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But we have air conditioning. Every place has air conditioning. And it run's constantly. But still my power bill is just a fraction of what it was in California.
From late fall through early spring the weather is very California-like: cool and crisp in the morning and warm and dry in the afternoon.
I lived in the SF bay area for over a decade, and when employed by the tech industry and spending all my free time outdoors it was very worthwhile.
But whenever I stopped working in the lucrative positions there, the math stopped making sense, even spending all my time outside.
I'm still in California, but a much cheaper part: Joshua Tree. Bought a sizable property in cash, my cost of living is very low and I can still access all the excellent California produce and the coast is only a ~2 hour drive away.
People tend to only talk about the most expensive pockets of CA as if it's representative for the entire state. There's a lot of more rural parts of CA that are very affordable, still beautiful, and not even that far from the ocean.
Do you really need to be explained all the reasons California is a desirable vacation destination for the entire world?
Living there without spending your time outside is missing the entire point.
Many people live there just for the tech industry, and simultaneously complain about the high cost of living. Well, if you spend all your time at the keyboard indoors, you should shift to remote work and leave the state. Because you're paying to live in the funnest place in the nation, don't blame the state for not taking advantage of it.
The board chair was for many years was Don McLeroy. He is a dentist without any particular educational pedigree. What he had going for him was zeal to promote the cause, nothing more.
It wasn't just science books affected, of course. History books cut out Jefferson to make room for Reagan and Phyllis Shlafly. When you are far to either side, even centrist information looks biased. The SBOE believed the textbooks had terrible liberal bias and needed to be fixed. If you are an American student and have textbooks, they are far from liberal.
Pasadena though? Absolutely.
Let me tell you something about human nature, people like to hang out with people that look like them (and animals in the wild do this too). It's natural, they have similar culture, and therefore similar interests, it's easier to have a conversion if you come from a similar background as someone else.
I have been to Texas a few times, a few different cities, and anecdotally I noticed it is no different from the Bay Area: Whites generally hangout with Whites, Blacks hang out with Blacks, Indians with Indians, Asians with Asians , etc..
It's not racism, it's just human nature.
I'm currently living in Houston, working as a SWE, and can attest to the pros of living here. Regarding your concerns, the city is quite demographically diverse from people of all walks of life. Summers do get hot and humid, but nothing unbearable. The winters are more than tolerable (its currently 68 degrees outside) as well.
In the Bay Area we have the following people: white, black, indian, vietnamese, chinese, korean, latinx, middle eastern, russian, polish, european, british, etc.
Whites are a minority at many public schools in the Bay Area..and that is normal here. Yet people on HN love to complain about lack of diversity?
Cons of Houston:
-Traffic is just as bad as the Bay Area if not worse, no?
-Weather
-Far less tech jobs
To me, that's really really broken.
I'd love to live somewhere "purple", where people of all opinions coexist peacefully. Do places like that still exist?
I would guess Vermont, NH, or Maine still may have places with the same purple politics.
If by conservative you mean something akin to capitalistic, and unabashedly out to make money, from the housewife to the CEO, then yes.
If you mean something else, then it really isn't that cut and dry.
Everyone (a very large majority) is from somewhere else, and most came to Houston not because it was some kind of Shangri-La, but because of the opportunities.
Plus, for what it's worth, Houston is one of, if not the, most ethnically diverse city in the US. (Google it so I don't have to provide biased sources.)
> Houston is one of, if not the, most ethnically diverse city in the US.
It's worth pointing out that this is in no small part because Houston is affordable.
I don't care for that kind of sprawl and would prefer other ways of building 'enough' to be affordable ( https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-... ) but still, it is affordable, and there are a lot of opportunities.
They had a mayor who was one of the first openly gay mayors of a major US city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annise_Parker
It's not the kind of place I want to live (I prefer an order of magnitude of around 100K), but when I actually learned something about Houston, I realized that I had some stereotypes that were not accurate.
This is an under appreciated point. Texas in general, has some of the most organically diverse places I’ve been to. Low taxes, low regulation, and low housing costs have done a lot to attract a diverse set of people from the rest of the country, and from other countries. It’s a place where people of color are building families, businesses, and thriving.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/...
But look up San Francisco's racial makeup vs Houston's and... you can make the case that there's at least a place in the same city for a lot more people in Houston.
They're practically the same if you swap the black and asian populations. This makes a lot of sense: Asian immigrant populations came from the west coast, usually SF. Black populations started in the southeast, and its much easier to migrate from Mississippi to Texas than Mississippi to San Francisco.
As someone who moved between red and blue states mid-high-school I assure you the blue states do just as good a job neutering your kids' education. They just skip different chapters of the history and science books than the red states.
Austin is as blue as they come (and way less of the neoliberalism you see in SV). Houston from what I can tell has become much more liberal too (partly because a large influx of Katrina refugees).
Hot take - with all of the migration to Texas, this state will be blue in the next 10 years.
The only "conservative" things you find in those areas is (1) big trucks (2) guns (3) tobacco (4) sports. Not much different than what you might see in rural CA.
I think even suburban California culture is much more similar to Texas culture than it is to SV culture.
It makes sense. There’s a lot of shared history: Central American cultural influence/heritage, long history of intense and local economic booms and busts (Oil in SoCal and Texas, gold in NorCal), fiercely independent political history. It’s produced an interesting mix of conservative and progressive ideas. The only thing that California has that’s unique on top of that base mindset is environmental conservatism; because California is jaw droppingly gorgeous and Texas isn’t.
Totally agree with the point others have made, that Texas is a lot more blue than its gerrymandered districts let on. Similarly, California is much more “red” outside of the urban bubbles. They’ve a lot more in common than cultural memes would lead you to believe.
I grew up and lived as an adult in central and rural California (and the Bay Area) before moving to Texas.
I thought I was pretty conservative, like many in rural California.
But coming to Texas it was shocking how liberal I was. Not in anything specific, but in the overall. Texans and California’s government and voter just don’t even think about the same kinds of things. What is perfectly reasonable in California is completely foreign in Texas and vice versa.
The big example: the taxpayer. In California I never thought about them. Who’s going to pay for this great new law or public policy? In California we never ask. In Texas, everyone knows: the taxpayer.
No conservative one in Texas is going to support a law, no matter how good, that the taxpayer isn’t going to want to pay for.
Somewhere issues of how government should be run, how taxes should work, were also tied to issues like abortion and gay marriage.
And will have all the problems of California, New York, etc. in another 10-20 years after that.
Everyone complaining about policies in California make it sound like Texas is perfect. I'm pretty sure it could use a lot of improvements on its policies. There are some large factors that have had a disproportionate effect on the housing problems California faces and one of those is Prop 13 so it is much better to focus on avoiding repeating those mistakes than making general blanket statements.
Prop 13 has effectively created a vicious cycle of escalating property values.
Sure, but without any numbers, this is simply a just-so story. House prices in Seattle metro have shot through the roof in past 5-6 years, despite Seattle not having Prop 13 law. If house prices can demonstrably go up a lot in a place with no Prop 13-like law, but otherwise rather similar to California when it comes to attitudes towards what kind of houses are allowed to be built, it stands to reason that Prop 13 is unlikely to be main factor in dire California's housing situation.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-re...
Humans are really good at crafting narratives explaining complex and uncertain reality. However, just because something sounds superficialy plausible, doesn't mean it is true: it is usually easy to craft an alternative theory, just as plausible as the one at hand.
For example, the narrative of Prop 13 being the root of all California's housing problem very much depends on exactly how much it affects the decision making. It could be a lot, it could be a little, but without knowing exactly (or at least approximately), we're simply in the dark. Maybe it's not Prop 13, but environmental activists running amok? Maybe it's a cartel in the construction industry colluding to keep the construction prices up? Without putting numbers on these, you can't tell which of these has significant impact, and which is irrelevant.
I live in Seattle, where the attitudes of residents and attitude to building are similar, but we have no Prop 13. How is it possible?
Even if there is a bright future ahead, people will limit change. This is in large part because the benefits and costs of change are not uniformly distributed, and when people have a valuable status quo, change represents significant risk.
Sure, Texas could start imposing an income tax, and raise the sales tax rate, but that would be a huge political hurdle to jump in order to be able to enact CA's terrible housing policies.
EDIT - To be fair. Many of the geographical issues with Chicago, LA, SF and NYC are about being land/water locked on an adjacent side(s). Less of an issue in TX.