The author should look at himself and his class for why the Central Valley is so bad. The Central Valley population is the serfs of a political system owned by a group that hates them.

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.

I could go on, but it won't matter. California hates the Central Valley, and hates the people in it. And that, coupled with sanctimonious how-could-this-be? ignorance is why I left.