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Comment by senormenor | Hacker News Reader

If you believe conservative media and "anti-woke" Twitter, California is an unliveable wasteland where you can't walk two paces without stepping over homeless people, discarded needles and human feces, where crime (violent and non-violent) is skyrocketing, where people don't feel safe in their own homes, and where the only response by "progressive" politicians is to double down on their same bad policies that created the mess in the first place.

Is any of that true? I have no idea; I've never been to California. But it's what a large percentage of the country believes about the Golden State.

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I live in Oakland and I find all of that true. My family and I very much want to leave as soon as possible. (I’m a non-immigrant Democrat for what it’s worth, but not very progressive.)

We’re staying in-state though—Oakland is far from typical.

There are small parts of California where that is absolutely true. A block of the Tenderloin is more likely to have shit and needles than not. Crime in SF is out of control. There’s also about 160 million other square miles where things aren’t so bad.

This is true, but the bad places tend to also be the big population centers. This naturally means the same people that are content to allow these problems to fester are also politically dominant at the state level.

> This naturally means the same people that are content to allow these problems to fester are also politically dominant at the state level.

In the 1920s, Californians would complain about hobos hopping trains to LA and San Francisco (The Little Tramp stereotypes weren't completely baseless). This was when California was predominantly run by Republicans. During the Great Depression, California then attracted a bunch of jobless/destitute Okies and so on...

If the problem has existed for more than a hundred years, maybe it's not the politicians and residents enabling it. If California wants to get rid of its homeless problem, they need to change their weather (or get fixes on a national level, but with the current Republicans in place, probably changing the weather would be easier).

> get fixes on a national level, but with the current Republicans in place

Er, what? You realise the federal government is currently controlled by Democrats, right?

It doesn't matter. Divided government and electoral pressure means that we are fixed right of center for the foreseeable future; there is a reason we elected a conservative Democrat as president. The Democrats also can't just go off and propose nationwide solutions to homelessness, they can barely get an infrastructure bill going.

There are definitely some cities like that — San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles metro all come to mind. And we did waste however many billions of dollars on a high-speed rail system that still doesn’t exist. And we keep catching on fire every summer.

But in the central valley where the majority of conservatives in California live, there are MUCH smaller cities, and therefore have fewer “people” problems by comparison. Sure, Fresno and Sacramento have some homeless problems, but those are usually crack and meth users in a particular part of town that everyone else knows should be avoided. The reality is, everywhere has some sort of problems that you’ll find if you look hard enough.

Having said that, I was one of the people who chose to leave California. I love California, and it will always be my home, but being a single father with two children making $140,000 a year in the Bay Area in 2016, I was barely making ends meet.

The rat race of the bay area, combined with high gas prices, combined with terrible traffic that extends 100 miles in any direction from San Francisco, it just stopped being worth it. So I left.

I know that I don’t represent everyone, but I’m one of the statistics that got “rounded off“.

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