California is booming, but Californians are unhappy | Hacker News Reader

California is booming, but Californians are unhappy

nytimes.com

30 pointsOzzie_osman19 comments

I grew up in San Diego. I decided to stop commuting long distances several years ago and have only taken online jobs or worked in my own startups. For me it has not been easy to maintain a high income like this. But at least I don't have to deal with SoCal traffic to get to work every day. My current startup doesn't make any money and I couldn't afford my own apartment in San Diego anymore and so last year I decided to move across the border to Tijuana.

About 1% of the time the water or electricity doesn't work, but the rest of the time things are pretty great. Seems like my cost of living is about half even though I live right on the beach now. There have only been two shootings in my immediate neighborhood that I know of and those were both parties involved in drugs. And at least 99% or maybe 95% of the time it doesn't even smell bad.

It might be because only a small fraction of mostly out-of-state/-country transplant knowledge workers are living well. Meanwhile, they price nearly everyone else out of the real-estate market and drive up costs-of-living. This leads to janitors and normal people living in their cars because they cannot afford rent or sky-high gas prices ($3.99/gallon vs. $1.99/gallon elsewhere) because they don’t receive livable wages. And also, conservatively, several thousand homeless people living under bridges, along freeway onramp embankments and so on like a dispersed favela of a third-world country. It’s embarrassing that people aren’t treated more humanely in such a ridiculously rich country.

It's supply and demand. During the last decade all new buildings built that I've seen in the sf/bay area are business parks. When both new houses are not built, and we're not building up, yet corporations are allowed to build, you're going to get this kind of inequality.

In Florida, for example, it's common to see new apartment buildings starting at 10 stories tall. In the bay area, it's rare to see an apartment building past 3 stories.

There is massive potential to build up, but communities of home owners who treat their property like an investment are doing everything they can to prevent new real estate. This selfish behavior may benefit them and eventually their kids, but it hurts everyone else.

The irony being that the Democratic party is the party of helping the disadvantaged, yet the selfishness we are experiencing, isn't very in line with the dnc. California is a liberal state, believing odd balls should be treated like human beings, expressing creativity for who people are and embracing that. But, contrary to common belief, California isn't very left wing and it isn't even strongly in line with the democratic party. States on the east coast, like New Jersey, are far more left wing than California, but are less liberal. If you go north to Oregon, it's just as liberal as California, but is a Republican state.

What Californians need most is to end prop 13, or reduce it to some sort of capacity. This way we would be like every other state. Most of our problems would go away if we did that.

> What Californians need most is to end prop 13

How does Prop 13 inhibit new buildings?

Isn’t it an incentive to buy? property taxes on new homes are capped with prop 13

From wikipedia:

Proposition 13 alters the balance of the housing market because it provides disincentives for selling property, in favor of remaining at the current property and modifying or transferring to family members to avoid a new, higher property tax assessment.[36][37]

Proposition 13 reduces property tax revenue for municipalities in California. They are forced to rely more on state funding and therefore may lose autonomy and control. The amount of taxes available to the municipality in any given year largely depends on the number of property transfers taking place. Yet since existing property owners have an incentive to remain in their property and not sell, there are fewer property transfers under this type of property tax system.

California also has high rates of migrants from other countries and states,[38] which has contributed to more demand for housing, and it has low amounts of moderately priced housing due to the increased property tax liability after a sale.[citation needed] In effect, because the different tax treatment makes real estate more valuable to the current owner than to any potential buyer, selling it makes no economic sense.

> corporations are allowed to build

I agree with the basic premise of what you're saying, but, the issue isn't with "corporations are allowed to build" vs "individuals are not" since, for everything but single-family housing (and even sometimes then), corporations are the ones doing the building.

The issue, as I see it, is a lack of building of low-income housing due to a real or perceived (and it's a mix of both) issues that they cause and working against powerful community lobbies in urban/affluent neighborhoods. Doesn't help that some people cry discrimination or segregation of the poor if you suggest to build dense affordable housing far outside the city center and it also doesn't help that we lack the ability to invest in -- or even build on realistic timeframes and for realistic budgets -- the kind of public transit system which would make those kinds of developments work well.

Prop 13 isn’t really the cause of our housing shortage, it’s the refusal of existing residents to support development.

IMO Anthony Weiner’s proposed reforms which mandate higher density zoning near transit hubs is much more promising. Repealing prop 13 would make taxation more fair but is politically infeasible

I wouldn't go as far as to blame the country for California's problems. California has gone far out of its way to do things how it wants. And, somehow, despite being the [1]world's fifth-largest economy, cannot afford to maintain itself without obscenely high taxes that are pushing people to move to neighboring states.

Ultimately, the policies of California (despite the politics leaning very strongly towards the Democrat party) are not helping the people very much. In many ways, the policies just get in people's way and make it harder for an average earner to get by.

[1] https://fortune.com/2018/05/05/california-fifth-biggest-econ...

Federal taxes are still much higher than state taxes. How is the federal government helping the situation?

The role of the federal government isn't to interfere in an individual state's affairs. In fact, if this weren't the case there wouldn't be much reason to have states at all.

California's current situation is actually a very compelling argument in favor of states. If you don't like California's policies, you can move to another state that can have vastly different policies. That wouldn't be true if the federal government just homogenized every state. I shudder to imagine a version of the United States where the entire country runs with the efficiency and policy foresight of California.

I agree, but my point is that federal taxes as disproportionately higher.

With software performance optimization, it's best to focus on the most expensive problems first. A few hundred dollars per quarter for state taxes vs. a few thousand is a massive difference.

Taxes are a broad topic, but it generally comes down to $ in vs value out. Now, in the United States, in general, it's fairly obvious that the citizens aren't getting as much value out as they should, which is a completely valid criticism. However, I would still argue that the federal government is providing more value per dollar than California is, even if it's purely because the federal government does less to interfere with its citizens than the state of California. Once you get to this point in the discussion though, the topic has moved entirely away from where we began.

edit: This would be an interesting topic for analysis, as it's a subject that gets over-simplified for the sake of political expedience. So if anyone has some interesting analysis on the topic that doesn't have too much political bias attached, I'd love to read it!

One thing the FG has not done is to massively invest in repairing/upgrading infrastructure across the country (as China has recently done with its grid). I'd guess that is responsible for the recent demonstrations of CA's crumbling electric grid. Funding for high-speed rail being another example.

This is only one of the obvious outcomes of massive overseas expenditures in decades-long warring. The benefits of those (non-transparent) expenditures are not flowing to our people.

It's the locals who passed Prop 13 and then proceeded to stifle housing development for decades. The latest wave of immigrants aren't to blame here.

If there aren't enough homes and too much demand then there will always be people priced out, the remaining question is who. The same is true for all the finite capacity of regional services. Given that everyone wants a musical chair, we can rest assured that for whatever capacity it shall be filled.

I moved to SoCal from Arizona about 1.5 years ago for a job, and I plan to leave within the next 6 months. The most striking aspect of living here is the incongruity between taxes/state spending and the general despair of the average Californian. Lots of natural beauty here but I can get better quality of life and keep more of my money somewhere else.

Where are you moving to? Transfer or new job?

New job, likely back to AZ since my industry is booming there too, and cost of living is much lower. Also considering WA because family.

http://archive.is/hjSkn

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