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Comment by stevecalifornia | Hacker News Reader

I have lived in California for about 30 years. Yesterday I took my kids to the Barnes and Nobles in San Luis Obispo. The kids section is next to the bathrooms. Inside the bathroom a homeless guy was smoking meth and another was using the sink and paper towels to give himself a bath. On the ride home I noticed that there was literally no less than one homeless guy per block on both sides of the road.

It has not always been like this and it's getting worse.

This is on top of all the other issues California has. Ridiculous housing prices, horrible schools and a wildly business unfriendly environment, etc.

My point is: The governor was working on mandating public companies have female board members instead of the laundry list of catastrophes that are destroying this state. Think about who you vote for this upcoming election in CA.

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California has about 25% of the nation's homeless population. It's quite bad and there are complex reasons for it.

One contributing factor is the lovely California weather that makes it much less of a hardship to "sleep rough" than it is in most parts of the continental US.

i cab imagine there are much more lovely weather than in SF, yet it’s the city with the largest number of homeless i’ve ever seen ( and i live in europe).

The San Francisco Bay Area is the only part of the US with a Mediterranean climate.

As I said, there are many factors, weather being just one.

> The San Francisco Bay Area is the only part of the US with a Mediterranean climate.

No, it's not. A significant fraction of California outside of the Bay Area, and some of Oregon and, IIRC, Washington also does.

I stand corrected:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_climate

>and i live in europe

What do you mean by this? Because I live in Europe too and it's rare to see a homeless person, even in the bigger cities.

You should come to Paris then :)

California can't be the only US place where it's warm, there's probably other reasons.

I can't think of any other state that has weather that's as conducive to living outside as CA. Most of the the southwestern states (NM, AZ, West TX) are blistering hot in the summer, and the warm southeastern states get hot and muggy with a crap-ton of rain. No place is as good as CA.

Any state in the sun belt has similar weather.

Not remotely true. California has a unique combination in some parts of the state of mild temperatures combined with low precipitation. Other places with mild temperatures tend to be much, much wetter. Other places with dry weather tend to have more extreme temperatures.

Off the top of my head:

The joke is that San Diego is "72 degrees and sunny" year round. San Diego gets about 10 inches of rain annually. Fresno gets 11 inches. SFBA gets around 20. Average for the nation is 44 inches annually iirc.

If you go someplace dry that's more inland, it's typically blazing hot in summer at a minimum and deserts can have temperature swings between day and night of 30 degrees or more.

I agree the weather's awesome in CA, but it's also pretty fine in AZ, NM, TX, MS, AL, LA, GA and FL. Is there evidence of mass migrations of homeless people to CA from the rest of the U.S.?

Why wouldn't the housing affordability problem in CA be directly contributing to homelessness there?

I have seen articles indicating some states have been known to stick people on a bus and ship them to California.

I run several homeless sites and routinely read r/homeless. A common question is "Where can I go with better weather than where I am currently?"

I spent several years homeless. I was evicted from my apartment in Georgia and walked and accepted rides to cross the country to get back to California. So I basically camped my way across the country.

I'm quite confident I know whereof I speak on this specific detail.

Though just to be clear, I am not suggesting we ship all our homeless there, though it absolutely is true that some portion of the homeless population in California traveled there from elsewhere in some fashion.

The weather in TX is better described as miserably hot in the summer. We don't have the stabilizing influence of an ocean right next door (the Gulf doesn't really help except right at the coast).

If its business environment is so wildly unfriendly shouldn't that have solved the housing prices issue as all the jobs and therefore the desire to relocate should have long since faded?

I don't agree with the law and yet I don't think any of the problems you listed have simple solutions. For example all the ways imaginable to address ridiculous housing prices would seem to negatively effect those who presently own houses who have basically all the wealth. How do you propose to fix THAT.

Few things lag, these things have a long cycle. I come a state in India which used to be richest 60 years ago then we voted in the communists. Now we rank in the bottom five, after all parties trying to out left each other.

People have been saying this about CA at least the last few decades some lag there.

Given how many dysfunctional policies in California are a result of the proposition system I think the people of California only have themselves to blame not the Governor.

For example? Truly, I'm curious as to what the dysfunctional policies you're referring to? Absolutely agree the homelessness and housing are ridiculous. That said, California is something like the 5th largest economy in the world, produces a huge chunk of USAs food, has some of the greatest universities in the world and is home to some of the largest and most powerful companies in the history of humanity (not sure how I feel about that one). Not to say there aren't huge issues but it's not exactly a hellscape here.

I'm not the guy you replied to, but the poster child for this has got to be Prop 13[1] which limits the maximum property taxes on property can increase at 1% of the full cash value as last assessed. Nominally, it prevents old/poor people from being priced out of their homes.

The owner of a home not reassessed since the 50s now worth millions today may be paying a few hundred a year in real estate tax. Corporations have found a variety of loopholes for themselves here, the simplest involve shell corporations[2] and have allowed large and extremely valuable properties to change hands without reassessment robbing the state in billions in revenue.

Even reversal of the policy just for commercial property would produce a massive windfall of much needed capital for the state, to the tune of roughly 8.2-10.2 billion dollars per year[3].

It's honestly one of the worst longstanding pieces of legislation I've ever encountered and one of the big reasons for the massive distortion in the CA housing market.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...

[2] https://financialtransparency.org/how-shell-corporations-und...

[3] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/550356b8e4b02e0b159ae...

Hermitian already mentioned the worst offender.I've lived in New York, Atlanta, Miami and San Francisco. San Francisco is probably the worst place I've ever lived.

> California is something like the 5th largest economy in the world...

California's a big economy. But it's not (at least superficially) outsized relative to other parts of the United States that contain similar populations [0]

[0] https://github.com/RhysU/states/blob/master/README.md

This is virtue-signalling. It's easy to ham-fistedly fix issues that give them publicity while ignoring stuff that needs real work to fix.

You're a moron.

We've banned this account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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