Why Is the Central Valley So Bad?

One thing the article doesn't seem to mention at all is the 2008 financial crisis. The Sacramento area got hit hard, especially suburbs like mine. My specific hometown, Elk Grove, rapidly expanded from being mostly farmland when I was a kid to being the poster child of suburban sprawl when I was a teenager. The population exploded, the housing supply exploded (and got outstripped by demand), and then in 2007/2008 it all came crashing down, with foreclosures and vacancies and squatters everywhere. I can imagine other Central Valley cities got hit similarly hard.

The article mentions people commuting from Central Valley cities to coastal cities. My dad was one of 'em for awhile, commuting from Sacramento to the Rite-Aid he managed on Van Ness in SF. He wasn't rich, and at the time neither was my mom; living closer to SF was out of the question even back then (especially after they divorced). My stepmom and her parents had emigrated from SF to Sac before meeting my dad, and she worked at the same store, making the same commute (and that's how they met, and were soon happily married 'til death did them part when he passed in May this year). It was indeed a long commute, leaving home before sunrise and getting back after sunset.

All in all, even Sacramento was kind of a shithole, let alone the rest of the Valley. Now it's an even more expensive shithole. I ended up leaving to work my first job (because few employers in Sac were willing to hire a high school graduate when they're being flooded with college graduate applicants), and I haven't really looked back; decent memories, but neither the present nor future are appealing - especially when it looks like we're on the verge of another 2008.

Forget the contiguous geographic restriction for a moment, if I instead said the median of income in the poorest 5% of California was less than the median income of Mississippi would anyone find that surprising in the slightest? What about the poorest 5% of counties having a median income less than mississippi? Still not surprising. Requiring the contiguous areas would increase the income somewhat-- but we know that activities and income are not geographically independent.

And there's a political nexus that isn't mentioned in the article, which is the massive post-60's policy shifts that have remained the norms ever since. In the early 60's, there was still a Bracero program. By the mid-70's the farm owners were bussing in illegal immigrants, and the "drug wars" had started, helping to keep those countries destabilized and easy to draw workers from. Agribusiness deals in commodities, so unless there's coordinated top-down enforcement of standards and practices, it quickly converges on exploitation or automation to remain price-competitive. The 70's saw an energy crunch; appetite to attempt further mechanization for fruits and the like would have been limited, if it were even possible. Today's inflationary environment, battery EV and robotics suggests we're due for a rethink of that, which would completely upend longstanding narratives around immigration.

The growth of the South Bay is likewise instructive; it used to be a fruit orchard. But post-war, it picked up steam as a military-industrial hub, from which Silicon Valley emerged, again with the 70's marking a certain turning point as computing started to access a mass market, at first with integrated circuit devices and then with microprocessors. That was a better business to be in, after all; a lot of land got sold off and developed, and San Jose eagerly annexed everything around it to become the big city of the area while the Peninsula cities mixed the high-end talent from Stanford with an emerging VC business. Again, a largely unchanged dynamic until very recently.

California HSR has the goal of linking the Valley with the coast cities. One hypothesis would be that this would revitalize those cities and bring them into the urban ecosystem of the coast. Another is to look at Japan's Shinkansen experience and say, "all cities are suburbs of Tokyo", i.e. living in Fresno, you'd most likely be a supercommuter who uses the train to get to SF or LA, but is still effectively "off the map" in terms of local vitality.

[0] Fields Without Dreams

[1] Mexifornia, a State of Becoming

[2] The Land Was Everything: Letters From An American Farmer

Nit: nut harvesting is heavily automated. This is a pretty good overview of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql9NIPilcPI

What I have also noticed with people that have this sentiment is they have some group to blame, not a solution.

Would farming more profitable cashcrops or moving away at least paritally from agriculture help? Would better housing decelopemnt (more housing density but at a competitive price, not for thr poor) bring housing costs down?

Also, central valley feels a lot like conservatice states as thr article points out. That includes intolerance to other people and ideas.

Let's look at the blessings that class has brought:

  - Failure of MTBE additive which poisoned groundwater, had to be reverted, and will take decades to pay off adding ~$1 to CA gas prices
  - Pollution which flows downstream from Northern CA into a basin where it stays (those lovely SF winds blow that somewhere)
  - A patronage system that spends all of its education money and qualitative goods in urban areas while denying those same benefits to the valley.  Instead, economy and society destroying welfare is handed out that has low social capital.
  - Political vengeance with diverting ~50% of available agricultural water to the ocean to protect for a variety of fish
  - Buying off districts with political pork so that CA could have a veto-proof majority and not have budgetary constraints with the R minority.  You thought the bullet train was a bug?... it was the feature.  There was no intent to ever finish that train.
  - Disabling of power plants via PG&E and a benchmark electricity rate that is based upon temperature ranges in.. you guess it, San Francisco.  Combine punitive, non-linear prices with a location that gets in the 110s in the summer benchmarked on the temperatures of Northern California, their poorer southern neighbors pay substantially more in electricity.
  - Massive illegal immigration.  Those statistics were just legal.  CA has well over 8 million illegal immigrants and almost all live either as transients or in crime-ridden areas where crime is not reported because of political inconveniences.