Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

Fuck California and fuck the Bay Area.

Just a bold statement. I wish for change but i don't see it happening. I love the weather, love the environment and sometimes love the people here but after living here for a number of years, I am started to not understand it. I pay pretty high taxes to live here. We have the most embarrassing property tax laws that include business property. I walk to work and walk through so many homeless camps filled with poop, trash and needles. Many of our communities have failing roads, some of the worst I have experienced in the world. The roads have started groups such as "pot hole vigilantes". In most of the communities I never see a police presence. We say we are green and love the environment but we have made little progress on public transportation since the 70s. I mean hell, we cannot even get a quick rollout of new BART cars. So we want to hate on building new roads but we have no new public transportation. I am starting to run out of reasons to participate in California.

> Fuck California and fuck the Bay Area.

I'm Californian (7th generation) born and raised and I had to leave for the aforementioned reasons, I spent a summer in Sunnyvale and I just couldn't cope with the dreariness of it all, (this is also about the time I became really fascinated with the Cyberpunk genre, because I felt it had already happened there).

If I'm honest the Bay area feels the least like the California I knew and love(d). I'm originally from SoCal, but my family is from NorCal (Santa Cruz and San Jose) and its just not worth it. The costs, the traffic, the taxes, the headache of just being somewhere that shutdowns so early but feels like its never dormant. I used to go to San Jose in the 90s and the feel and the vibe of the place is night and day to present-day.

I've traveled all over Europe and lived in Hawaii for a while, and the World is much bigger than California. The one thing California does have above over every other place is the weather, and that's debatable as I thought NorCal weather was far too muggy and sticky for my preference and I lived in Coast in SoCal, and the diverse cultural environment. In OC I can honestly immerse myself in Vietnamese, Laotion, Chinese, Japanese, Korean centric towns within a 45 miles radius all in the same day. Its amazing if you're into food culture, LA is even better, San Diego less so but still good.

Where as if I lived in Germany or Italy, while they have their own regional 'cuccina tipica' it was just not the same at all. And that's what I missed the most when away from California, everything else I can cope with.

With that said, I hate the BART, its gross and a relic of terrible system. It was cool to see it from afar, but having to go from Sunnyvale to the East Bay, to SFO on a regular basis... I'll never see why anyone would do that instead of ride a motorcycle or an EV and drive in the carpool for free if you value your time ad health. I got stuck in SFO on a Sunday for 13 hours because I forgot the BART stopped early.

> In most of the communities I never see a police presence.

An SFPD cop told me years ago that they won't get involved because of social media. Social media outrage doesn't care about context, and their job and pension is on the line, so it's just better to do nothing unless someone's in real danger.

Beyond that, the SF DAs haven't prosecuted petty crimes in years. In fact, the new one is not only not going to prosecute, but is saying he wants to simply pay back people for their broken car windows.[1]

It's really going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

[1] - https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-auto-burglary-e...

Just remember to adjust your voting habits when you inevitably move somewhere else.

This is the thing that takes so much effort to tell people: if the place you live in is crippled by politics, but you agree with most of your neighbours on who to vote for (the same people for often a decade at a time), then it's time to look inside a bit.

I have met many people who complain non-stop about things, while not being able to name the politician they are voting for in a local or regional election, or even a politician they just voted for in a recent election.

For clarity the people voting for policies to restrict housing are not the people moving away because they can't afford housing.

There's a class of people that own housing that pay very little property tax because they bought years ago and are protected by Prop 13.

These people vote to prevent building anything because they benefit both from insane house prices and property tax protection.

All the new people live with a handful of roommates and still pay $1400-$2200 in rent.

Fuck Prop 13. It blows my mind how many long time California people don't even realize prop 13 covers many business properties.

For me the individual housing protection is worse than business.

Primarily because the individual housing protection is what causes the incentive problem where people prevent housing from being built.

Companies would benefit from more plentiful inexpensive housing.

My dream bill would be a prop that requires local communities to build X amount of housing (where X is some large number possibly determined in part by the spread between property tax payment and property FMV) every year.

Failure to meet X means that all property owners see a 10% increase in their property tax.

This happens every year with an upper bound on the property tax being the current tax for the FMV of their property.

This is basically impossible to actually pass, but it's what I would do if I was king of Palo Alto, either build the housing or pay the actual cost of your policy.

Maybe one day SB50 will pass - at least that'd be something.

looks like you are describing a specific part of 'bay area' . lots of burbs don't have these issues.

Why should we pay a heavy price in wasted time and pollution to commute to/from a suburb just so we can avoid the filth and decrepitude?

Even Mountain View has these issues. Not to as near of a degree as say SF, Oakland, or Berkeley, but almost all of the above I've witnessed in Mountain View.

So, I wouldn't say OP is describing a specific part. It's rather pervasive all over.

I mean I am but I am not? A lot of the people in the safe "burbs" are commuting somewhere. But even then I feel like I could count far fewer safe burbs than what I described above.

Anyway, just because there are some safe burbs does not mean what I describe is wrong. Our roads suck, we have a backwards property tax, its expensive to live in a decent school district and I generally feel pretty unsafe here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com