to upzone your neighborhood. The reason California is so expensive is because the generations who already own homes have long asked to maintain the status quo with low height limits (most of San Francisco is 40 feet!) and density limits. This creates an artificial shortage. And those homeowners have somehow created a political coalition with lower income renters afraid of gentrification by offering them things like rent control and token amounts of subsidized housing. The thing is, if you do the math, it quickly becomes obvious that there is no world where we create enough subsidized housing to make a dent in the problem. And rent control works to keep people in their homes but at the expense of everyone else. Subsidized housing is a lottery, and always will be in California. We don't suggest buying lottery tickets as a solution for income inequality; we shouldn't for housing inequality either.

The only viable long-term solution is relax zoning laws, and make new construction approvals easier and faster.

SB-827 is a start in the right direction.

I could be wrong, but I don't think the OP is asking for more high-density (and low income) housing.

This.

If SB-827 doesn't pass, we'll know that California's priorities are not with the young/it's future - it's with those who were lucky enough to get in the right place at the right time.

I'm not very hopeful, and the insane cost of living/owning a home is the primary reason I've pretty much given up on moving there at this point.

If you are a tech person, I'd say you should seriously consider the Silicon Prairie.

For example, it doesn't surprise me this article emphasizes Nebraska. Whereas this article mentions not owning a home in California, you can readily afford a home out in the Midwest. If you don't want that, grab a two-bedroom apartment that costs you less than a $9,00 per month. Insane commutes don't exist.

Places like Kansas City have Google Fiber and other places like Lincoln and Omaha don't have Google Fiber, but still gigabit Internet or even 300Mbps Internet plans (for $60/month)

For a while, the fastest growing company in Nebraska was a tech startup called Hudl (https://www.hudl.com/)--which you really can't even call a startup anymore since they're big enough to be building their own buildings now.

Kansas is awful - don’t move there. Governor Brownback’s insane low-tax plan has starved government services and thoroughly ruined the state over the past decade.

Citations would be helpful...

Here: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/us/sam-brownback-kansa...

Brownback’s tax plan was so awful for the state that Republicans called him out on his bullshit and overrode his veto of a tax increase bill. Article has more details and links.

My wife and I spent seven years going to school and working in Omaha. It's a nice little city, but if someone valued the benefits of urban life (restaurants, sports, social events, public transit, etc.), I think they would eventually be disappointed. We left Omaha feeling like we'd basically finished the city, like it was a level in a game - in the 3ish years after broke-college-student status, we had tried pretty much every interesting restaurant, checked out the social events that were available to people in the post-college, pre-kids bracket, and there just wasn't much novelty left. We moved to Chicago for work a few years back and we still haven't scraped the surface of life here. Are there problems with Chicago? Of course. But the quality of life is dramatically improved for this sample size of two.

From a foreigner point of view who keeps reading about California, it seems both like a fascinating and terrifying place. So advanced yet so backward in some ways

Care to expand?

The rampant homelessness and drug use for one, the putrid mess that is downtown SF for another.

San Francisco is one beautiful city with one very ugly downtown.

What's so bad about downtown San Francisco?

The stench of urine and feces is dominating, the random exposure to homeless folks mental problems is a daily occurrence, drug paraphernalia (eg: heroin needles) and trash are scattered throughout. SF downtown is an absolute dump.

Go ahead, take a 30 minute walk just north of The Mission. Turn a corner and you'll find a homeless dude standing with a vacant look on his face and pants around his ankles, letting his penis sway in the morning sun.

Turn another corner and you'll find someone shooting up with reckless abandon.

Turn another and you'll be an uninvited witness to a homeless dude verbally and physically assaulting someone for no reason.

LA, NYC, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, etc -- at least these have their size to distribute the problem, SF on the other hand is so small and its city council so progressive that there is a critical mass of it all.

I believe other states send us their homeless cause here you can find places you wont actually freeze to death in winter. It may skew things a bit. Not sure.

The ag of California sure Nevada for doing exactly this. Nevada settled:

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-reaches-400k-settlement-proposa...

Also California is a huge place, not just SF and LA. We have as many national parks as Alaska, 100's of some of the most beautiful state parks and 100's of county parks. Many states have much worse drug problems per capita. Any country of 39M people and the economy we have is going to have upsides and downsides.

But the downsides are concentrated in the population centers where most people need to live.

Not having a viable path to produce the next generation doesn’t seem like a viable long term strategy to me.

One of the consequences of the liberal tendenancies in California is visible homeless people.

Californians just don’t want their cops regularly as policy beating homeless people and arresting them for existing.

That’s why other downtowns don’t have homeless, they’re swept aside.

This is true for the most part. NYC has more homeless, but they are kept out of Manhattan, and the supportive housing is in the outer boroughs. That said, I think NYC also does a better job of housing their homeless.

But, to your point about being too liberal, I've seen some of the most disgusting things ever in Powell BART station, and when the police try to kick people out, they get too many complaints and have to back off. So we all have to suffer.

What large US cities don't have these issues? People complain about the same things in Seattle, LA, NY, etc.

In fact, it's not the worst based on the data: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/is-seattl...

Contemporary Manhattan and downtown Chicago, for one. These things exist, of course, but they aren’t in your face all the time on the major pedestrian corridors.

To be clear, it's absolutely not terrible or backward by any stretch. Please visit and see for yourself.

Expensive, sure. But there's a reason (another word for price in a decent market is 'value'). And not every city in California is San Francisco in terms of cost of living.

Our most central and highly-trafficked sidewalks and public transit stations are de facto public restrooms and homeless shelters. The plaza around our government and cultural center is densely populated with open drug use and varying degrees of mental health crisis. Begging and tent encampments abound. The cyclist-advocacy and homeless-advocacy groups are at each other's throats over whether the takeover of bike lanes by encampments should be permanent. Violent mental health breakdowns on the sidewalk are not considered worthy of the attention of any government service, least of all the police.

You can learn to tune these things out and live with them, but it is absolutely 100% backwards for place so rich and so ostensibly progressive and compassionate to blithely incubate such shocking and pervasive displays of desperation and public neglect in its own backyard. Property values are in a sustained, meteoric rise and we choose not to tap them to address these issues in any meaningful way, not from a compassionate perspective, and not from an enforcement perspective either.

EDIT: more detail.

Having seen how places like Chicago treat the homeless in the interests of keeping the things you're pointing out hidden from sight - I appreciate SF's more tolerant, somewhat live-and-let-live methods, in lieu of better, more compassionate solutions.

Hopefully having all this on display in SF will eventually provide enough impetus for the better solutions to emerge. Until then, I hope they don't decide to start being agressive and violent towards what is a largely mentally ill and incredibly vulnerable homeless population.

My admittedly limited understanding is that much of this problem is the result of mental institutions being closed across the state in the face of federal funding vanishing in the 80s. [1]

I've also heard numerous anecdotes about mentally ill patients and the homeless being forcefully bussed to San Francisco from not just other parts of California but other states, precisely because of the city's tolerance. If there's a shred of truth to this, it's a trivial to see why it's such a persistent problem.

[1] http://sfist.com/2016/06/27/san_francisco_homeless_history_1...

San Francisco had 3,146 sheltered and 4,353 unsheltered homelesss people in 2017 [0]. Chicago had 4,096 sheltered and 1,561 unsheltered. [1] Despite having 3x our population and a more centrist political climate, Chicago has fewer homeless people but provides shelter to both a greater proportion and a greater absolute number of them.

Your comment is illustrative of why accelerationism doesn't work here: San Franciscans are much more interested in the social climate and ideological purity than material conditions and effects. Worsening blight only makes us congratulate each other more vigorously for tolerating it. People then opt out quietly when they can (see: private transit) or more openly when they can frame it as selfless concern for their children (see: the near-universal social norm of leaving the city, if not the region, to start a family) or their neighborhood community (see: NIMBYs). Everyone agrees that something should be done, unless it involves any tradeoffs or taxpayer money.

Lack of federal funds is not an excuse. California cities would have some of the most enviable property tax revenues in the world (also less insane housing markets) if California voters would allow Prop 13 reform.

[0] http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin...

[1] https://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/fss/sup...

The statistics you cite say absolutely nothing of how CPD treats the homeless, or how many of their homeless are off the streets because they're instead incarcerated.

If you applied Chicago's policing practices in San Francisco, you would have a whole lot less homeless people.

Chicago also enjoys the luxury of being relatively unattractive as a destination for the homeless. San Francisco is a magnet for the homeless, which certainly contributes to the disproportionately high numbers for its size.

San Francisco obviously has the resources at its disposal to do good things about it. I look forward to something positive in the future. I am not an SF resident, nor do I own property there, though I have spent quite a few years in the area.

The article is about California, the state. San Francisco is not California.

California is great for high earners with no plans to have kids. But it’s a pretty raw deal for everyone else, though.

From the article:

> In case it makes you feel any better, while California stinks in terms of quality of life at least it didn’t rank dead last in the overall rankings. We came in at No. 32 overall, although that’s well behind New Jersey (at No. 19), Florida (at No. 15), and Nebraska (at No. 7). Ouch.

> The bottom line? The state performed well in terms of its economy, coming in at No. 4 (hello, high tech boom) but it fared terribly in categories such as citizen opportunity (No. 46) and fiscal stability (No. 43) in addition to the dreaded quality-of-life assessment (that scarring No. 50). Of course, as anyone who has tried to buy a house in the Bay Area knows, fiscal instability is basically our motto at this point.

I think it's also interesting that Mississippi, Arkansas, and New Mexico were in the top 10 for "quality of life," but bottom 10 overall: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings

It would be interesting to see the correlation between overall ranking (or economy) and quality-of-life ranking. Looks like many comments point out that they're often opposite.

>The state performed well in terms of its economy, coming in at No. 4

This isn't surprising. The reality is California's good economy, relatively good school system, attractive West Coast appeal, and high influx of immigrants make California VERY competitive (i.e. overcrowded), which brings down the quality of life for all.

This is an end result of sorts of our global society. A California will always exist.

What does this even mean? Your comment is vague and nonspecific. California chose its path at the polls.

Unless you're rich of course. Then it's fantastic!

Not bad if you’re poor, either.

This is a bit weird...

"Quality of Life" is, in my understanding, a synonym for happiness. But just asking people to rate their happiness doesn't really count as research.

So this appears to be a two-step process: Find certain objective factors, such as time spent with family or environmental factors that are good determinants of peoples' reported levels of happiness.

Next, rank areas according to these factors.

The first part is obviously useful, because it sets specific goals to inform policy that otherwise doesn't really know how to make people happy.

But the reverse step seems unnecessary complicated. And while I wouldn't dismiss the results completely just because they are counter-intuitive, I do believe people tend to do well on judging their own happiness. And there'd be a lot of people moving from California to North Dakota if the results are completely true.

The older generations that have owned houses for 20+ years are the problem. Seen Lafayette or Orinda lately? They oppose all development, call affordable housing "the ghetto", and are of course protected themselves by prop 13. Heck they even elected a Republican assemblyperson.

Came back from walking along the beautiful Santa Cruz coast this afternoon and read this. All I can think is this is a genius way to slow down the immigration rate until legislation and housing developments can catch up :)

Have you ever been to Angel Falls? Or Parque Nacional Henri Pittier? Or Bahía de Cata beach?

Well, all those places are stunningly gorgeous! And in Venezuela.

So what's your point?

I bet there are plenty of coastal areas with similar effect. East coast was nice, for me, for example. If you like all seasons, they might be more interesting than cali.

I grew up on the East Coast actually. I vastly prefer the weather, the culture and the economic opportunity of the Bay Area. I know its got huge problems, and how people like me exacerbate them, and I can’t afford a house here, but there is no where I’d rather be right now.

I grew up in a foreign land, with four seasons, and i feel the same about Cali. This is probably the place i will grow old. But i also acknowledge not everyone is like me.

For many, Texas seems like a good place too.

I take it that you went nowhere near downtown Santa Cruz.

I like it weird. ‍️

Does this apply to tech workers in the Bay Area? Because it seems like the quality of life should be very high with what they're getting paid.

When you take the cost of living in to account, the QOL on the peninsula sucks. I live in Gilroy, which is ~40 miles south of SV, and like it a lot. But I also almost never have to drive north.

Don’t worry, the #1 quality-of-life state is North Dakota so clearly the methodology is wack.

Have you ever heard someone say: “man, when I finish my internship, I hope I can go to North Dakota where there is lots of happiness?”

No. Because it’s -40° there half the year.

As much as I'd like to buy a house outside of California, I can't imagine living in cold weather constantly. I really need sunlight/warmth, and I can't help but feel like I would miss California's weather.

Luckily, there are plenty of other states with similarly nice weather.

Specifically?

The thing that I like about California is that it’s warmer than the rest of the country in the winter and cooler in the summer, generally expressed by the locals as “if the temperature is below 60 or above 80, everyone complains.”

Even inland California is too damn hot.

There are no other states that have mostly Mediterranean hot/warm summer climates (Csa/Csb) - Oregon being the exception if you enjoy a colder/wetter Csb than what you find in the Bay Area:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/US_50_st...

It’s not that bad considering modern technology and all. Get a winter hobby or sport!

I live in San Francisco, but I've spent this whole winter in Utah, and it's actually been quite wonderful.

Here are the metrics they used for quality of life:

  Community Engagement
  Social Support
  Voter Participation
  Drinking Water Quality
  Low Industrial Toxins
  Low Pollution Health Risk
  Urban Air Quality

Was like...a survey of the happiness of the population not at least one of the metrics they used?

It seems...like a really silly metric not to include in a quality of life ranking.

> a survey of the happiness

It's not possible to measure happiness by asking people.

I remember reading a study about, maybe someone can find it.

The only thing you can measure (or ask about) are proxies to happiness.

Since "happiness" by definition is subjective, how do you determine what the proxies to happiness are?

How do you correlate something to "happiness" (to determine its a proxy), if you can't measure happiness directly?

I mean, I agree that there's some significant problems in surveying a population, but I'm not aware of any other way to measure something subjective like happiness. I'd love to read the study you're referencing if you can find it.

>Have you ever heard someone say:

Public perception has jack to do with actual happiness. A bunch of college students wanting to go somewhere does not give it a good quality of life.

Mischaracterization in the title. Actual title, which I think matters, is: "California’s quality of life is the worst in the country: Says who?"

Perhaps correct? It does change the tone.

It does set a tone, but after reading the article, I failed to find a justification for "says who?" There doesn't seem to be a defense or rebuttal for the quality of life assessment.

The "Says who?" addendum is only on the one version they put on the web (they use varying headlines on their 10+ member papers). The original print title is right in the URL:

  california-has-the-worst-quality-of-life-study-says/

I added "US News" to clarify the source of the study.

Please, admins, consider the possibility that some of us use honest forethought in entering a title. (The most recent change of adding a question mark is the most editorializing choice of all.)

[Update]: the Mercury News archive edition title for this article (Page 1A) is

  CALIFORNIA’S NO. 50!

  In quality of life, study calls us Worst Coast

I was erroneous in calling the original web posting title the "original print title".

Pure comedy.

Being homeless in coastal California confers a better quality of life than having an apartment in most other states in USA.

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