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Comment by pbuzbee | Hacker News Reader

I feel like it's only going to get worse. California has a good number of problems: housing costs, traffic, wildfires, homelessness, ... and the high tax rate you pay for the privilege of enjoying them. But I haven't seen California take meaningful steps to solve any of these. We're still in the stage of "problems are getting worse", and any solutions will take a long time to materialize.

I grew up in California. It's still a great place to live if you're rich or if you bought property in a good location a long time ago, but if neither of those are true, you're going to have a huge uphill battle. Most people in my millennial friend groups, including me, have all talked about how we'd like to leave. We're mostly still here because our families are here and good jobs are easier to find. But each year, one by one I see people I know flee to other states.

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Most of California's problems go back to lack of housing and opposition to building more. Everyone wants to live in Cali for nice weather and jobs. If you stop people from building more housing your property value just keeps rising.

Property costs are high because NIMBY blocking denser housing. Traffic is bad because housing density is too low for the population. Homelessness is bad because houses are too expensive.

Wildfires and earthquakes are the only problems not self inflicted

> Wildfires and earthquakes are the only problems not self inflicted

Massive wildfires (vs small distributed fires) are the result of the policy framework that (a) prohibits preventative controlled burns (b) requires immediate containment of any new fire. The old (more flammable) undergrowth never has a chance to burn off and free up the space for (less flammable) new generation.

As a result CA is one of the most polluting states in the nation as far as co2 emissions https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-wildfires-ca...

Erm, no. There's a carbon cycle.

Trees trap carbon. When they die, trees release carbon. Unless you bury dead trees underground (e.g. as paper, furniture, etc., in deep landfills), in terms net amount of carbon capture, there's no difference between a massive forest fire, periodic controlled burns, decay, etc.

They differ in time cycles. Even a sequoia will eventually die and release its carbon back into the atmosphere.

There's this myth that forests somehow reduce carbon in the atmosphere. Left to themselves, they store carbon, but they can't capture carbon. They're carbon-neutral. If you cut them down and release the carbon, you have a one-time emission. If you plant new ones, you have a one-time carbon capture.

The only real net change to CO2 comes from:

1) Extracting dinosaur-era carbon, and releasing it.

2) How we handle our waste. Ironically, composting releases all the plant carbon eventually, while burying it underground stores some carbon away from the atmosphere.

This. The most climate-friendly way to handle forests is to actually cut parts of them down regularly (in a sustainable pace, leaving enough unaffected areas for wildlife), and use the wood for building houses and other elements which stay intact long-term.

More buildings should be constructed from wood, less from concrete, which itself causes major co2 emissions.

> there's no difference between a massive forest fire, periodic controlled burns,

I believe the way it's performed elsewhere is a controlled burn after the older trees had been felled. The burn is for the undergrowth.

This strikes me as a reasonable argument. I wonder why it doesn't work for agriculture, which is regularly criticized for e.g. the carbon in livestock feed?

The fertilizer is made from fossil fuel gas.

I agree, I do think building more housing would help. However, my point is that I don't see that happening anytime soon. We've only seen light forms of the policy changes this would require, and many haven't even passed. There's a lot of opposition to these policy changes, and they have money on their side. And even when (if) they do change, it will take some time for them to have an effect.

My age group is at the age of looking to put roots down and have children. For many of us it makes more sense to leave than to wait 10-20 years and hope things get better.

> For many of us it makes more sense to leave than to wait 10-20 years and hope things get better.

But most of you don't leave because of family who live in CA - the very people who prevent any fixes to the situation, in the first place.

I’m not sure I understand your statement that traffic is bad because housing density is too low for the population.

Certainly just increasing density with no other controls just increases traffic congestion.

The best approach would be increasing density while decreasing reliance on personal transportation.

https://www.transformca.org/transform-blog-post/our-take-gre...

Increasing density will naturally decrease reliance on personal motor-vehicles because more journeys become walkable.

I disagree. And I’m thinking of California in particular here. There is FAR too much reliance on personal transportation. It has little capacity to support “just increasing density”. There’s nothing natural about it. It will take a very serious planning effort to transform the state.

> Increasing density will naturally decrease reliance on personal motor-vehicles because more journeys become walkable.

Only if you don't need to go to work. Which is working wonderfully in pandemic era. I can pretty much walk anywhere I could need in terms of stores and services.

But jobs, unless you work in one of those stores or services, are of course far away, not in the middle of denser housing. Tech company campus won't be between housing rows.

My town has built tons of housing over the last two decades. Offices are still in the industrial campuses farther away and all that new housing means tons of new local traffic. Uncomfortable but true.

It used to be 2 minutes and one stoplight to get to the highway. Now it is 7 stoplights and up to 15 minutes to get to the highway (from the same house).

It would be wonderful if for every new housing block there was an adjacent office complex block, so most people can walk to work, but that's not how it goes. So in practice, yes, increased housing density just means tons new traffic to fight through.

Hopefully I can just remain work from home forever!

This is probably more true than any time in the last 30 years iff remote work takes hold. Previously, it wasn’t near as likely that all workers in a household could for a 40 year career live within an easy walk of their work.

Now it’s possible (maybe) for many more people (although they’ll need larger housing units).

> personal motor-vehicles

Fancy way to say 'car'.

More precise because it includes trucks and such

Forcing low density housing causes sprawl. Look at European cities which generally have cores 5-10x denser than Cali. Most of them have no such traffic problems because you don't have the whole population travelling 30 miles on roads every day

Yes. But California isn’t Europe. There’s a million factors that led to California, or America as a whole, sprawl. Probably, primarily, land is plentiful and cheap. When it is no longer possible to get cheap land then density will naturally follow.

Take New York as an example. Limited land area. Lots of money. Drove up density and has a low reliance on cars and has an ok public transportation system.

Everywhere else it’s just cheap as hell to buy land and build. California is getting to the point now that some areas are expensive and density is increasing. But its also easy for people to just move somewhere else still

Think miles per person per day. More dense means everything is closer.

Dense housing is only dense housing, if people still need to commute half an hour or more to their workplaces dense housing is only creating traffic issues.

Transport infrastructure (roads, buses, railroads, trams), housing, everyday service infrastructure (supermarkets, medical services, restaurants, haircutters) and employment infrastructure needs to be planned holistically or you're just shifting between problems - in the case of only going for denser housing, you'll lower homelessness a bit but get traffic issues in return.

And on top of that, city planning needs to take entrenched interests into account. Often enough NIMBYist complaints are founded in real fears of exploding traffic or a loss in property value - but these can be counteracted and compensated, if one is willing to.

Why can’t you have dense office, retail and housing space (can even be in the same building)?

Dense industrial areas are hard

> Why can’t you have dense office, retail and housing space (can even be in the same building)?

I'd love that too, but it's not happening. FAANG isn't building their new HQ campus into the first floor of a new apartment complex. It'll be where it'll be and we'll have to fight through ever increasing traffic to get there.

Dense housing naturally causes businesses to move closer. I don't know of any cities where a dense urban core isn't also filled with businesses and very walkable. It will naturally happen if they allow dense housing

NIMBYism regarding more housing really only pertains to metropolitan/urban areas. How come the rest of the state can’t build housing consummate to the demand?

I live in a socal suburb and there is plenty of nimbyism. Any new developments take years or get stalled indefinitely as all the nimbys who already own their home show up to complain and block everything at every turn. Because they don't want the traffic to get worse, or they don't want the community to "lose its charm" or whatever else they can think of.

People want to live near jobs, services and amenities, and diversity of those can only be achieved at scale.

You could build a million homes in the middle of nowhere and you’d wind up with a million empty houses.

Many people also want to live in large houses or apartments, which is extremely expensive anywhere with high population density.

Many people also want to win the lotto.

Even if people are saying this, what they actually do is quite different. People in CA moving out are generally moving into other metropolitan areas or smaller cities. They're not living some kind of Stardew Valley fantasy in the fields.

That was the major selling point of the CA high-speed rail when Governor Brown originally put it on the ballot - everyone would live in one of those ever-expanding residential suburbs and then take a quick train ride into a busy urban area.

Employment. Rural areas don't have much to offer in terms of jobs other than backbreaking farm labor, and Internet access is usually way too underbuilt to support full remote work.

NIMBY is everywhere in California. For being such a liberal state it's crazy how local governments are obsessed with stopping new and denser housing from being built

Everybody says that but I have never seen a study indicating increased housing availability reduces housing price. Where I live, growth rate 22% decade over decade for the last three decades, housing prices increase directly proportional to the increase of housing quantity. That is until an area is filled at which point housing values will either skyrocket or flatten based upon desirability.

> That is until an area is filled

Thats the issue with your approach. Supply and demand will cause housing in an area to be knocked down and replaced with denser housing. Townhouses, apartments, skyscrapers eventually.

In some places this natural replacement cycle is feircly resisted and local governments are bent to the will of incumbents.

HN leans heavily liberal but this is one place where conservative "small government" lack of regulations works better. In liberal areas local residents will co-opt the systems for making local regulations to protect their own investments. In conservative areas it's more difficult to NIMBY your way to halt development.

I agree with most of this, but "Local control" of housing of this sort is generally a conservative phenomenon. However, the bigger effect isn't typical left-right politics but instead the class-divide of homeowners versus renters.

Self-identified liberals are more receptive to nearby apartments than self-identified conservatives.

But the bigger effect is homeowners versus those in apartments. People in apartments are far more supportive of new apartments, and homeowners are less supportive, and this effect is bigger than the political divide.

You’ve hit the nail on the head here. The desirable parts of CA are located typically along the coast with geographies which don’t allow unlimited expansion (lots of hills/mountains and water). No matter how many houses we build, the desire to live here for the weather/amenities/economy will continue to outstrip supply. Plus, it’s not just housing which would need to expand, it’s transportation, water, etc. There are no easy answers but the solution is not simply “build more housing”.

IMO it's not true. If it wasn't for rampant NIMBY in Cali developers would gladly replace low density housing with skyscrapers.

There's less space but you can always build up. But none of the Cali cities allow this. That's why despite California's huge population you don't see any cities with skyscrapers and traffic is so bad.

Building upwards also solves the transportation issues.

Look at places like Tokyo and Singapore in comparison to Cali coasts. They're are all space constrained but these places managed to fit 20X the people in the same space and they still don't have Cali level traffic problems

You could be right about vertical construction lessening the transportation burden, but there’s still the water issue.

As an aside, I came across a Tokyo density map overlaid on a map of CA (Greater Tokyo Area, not just the city of Tokyo) and it would be like taking the entire population of CA and condensing it into the city of Los Angeles.

What water issue? People are not the problem when it comes to water, the problems are industry, agriculture, large lawns, and old construction.

Water usage in my small, coastal, mountain constrained town has decreased even as population has increased and number of connections to the water system have increased.

I’d be interested to see your sources and learn how increasing CA’s population will lead to less water usage.

Should have included those, apologies!

Check out page two of this PDF for the statewide picture; our use statewide urban water usage is going down, from a peak in 1995, even as our population increases:

https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/...

I first became aware of this when lots of people were complaining about water use for a new apartment complex that included below-marker-rate units, as it seemed preposterous that <100 new apartments could have any significant impact, especially when the alternative is for the same people to live further out in bigger places that need more watering of lawns.

Turns out that our city's urban water use had decreased quite a bit, despite a slowly growing population, as shown on page 25 of this PDF:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20484267-2020-annual...

There's a lot of really bad and environmentally counterproductive thought from the 1970s that needs to be fact checked. People don't require a fixed amount of resources, they require a fixed amount of services, and we have gotten better and better at providing those same services with far less resources.

This is the same as the hard energy versus soft energy debate from around the same time period. We don't care about total energy available to a person, we care about the services that the energy provides. So things like greater efficiency through insulating homes, switching to more efficient lights, etc, doesn't actually result in more energy usage.

The same surprising (to some) result applies for water, apparently! Swapping out all those old, bad water fixtures, and being better about lawn watering, makes a huge impact.

Thanks for the reply! More efficient water tech and less lawn makes sense and I look forward to drilling down into the details.

> Wildfires and earthquakes are the only problems not self inflicted

PG&E?

But the funny thing is, the California "countryside" is languishing because of a lack of people/jobs

But instead of going there people prefer the big established cities elsewhere

Someone else said it, but their comment is dead: California is bordered by a state with no sales tax to the north, and no income tax to the east. I would love to move to a more "rural" area if my company ever adopts remote work, but there is no financial advantage to rural CA over, say, rural any-other-state. If I'm going to move to the countryside, far away from my job, to remote work, I'm going to keep driving the moving van to at least cross a border, to avoid all that extra expense.

I've never lived there, but I bet the east and west sides of lake Tahoe have similar quality of life, similar amenities, similar schools, but living just a few km across a border could mean you keep thousands more per year of your compensation.

A lack of jobs is usually not considered a positive thing when looking for a place to move to

True. And it's a bit of a catch 22 because even if you have your job, the city might not be good in terms of infrastructure, resources, schools, etc

Any particular countryside town you’d recommend for someone working from home?

"But I haven't seen California take meaningful steps to solve any of these"

Yeah, the thing is there are political and regulatory efforts to deal with these, but most people don't hear/read about them, unless they are super wonky.

So the people who tend to get involved are the wealthy people who benefit financially from the outcome, and the occasional non profit. The latter is where you can actually make an impact for good.

Check out https://cayimby.org/ and take part in their campaigns/petitions, and tell your friends to do so.

They have a great track record in terms of housing bills, and an associated organization that is suing communities that are blocking affordable housing.

If you rely on nonprofits to solve homelessness, you are essentially allowing a nonprofit homelessness industry to exist and funding it with tax dollars.

Thus the massive rent seeking in San Francisco, for example, where the city spends $852 million a year for 8,000 homeless (https://www.hoover.org/research/only-san-francisco-61000-ten...), funding a massive homeless-industrial complex.

Vancouver has similar issues.

Mental health, housing and drugs.

Up and down the west coast.

I mean in a way that's fair. The way to solve homelessness is to provide housing, QED, not to have homelessness nonprofits.

It's impossible to solve homelessness with homelessness nonprofits, government programs for the homeless, as it's an outgrowth of factors like a high cost of living, generational poverty,the working poor lacking a living wage where they can save for emergencies, a lack of social welfare and health care programs, abusive homes, etc.

You have new people who were living paycheck to paycheck who are going to become homeless. Happens all the time.

You have queer and trans youths running away from abusive homes.

So lots of people being added regularly to the homeless population. And of course chronic homeless... because it becomes harder to get back on your feet the longer you are homeless.

The thing that really kills me, and I'm not exactly a marxist or anything, but there is absolutely enough money in America to solve homelessness, enough land to build on and enough money to build the homes. There is enough food to feed everyone (and 1 in 5 US families report not having enough food during covid 19).

We just don't distribute our resources well. The already wealthy got richer during covid 19, while many other Americans slipped deeper into debt/poverty, etc.

So yeah, we are left with our tax dollars funding these issues, because the system is set up to the benefit of some people, and to the detriment of others. And that's not just the way the world is, not some natural state of things, it's how our institutions and culture and laws and financial systems have been made in the US, and how they have been maintained and advanced by interested parties.

It doesn't have to be this way.

These are solvable problems, difficult but managible, which is why I encourage people to actually get involved, write letters, donate, organize and lobby, etc.

Agree.

It's evident that the free market has failed to house people appropriately, and also evident that it would be cheaper and easier to solve homelessness with state-provided housing first solutions.

Not taking this action is "allowing a homelessness industry to exist".

There are people working towards that (and doing so thoughtfully, not just to segregate poor folks into projects)

https://eastbayforeveryone.org/socialhousing/

Or charity

To me it feels like that’s why it’s expensive. Either that or it just very coincidentally started getting extremely expensive at the same time housing segregation and home-loan discrimination were banned federally (1968 and 1974 respectively. People ask “WTF happened in 1971?” (https://wtfhappenedin1971.com) like they never took a high school “american history” class.

In my 20s, I was stunned to learn that my city's founding fathers got rich by developing land stolen from immigrant Japanese farmers. In my 30s, I learned about sunset laws, another large factor explaining segregation.

Growing up, it had been explained that racism was what other people did. Certainly not us.

Everyone's the hero of their own story.

Is the answer that the US left the gold standard and switched to completely fiat currency?

Or the US ended the trade embargo with China?

Or Walt Disney World opened in Florida?

There are several other general policy changes and trends that are far more relevant to housing.

With the passage of the Fair Housing Act, cities embarked upon thorough downzonings to prevent any new construction and "preserve neighborhood character" by not allowing more affordable forms of housing like townhomes and condos.

Prior to the downzonings, zoning capacity was very free, there's a great graph of LA's zoned capacity versus population over time, and it starts decreasing from many many multiples of population, and as population rises it falls to barely more than population. This sort of extremely tight constraint on housing, allowing it only in very certain areas, and in particular only if there is no small subset of homeowners that oppose it, is a huge change from the past.

You can also see similar evidence pretty much all over the Bay Area too. A six story apartment building in the Sunset may exist now, but could never be build now because of downzoning. You'll find lots of older duplexes in some parts of the Bay Area, similarly outlawed now.

This sort of planning trend wasn't limited to California by any means, and the Levittowns of suburban development embraced a development style of having nearly all land "built out," a state of regulation so that nobody with slightly less money could move in because apartments or duplexes were allowed.

We outlawed segregation so all those people who wanted it immediately realized they were wrong, racism disappeared, and we all lived Happily Ever After. Or that’s the way the Disney version goes anyway.

It was decimalisation all along!

That wasn't covered in any of my public school classes. Offhand, none of the teachers for history ever covered past WW-II. None of the material in the books (I read ahead) covered anything during the 70s or beyond either... though the district I grew up in did have some really old books for the time (over a decade old, and no dedicated class for 'recent' history).

> But I haven't seen California take meaningful steps to solve any of these.

Based upon comments I have seen on HN California deliberately does not want to solve many of those problems. Expensive social polices cost more money which means higher taxes, which may or may not provide the intended result irrespective of increased price.

As a better more precise example of that phenomenon look at the city of Austin which has many policies, funding concerns, and results comparable to large California cities despite being the capital of a large deep red state. Compare the Austin experience, in numbers, to other major metros in the same state.

There is only one party, the Property party, with two wings: Democrat and Republican. - Gore Vidal

California doesn't care about anyone who isn't rich. (I'm politically ambivalent and non-participatory.) It's the neoliberals (the Clinton lowercase democrats who emulated Republican laissez-faire social darwinism) who let CA become an unequal society and helped along by Reagan Republicans. (The progressives are the group who later became the "true liberals" after the neoliberals stole and bent the uppercase Liberal moniker.)

PS: Heya ATX from I-35 and 5th. I moved to ATX from CIC/SJC/MTV in late 2020 because my mom couldn't financially live in Paradise anymore, or take the smoke and PSPS power outages. Unfortunately, all of the worst of Californians who made it terrible are moving here too. I prefer the original ATX hippie/bike mechanic/entrepreneur/tatted/skater/cool friendly people, not these kidult, a/anti-social, rude, fake, yuppie, ignorant, selfish ahole office jobber transplants who are clueless about what makes ATX culture or the plight of the tent city homeless under I-35. The yuppies I mentioned comprise most of my apt complex, and like stockbrokers, they take more meth and coke than the homeless do.. they bust out the hard drugs, and I leave. I tried being friendly with the neighbors, but they're not people I would be friends with or even want to be acquainted with... they're uncool like posers.

> There is only one party, the Property party, with two wings: Democrat and Republican. - Gore Vidal

So enlightening from a person who owned Italian and Hollywood Hills villas while saying this.

'Property for me, not for thee'

I agree. The worse part is that at Federal level all tech bro are considered rich end up paying ton of taxes along with CA taxes, without any possibility to deduct anything because, you know, as long as you work in tech, you are rich by definition. I work in tech, I earn very good money, but can't afford to buy a home. I am planning to leave anyway, so at this point I don't really care much. But CA, along with its taxes, crazy regulations and nimby have made CA impossible to live for normal people. CA is for rich, period.

Exactly. I grew up in LA, and my parents bought a house for 50K in the 70s, but that same house today is ~700K. Just getting the down payment for a house that price would take a long time.

$50,000 in 1970 is worth $350,000 in 2021 dollars.

So in reality the house has doubled in price.

And I guess what we think are great salaries in the tech industry today, were salaries of a postman or a factory worker back then?

A small section of the total workforce has had a massive salary bump due to a severe shortage.

Not sure what that's got to do with anything we're talking about.

My grandparents bought their house on the SJC - Los Gatos border for $30k in 1968. It sold in 2019 for $1.4M.

That's what piggyback second mortgages are for. There are also subsidized loans for first-time buyers in the US called FHA loans that allow 3.5% to 10% down payments.

> $30k in 1968. It sold in 2019 for $1.4M.

and the same $30k invested in the S&P 500 in 1968 would have earned you 186x - or $5,580,000 (using http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm as a guide to calculate returns).

And yet, nobody bats an eye that this amazing returns of stocks, and continues to complain that housing prices are too high today, when it was "cheap" in the past. But was it really cheap in the past?

> > $30k in 1968. It sold in 2019 for $1.4M.

> and the same $30k invested in the S&P 500 in 1968 would have earned you 186x

OPs grandparents would have a difficult time living under a stock certificate.

Housing is to live in, can't compare it to stocks. Unless you plan to be stock-rich but homeless.

But you can't live inside stocks. House is not just investment.

Inelastic demand items: housing.. like water, food, heating.

I guess my grandparents could've squatted in the Santa Cruz mountains for a while and kept saving to buy stocks. ;-)

But I don’t need stocks in order to survive. I do need shelter though.

As long as housing is seen as an investment it’s not going to be affordable.

you don't need to own property to live there - you can rent.

Buying and owning property will always be an investment. If this investment is worth it (aka, it has outsized returns), then it can not be affordable.

> you don't need to own property to live there - you can rent.

Look up rents in the 60s in Los Gatos vs. rents recently to see what a terrible idea that would've been for those people.

I’m gonna go ahead and guess rising prices also means higher rents

They bought it using the GI Bill loan assistance program. They didn't have anywhere near $30k in savings.

But what was their income in the 70s?

More than 700/50x less

All those problems get better as the population declines.

I dont think wild-fires and homelessness gets better with less people. The latter gets a lot worse even, by increasing general pop/homelessness.

This is the biggest asshole response to real problems that I see Californians say all the time.

Maybe I just know too many assholes – but there has to be a better answer to “people are fleeing California for legitimate reasons” than “good riddance.”

Have you considered that it is not "good riddance", but an observation that as the population declines the housing problem is decreasing until it will go away?

Population growth is a real problem, we are living in an finite system called planet Earth. With 1/4 of the world population everyone would live better - less pollution, 4 times more resources per capita, etc. Imagine California with 10-15 million inhabitants, no homeless people, enough water for everybody.

The problem isn’t total population, its population density. Too much is bad and too little is bad. You could change the total all you want but if everyone decides to live in the same place then you’re stuck with the same problems.

I would say the reverse: low population rural areas are great, and high density cities are great, but suburban mid-density is the absolute worst of all worlds. It creates massive traffic, consumes unbelievable amounts of land with roads and environmentally destructive lawns, is super high-carbon per person with no way to add effective transit or amenities. It leaves people trapped in homes that they can't leave for any daily errand or commute without hopping in a car, which is terrible for people's health, and as we age it leaves us even more stranded because cars are not good for accessibility. Kids can't play outside on their own because of constant fear of cars, and as they grow the need constant taxiing around town to do any sort of activity or get to and from school. Schools themselves become enormous parking lots twice a day as kids are dropped off and picked up in what has to be the most ridiculous form of transit every conceived: massive SUVs weighing tons, spewing brake dust and exhaust into the lungs of the tiny princes and princesses being chauffeured one by one to their schools.

There is no redeeming the car-dependent suburban style of city planning. Commuter rail suburbs are better, rural life is better small towns are better, urban life is better. But our cars are killing us and we need to look beyond them for a sustainable and healthy future. We will not and do not need to eliminate these places, but we do need to allow transformation.

> Population growth is a real problem, we are living in an finite system called planet Earth. With 1/4 of the world population everyone would live better

First half is true, second half ignorant. Your life is better because somewhere out there are half a dozen poor people mining resources and building goods for you, for a tiny fraction of your income.

I am living in that country where poor people mine resources for others to live good, so I know what I am writing about. My family is from a mountain area where timber and cow farms were the only resources they lived on, now we can barely get enough wood for maintain the buildings because the demand is so big that we either limit the consumption or risk massive deforestation. Less people means less demand and more resources per capita.

That's only assuming that being able to buy cheap stuff actually makes people happier. I don't think it does.

Nobody is talking about happiness and nobody could agree with everybody on what that means. The word here was "better" and cheap labor in poor countries objectively makes our lives better, because we can afford more goods (both needed and unneeded) with our incomes and expectations regarding working conditions.

Whether we are talking about happiness or better-ness you are still projecting a value system and claiming it to be objective.

I personally don’t derive any sense of betterness from being able to afford more goods. I only see the ocean of plastic.

> I feel like it's only going to get worse.

Why is this a bad thing? Less crowd is good for everyone. Is it not?

What states are your acquaintances fleeing to? If you leave CA, where do you plan to move to?

Utah is great, but don't come here. We want CA problems to stay in CA.

I moved to TN, anecdotally.

You say that but I absolutely love gentrifying (aka signing literally any lease at someone else’s price when I move literally any where) and there are still tons of people who took a bus escaping Mormonstan or Missouri to shack up with

From my perspective nothing has changed

Yep. Unless you have Prop 13 and can afford the cost-of-living and taxes, then GTFO. I was born there in the late 70's but left in 2020, mainly because most Californias were either out-of-touch (the 2% of the rich, sociopathic bastards who will hit-and-run anyone in their Bimmers) or angry-unfriendly ready to explode (90% of people). The middle-class in California is almost nothing but a slim segment of baby boomers and software developers. In addition, the SF Bay Area is, in a sense like Man Jose, full of dudes. Furthermore, the people who have migrated to the area pumped up real estate prices and displaced long-time residents. It's now (or was, pre-COVID) a place where people come to make tech money and leave, not put down roots; so most people come and go, and don't invest socially or in any community sense.

Good jobs are not easy to find in lots of places. Don’t underestimate the value of that.

And earthquakes.

But the places like Oregon and Washington which are booming as a result of "California flight" have all of those same factors with marginally different weights associated to each individual problem.

In particular, Oregon has a higher tax rate than California does for high (~120K+) earners as a result of a lack of sales tax and correspondingly absurdly high income taxes. Oregon is booming. Blue state politics is not what is driving people out of California.

>Blue state politics is not what is driving people out of California

It's certainly part of it (wealth tax, non-nuanced small-biz killing lockdown, signalling > results) though.

Not all 'blue state politics measures/stances' overlap.

"Wealth tax"? The people who are leaving California are not high wealth.

The best wealth tax out there, a land tax, has been prohibited in the California constitution via proposition 13, and that tax would go a long way towards eliminating the rentierism that is pushing out people with lower incomes.

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