California’s population shrinks for third straight year
sacbee.com
sacbee.com
So few days of good weather. Maybe worth it to some, but a bigger house was not worth it to me at all. We moved back in 6 months.
So many people want to live in California which causes more issues
I'm a Texas native. The temps in Texas are nothing like what California gets.
On the other hand, the rockhounding is far, FAR better out here in Cali. But you aren't doing that in the summer. You could do that in Texas in the summer out in the Llano uplift region.
It’s not just being indoors more but also being uncomfortable indoors. Boo
That must have been expensive!
You had to eat the second six months of a year lease on a house, maybe lost your deposit, too; plus you paid to move an entire family from California to Texas; then paid again to move from Texas to California. Then had to find another place to live in California and pay another deposit there.
Having helped a friend move from California to Texas recently, it sounds like at least a $40,000 mistake.
Probably cost 4K, not 40K.
Actually, it's how many of the leases I've had worked, and I've lived in dozens of states.
Probably cost 4K, not 40K.
It cost my friend $11,000 to move his one bedroom apartment from Southern California to Texas last year using Mayflower. And he was just one person, not a family.
Moving an entire family from California to Texas and back costs a minimum of $20,000; unless you're traveling like the Beverly Hillbillies.
Moving isn't cheap, but on even relatively junior tech salaries, provided some savings or access to credit, it's truly not a life-altering event the way $40k would be.
But it’s easier said than done for those with a sizable family, more possessions than fits in 26’ truck, a lack of time, or lack physical strength.
If you hire someone to do it, it’s expensive.
In comparison I moved Dallas to SF as a single guy in a 26' uhaul truck and I think my costs all-in were $5000 for truck/gas/incidentals plus another $5000 for first and last months rent, utility deposits and all the random stuff that comes with relocation. So $10k to move all-in as a single guy.
In the majority of states, the landlord has a duty to mitigate losses, which means you are only on the hook as long as the landlord is unable, making a reasonable, good-faith effort, to rent the unit.
And usually any part of a deposit not used to pay for damages beyond nornal wear and tear or rent for which the tenant was legally liable must be returned.
(The lease may assert something else, but where these laws are in place such terms have no legal effect.)
Lease - 2K. 3rd party Furniture transport - 2K. 10 day hotel stay 1.5K. 5.5K total cost.
You have already admitted that the 40K was double what it would have supposedly cost your friend. Time for you to divide it by a further 50%. Also, the statement that you would have to pay out your entire lease cost is, frankly speaking, ridiculous.
Congratulations on having signed leases in dozens of states. How many dozen states would that be? 2 dozen? 3 dozen?
At that price point in the city you've got options with, e.g. Travelodge, and you can choose between being right next to the freeway or in the middle of the meth epidemic. For a single occupancy room $150 would potentially get you something comfortable, but for moving a family? Not so much.
Btw, I did manage to find a 180$ per night deal in the bay area at Hyatt house, complete with a kitchenette and utensils recently for a friend.
That easternmost part of the state is the "piney woods" and it's lovely compared to the concrete island that is Dallas. The forests have a mitigating effect on heat.
Or appliance history at least (though we had iceboxes for quite some time!)
Maybe that's why we fought so hard for The Alamo; to clone it's futuristic A/C for later settlements...
There is a gap in the literature though as to whether the Caddos had central air. We can only speculate.
We moved to Austin-adjacent and downsized on the house. We put away about 100$k from the sale of our previous house, and used the rest for downpayment, netting us a <$1000 mortgage payment per month. During the periods of heat or cold, we now just peace out and travel, because we have ample cash to do so and still manage to put away for retirement. Currently chilling in Miami till middle of next week.
The rest of the time, weather is nice, plenty of good food, plenty of things to do.
that's nice but is it a good long term solution? i presume you don't have any kids. i wonder how this approach would work once you have kids and they start school. or maybe you do have kids but they are much older and moved out or no plans for kids idk.
Simple solution: don’t have kids.
That's why I tell disbelieving Californians that we have better weather in Texas than they do: When we have nice days, we appreciate it, whereas when they do, they don't even notice .... :-)
(Source: Spent several years in California long ago.)
Housing isn’t really a “market” that can be efficient at pricing in all information because it’s different for everyone (relatives, taxes, jobs, immigration, race, etc).
The places you listed have milder weather, and far less sunshine than most of the US but they also have hundreds of years of extra history and development. Moving from the US to there has far higher friction cost than moving between states.
Although my perspective is tempered with what I experienced around the gulf, in Mississippi and Florida. The humidity there is so bad I literally don't think it's fit for human settlement.
To that point though, most of the neighborhoods I have lived in have had little to no fog. Russian Hill being the exception. I’m not sure how much of a difference that makes in indoor relative humidity or chance of mold.
I've lived in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia and mold has never not been a problem in those states. I have never lived in San Francisco though so I can't compare.
The AC is appreciated, but you get acclimated to the heat. And anecdata of one, but I really miss the heat / humidity.
Texas civilization does predate AC after all for at least a couple centuries ;)
Yes, but its neither particularly hot (so it doesn't tend to be muggy), nor particularly cold (its cold for the densely populated parts of California, but that's not saying much), so the humidity isn't much of a problem.
Hence one of the reasons it waa attractive before it was a center of the tech industry.
I feel like most of the people that leave for Texas will end up feeling the same.
We left after almost 10 years. We're in NH now. There are still people who won't stop talking about their personal politics but it's a lot fewer. There are signs during voting season but that's most of it. People here seem to be genuinely friendly and not Bless Your Heart "friendly."
I wouldn't go back to CA without a major change in the economics and I'd never go back to TX because it's just going to get hotter and people will likely just keep getting worse.
The maybes are places that were nice to visit but I don't know very well.
Republicans move to Arizona, Texas and Florida
Outspoken racists tend to be "republican". Really just some flavor of extreme conservative, but republican has become a catchall term for right wing.
More subtle, closeted racists, come from all over the political spectrum through.
No, I did it and there is a big stink about us showing up in Boulder or Denver in large numbers and driving up the price of real estate enough to know we are persona non-grata amongst 'natives'--which is to say those who moved there in the late 90s or early 2000s and reaped the most benefits from said real estate spikes. It's a trope, and if you lived there or spent time there you'd know that.
I personally moved back to EU, after living in various countries for four years, and was way better received than most of the US--I'm Californian and lived in HI and CO. Granted, I was well welcomed by my local community in the startup World, but outside of that it was clear you were the scapegoat for all that was going wrong.
Personally I think the crux is that housing is less constrained in the EU and lower salaries keep things from getting completely out of hand, and their aging population coupled with significant Covid deaths meant their was an excess in vacancy and several of them sought to attract digital nomads (albeit with lengthy and tiresome processes) with attractive visa programs in order to cash in the WFH diaspora.
Edit: Not sure why this take would upset anyone. I didn’t say it was necessarily good or bad to live in California. All I said is that the average price of a home seems to dictate that people enjoy living there more than many other states.
Feel like the cultural center of gravity has left CA and it's in the early stages of a long decline. Detroit once had similar prominence in industry as the valley did for the past few decades. Motor City was a booming hub of manufacturing and music. And over the course of a few decades, it deteriorated. Jobs left. Local government got dysfunctional. Manufacturing left. Crime soared. Houses abandoned. Property values fell on relative and absolute basis.
At any rate, CA is running on the fumes of its former self, when it was younger, more agile, less burdened by dysfunctional politics, had more opportunities for young people and young families.
CA is a naturally beautiful state. But it's got deep-seated issues and there's almost a sense of an unfixable malaise, living there.
The fact that people are paying the rents being asked is more or less tautological proof of this.
Low temperatures? Heating.
High humidity? Dehumidifiers.
Low humidity? Humidifiers.
Particulate matter? Air filters.
Bugs? Pest control. Bug screens. Traps. Mosquito treatments.
High energy use? Solar.
Lack of density? Sign me up. More privacy, less noise, lower crime rate, and fewer problems in general. No rude people constantly in a hurry.
The stuff there are no solutions for: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and natural disasters in general. Except for insurance, that is.
Which US state doesn't have problems with bugs though? I know none hold a candle to Australia but it seems like each has its own unique problem with bugs.
Texas is no Australia when it comes to dangerous critters, but of all the American states, it's in the top 2, and gives Florida a run for its money.
The entire western coast of the US (cali to Washington) has far less bugs than the east or Midwest. I assumed it was the drier climate but Seattle area doesn’t have a lot of bugs either.
After moving west, I found in identical weather conditions, the west is better to be outside because it will have less bugs.
The south is cheaper for a reason, and CA is expensive for a reason. You get what you pay for. Red State governance is truly abysmal, the climate is terrible, and there is precious little BLM land to explore.
If enough people leave CA to reduce the price (or enough people move to the south to raise the price here) I'd gladly move to the west coast.
The situation has been dire for some time, but all they do are small incremental steps towards building more housing, it's nowhere close to what's necessary. Unfortunately, the NIMBY, anti-housing sentiment is very strong.
The rural county I live in has open jobs, but a sizeable chunk of the work force is either seasonal (logging, etc) then coast on unemployment for the off season or don't actually want to work. Those that do, are flaky as all get go. (My partner and I own a small business in the county).
What does this have to do with housing? Covid and growth of a near by metro area (about an hour away) have pushed people to buying up what was previously cheap (yet affordable) housing. Small cabins that would be going for ~75k or a bit more 7 years ago are pushing over $200k now. The local community college as well as natural disasters further puts pressure on the housing situation. How about building more? Well, insuring housing when large fires have come through? Hard to come by. Building costs have also gone through the roof.
Housing is needed in this particular county (and surrounding) but isn't being built.
Where does housing for 3.5 million get built?
One doesn't. One builds 3.5 million homes, mostly apartments.
I find this lack of optimism very dissonant and just divisive.
What infrastructure do you imagine California to be lacking that would be relevant here?
Also, there is the small fact that apartment dwellers use a tiny fraction of the water of people who live in detached houses.
In short, there is plenty of water in various major metropolitan areas.
Unfortunately, the sheer regulatory expense of new housing is such that it's not worth it for anyone to try any project short of big apartment/condo buildings.
With some of the recent changes to building policies I think we're going to find out that NIMBY local policy and regulation aren't the fundamental problem, but we're up against the limits of how capital naturally engages with building projects: chasing demand towards the high end of the market and staying well back from diminishing marginal returns.
https://citiesassociation.org/documents/constraints-survey-d...
Market prices of homes in places like Freemont tend to run from the high 6 figures through the low 7. Knock off $150k and we have maybe a 20% price reduction (probably closer to 15%). Nice to have but hard to figure out how that represents the largest portion of anything.
Land homes sit on costs more than $150k, maybe north of twice as much in Freemont-like areas (unless the lot is weird, inaccessible, or otherwise has issues that make it difficult to build on).
I'm not sure how one is going to get total materials and labor to come in less than $150k for most single family homes in CA. Maybe with small square footage and a good deal of luck with labor and materials? You tell me how to build for less than $120/sqft and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's all ears.
Seems to me to get regulatory expense to be the single largest item for building a home, we'd have ignore land, then play the game of lumping together all such expenses while splitting out building and labor, and even then I'm still not sure how it actually adds up.
The land cost scales down with density. The unit permitting cost is fixed regardless of size.
With the resources of an entire state government, or a lot of private equity, this is very solvable.
Take a place like Sunol, CA or Livermore, CA, either one about an hour east of San Francisco and trivial to connect to public transit.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.5871047,-121.8716321,3a,75y,...
(California has nowhere to build they say... see above link.)
Build several hundred high-rise apartments with several thousand of residents each. There you go. Housing for a million people in the space of not even a square mile probably. Add in generous amounts of entertainment venues, coffee shops, live music, some parks, and a bunch of office buildings.
Done. Solved. But they don't do it. Why?
This is called the Napkin Fallacy. When you write down some solution to a long standing social problem on a napkin in a coffee shop, and then instead of asking
"What is wrong with my solution, that it hasn't been adopted?"
you ask
"What is wrong with the world, that it hasn't adopted my solution?"
The world needs a lot more people asking the first question rather than the second. Virtually no one should be asking the second question. As the saying goes "For every problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong." That's usually the napkin solution. When you stop to really think about what is wrong with the napkin solution, you start down the path of solving real problems. It is highly unlikely that long standing social problems have napkin solutions.
As a slightly toxic corollary to the Napkin Fallacy is the Virtue Fallacy, which tries to answer the second question with
"It is because the world is run by bad people"
This is bad not only because it is an easy way to avoid the difficult work of understanding why the napkin solution doesn't work, but also because it caricatures one's opponents, and it is close to self-deification. While the saying "Let God be true, but every man a liar" is sound, the saying "Let me be true but every man a liar" is unsound. There is generally nothing about any of us that makes us better than others. Do not assume the world is run by people worse than you.
There are many vacant houses in the U.S., and many cheap houses -- pretending this is about shortage of physical housing is just foolish.
This is about shortage of desirable housing, and instead of stopping to ask what are the mechanisms that cause desirable housing (for you) to be so expensive, you just assume the problem is like a shortage of lumber or "space" or something equally irrelevant. If you build lots of affordable housing in Livermore, what would happen is that Livermore would stop being desirable for you, and you would end up wanting to live in some satellite area that was created outside of Livermore in which the exclusivity was maintained. Then good jobs would move there, because over the long term, the jobs follow the skilled workers and not the other way around. Then your utopian project in Livermore would find itself turned into a low income area where there is a shortage of good jobs, and most of the good jobs are elsewhere, in more exclusive areas, that are within commuting distance of the Lab. Then the Lab would find itself having trouble hiring enough people, and it would open satellite offices elsewhere. Then you would complain about a shortage of housing there, and want to rinse and repeat, not understanding why your intervention failed to solve the problem.
A good example is San Francisco. Most tech jobs were in Santa Clara county, not San Francisco. But a lot of tech workers enjoyed living in SF and did a long commute. Then tech companies realized they could hire more easily if they opened offices in San Francisco. Then companies began to be founded there, etc. All of a sudden, lots of tech jobs in SF. The jobs follow the skilled workers, and skilled workers have a lot of options in terms of picking where they want to live. They vote with their feet, and the jobs follow. How did the jobs end up in Santa Clara? Or Belmont. Through a similar process. Jobs chase high skilled people.
So you have to come to grips with why people that have a lot of choices choose to live in expensive, more exclusive areas. Why does the average high income person really not want to live in a neighborhood with a lot of poor people? Or, for that matter, even average income person? Why this hatred towards average people (something that can easily be found even on this site)? Why are they willing to commute elsewhere, and even take a pay cut, to be in a more exclusive area that is surrounded by other high income people? (And so signals to employers to open an office nearby). This is a social issue, not about lack of nails or space or a shortage of lumber.
I do have some arguments in favor of your position, but they’re mostly specific to the US: 1. Many people’s primary retirement plan and emergency fund is often their house, so property values are exceptionally important to them. 2. School funding per student goes down if less wealthy parents move to the district. 3. Violence in poor neighbourhoods can get really bad. None of this is God-given, though, which is why nimbyism isn’t quite as bad in many other countries. And while important, these factors don’t seem to be dominant.
The fact is, there just aren't that many cities that fit this bill, and those that do experience rapidly rising real estate prices. As with many issues, race is a taboo factor operating behind the scenes in determining which neighborhoods are targets of gentrification and which are not. When you create a lot of low income housing, people viewed as more undesirable move in and the high income earners go elsewhere. Then you rinse and repeat. But of course the problem is not that there's a shortage of housing or even a shortage of affordable housing. Median value of owner occupied units is $245K, which is 3.5x the median household income[1]. That's perfectly affordable. But the median home value in a major urban city with less than a 10% African American population is a different story. So there's a shortage of housing in our diverse society that has the "right" kind of demographics. As we become more diverse, the number of locations that are predominantly white or asian will get more and more scarce -- and more and more expensive.
You see a similar situation in Sweden, which accepted a large number of migrants and put them on the outskirts of major cities, and of course the house prices of units in the urban cores that were free of migrants skyrocketed. People are paying to not live in areas with large migrant populations. So all of a sudden housing is becoming 'unaffordable' in Sweden. But the unspoken part is that housing with few migrants is become unaffordable, not all housing. Again, this is a social problem, it's not a problem of a shortage of lumber or space.
So building more low income housing doesn't have the effects you believe, in terms of increasing the amount of housing in highly desirable areas. It will have the opposite effect, by removing one area that has the desired demographics, it makes the remaining islands even more desirable and thus even more expensive. At least this is my reading of history. It was very clear, after the race riots of 2020, how home prices in predominantly white/asian enclaves began to rapidly increase, at which point those who wanted to live in these enclaves began complaining about a "housing crisis" because they could not bring themselves to complain about a racial crisis.
But hey, I could be wrong -- housing in St. Louis or Detroit is still affordable. I'll wait to see tech workers scramble to move there, rather than, say Salt Lake City.
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/VET605221
I don't know what all is happening in Sweden, but what happened in Chicago wasn't an organic process; it was deliberately engineered.
Fun Fact: The Obama Administration was instrumental in tearing down a number of low income housing projects in Chicago and exporting them to nearby cities in Illinois, in an attempt to "unlock value" in downtown Chicago housing by removing poor black families. This has had limited success, although South Chicago is still overall a no go zone for gentrification. This explains the slight gentrification you are referring to. There were multiple lawsuits over this, as the nearby suburbs did not want to receive these housing projects, and were basically forced into it by the Obama administration. This was portrayed not as an effort to enrich administration-connected housing developers in downtown Chicago, but rather as an effort "integrate wealthy suburbs" so that they do "their fair share".
Bottom line, you have to be aware of race and what is really going on when you complain about "lack of affordable housing". There is, of course, plenty of affordable housing. But not where you want to live.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/chicago...
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/race-real-estate-oak...
Public housing projects as implemented by cities like Chicago were a failed experiment. The people that used to live in those places get Section 8 vouchers now, and live in houses on blocks like mine. They're better off, and the city is better off.
Living in California is expensive, in more ways than just housing. Not everyone can afford it. Just like not everyone can afford a new BMW. In my corner of the state, people who increasingly cannot afford to live here are noisy. I mostly don't engage because I'm aware that I will simply receive vitriol and anger for sharing my views. But quietly, I'm ok with it. They can move if they want to. I love it here and having fewer people on the fringes of society as neighbors isn't really the worst outcome to me.
Edit: and this why I don't engage. I'm out. Merry Christmas everyone.
Imagine property values start plunging, people can't leave, they just start abandoning houses, soon you get vast swathes of abandoned houses which lead to increased crime and urban decay.
Decades from now people will shake their heads and talk about the golden days of California and the problems with the silicon belt.
We get it, you don't care about anyone else, only yourself. This was already clear from your previous comments.
On a side note, how can you be mad at people who have a home, are raising their kids and don't want an apartment building smacked down next to them and their kid's schools flooded with hundreds of extra students?
[0] I say "naive accounting," because it's not so great if you ever need to buy a new lawnmower, sofa, or iPhone or if you hope your kids will someday be able to. And it's not so great for your city in the long run if making ordinary products illegal results in drastically lower levels of productivity, etc, etc.
One person's quality of life is not affected in any way by another person having a sofa.
More housing and population density does lead to increased crowding, which some people consider a decrease in quality of life.
We can argue which QOL argument outweighs the other, but it's plain wrong to say that increasing housing has no impact on existing residents.
You live in a society. Of course the things other people do impact you. That's a low bar, easily met, and not interesting enough to justify a ban on new housing. The impacts have to be overwhelmingly harmful to justify prohibition. Apartment buildings clearly do not meet that standard. You might not like apartments, but I love them, and banal preferences shouldn't drive policy in a free society.
If wouldn't be capitalism if we demanded you let us build on your land, but it's certainly not capitalism when you won't let us build on our land.
1. to the extent that land can be owned under a given mode of production.
It's in important distinction because even post-capitalist dialectics need an answer for the need of housing.
In the United States we have a Constitution that enumerates a set of Rights about which nobody gets to vote. It doesn't matter if you (or even 99% of all people) think it should be illegal for me to express this opinion, for example; you don't get to vote on that.
Private property rights in my view quite clearly fall under this rubric and it's only because of a few laughably bad SCOTUS decisions that this is even a live debate at all. For most of our history this was well understood.
If given the chance, most people will vote to ban new construction in their neighborhoods. I presume that if given the chance significant percentages of the population would also vote to ban certain kinds of speech. In neither case do I believe those positions are made legitimate by virtue of having majority support.
No, it doesn't, since people actually do campaign on changing the Constitution. I mean, unless you specifically and exclusively mean “the right to equal representation of your State in the Senate”, and even that is debatable, since you could vote for someone who proposes removing that limitation on amendments from the Constitution.
Why introduce "hate other people" into the discussion? Would you maybe allow that what some people actually "hate," are jammed highways and thoroughfares, not enough parking, and everything crowded? To the extent that people have a say (a vote) in zoning regulations, people are entitled to voice their opinion about the population density of the area where they live.
"Increasing price of cars during pandemic not an issue for people who already have cars."
Yes, people are upset that the government pushes policies that hurt people, and that make no sense generationally (intentionally targeting rising property values is just a generational ponzi scheme).
If your stance is apathy or even pleasure upon seeing the suffering caused by bad policy, it's no wonder you're being downvoted.
There was absolutely nothing in the comment to imply he derived "pleasure from seeing suffering." You are making that leap in bad faith.
I think the build-or-not argument might be more productive if the "YIMBY" side would acknowledge that a massive increases in housing density (and therefore population density) does have an effect on existing residents.
Maybe pleasure was the wrong word, but they certainly seem to enjoy the terrible situation. It's not very far off, and saying that you're okay with and even love the current setup that helps you at the expense of others isn't a great look.
> would acknowledge that a massive increases in housing density (and therefore population density) does have an effect on existing residents.
Obviously it does, just like increasing the supply of anything has an impact relative to the option of constrained supply.
Realistically, the real solution is radical upzoning at the state or even federal level. Upzoning individual neighborhoods and cities exacerbates the negative side effects of upzoning by concentrating them in small areas. If the population increase is broadly spread out, it'll be much less of an issue.
I believe you.
People who feel threatened move to the right.
This Volts episode about the psychology of "system justification" covers one facet of that phenomenon.
"Why social change is so excruciatingly difficult" [2022-10-24]
https://www.volts.wtf/p/why-social-change-is-so-excruciating...
Progressives ignore the psychology of action and reaction to their own peril.
I'm working on an entire comedy set about how many of my peers care more about dissecting the wording of shit rather than actually furthering a cause. Those idiots aren't going to affect my ideology, though I am sometimes cancelled for the hilarious reasons (i.e. mentioning Joe Rogan).
Lastly, I got ran out of a bar for saying I think people deserve health care. Labeled a communist with no job and that I'm not welcome there. Lol!
Your logic isn’t unsound, but it will increasingly come across as unreasonable because not everyone in the workforce has the option of finding employment and accommodation elsewhere.
But it’s not _illogical_ for someone who has everything they want to oppose things they don’t need.
NIMBY-is like another application of the “possession is 9/10ths of the law” argument. It has legs, but it doesn’t always win out.
As a San Francisco area homeowner and a BMW owner, I believe every human deserves a roof over their head.
Edit: Please don't discuss the things I've said. My BMW is the victim! Merry Christmas.
Builder’s remedy is already being applied against NIMBY communities like Santa Monica and Redondo beach, no take backs.
It takes time to build the homes and see the impact but it’s hard to say that they’re not moving strongly in the right direction.
Sure they’re doing it 20-30 years later than they should have but they’re certainly not sitting on their hands right now.
Newsome knows he needs to show that he really addressed the massive headline problem that everyone hears about California before he can have a serious crack at the presidency, or else he’s never going to overcome the “California bad because mismanaged by Democrats”
Have you seen the particulars of that law that upzoned the state? It's actually extremely weak:
"* Benefits homeowners NOT institutional investors. Recent amendments require a local agency to impose an owner occupancy requirement as a condition of a homeowner receiving a ministerial lot split. This bill also prohibits the development of small subdivisions and prohibits ministerial lot splits on adjacent parcels by the same individual to prevent investor speculation. In fact, allowing for more neighborhood scale housing in California’s communities actually curbs the market power of institutional investors. SB 9 prevents profiteers from evicting or displacing tenants by excluding properties where a tenant has resided in the past three years."
Translation: will be used only sparingly, because it's illegal to do it with a standard case of a corporation replacing existing housing with more housing. How many owner occupiers are interested in this and can afford this kind of redevelopment?
"Respects local control. Homeowners must comply with local zoning requirements when developing a duplex (height, floor area ratios, lot coverage etc.) as long as they do not physically preclude a lot split or duplex. This bill also allows locals to require a percolation test for any duplex proposed to be on septic tanks."
Translation: still lets local NIMBYs restrict density.
"It takes time to build the homes and see the impact but it’s hard to say that they’re not moving strongly in the right direction."
It's the right direction yes, but as you say, it's the kind of thing that should've been the response to the much weaker housing crisis of 20-30 years ago, not the much more serious one now.
If the state says no that’s not enough units you are just jerking us around, then the municipality is out of compliance and builders are basically autopermitted to build whatever they want (oversimplifying but look at builder’s remedy - it’s already being applied).
One of the important wrinkles is that there’s no take backs, once the city is back in compliance they can’t go back and stop things that were permitted in the meantime. It’s a very serious “fix it on your own terms or we’ll fix it for you and you won’t like it” approach.
Santa Monica is getting like 5000 new housing units all at once, 800 of them affordable housing, in tall apartment buildings because they threw a fit and refused to get in compliance and they found out just how serious the state is.
NIMBYs wail and gnash their teeth but all it does is expose that their “plans” are all a load of BS smoke and mirrors to max out boomer property values. If the plans were good enough, they’d be in compliance with the state and get to keep the “character of their neighborhood” or whatever.
Like, the state already had targets set for cities for a long time, and most cities just kinda ignored them. I know the newer regulations have more teeth, but when you know the other party is hostile to helping people to begin with, it makes more sense to me to explicitly set all the rules up front.
If you follow this stuff, these changes are the ones that have finally broken the impasse with these towns - it’s literally already working. The state has come in hard and fast to show it’s for real.
> It it'll inevitably lead to less housing than just outright requiring various upzoning rules
Sure but I’m sure they did their homework and figured out that would be harder to pass in legislature, defend in courts, and defend politically. Giving the towns some chance to increase housing units their way is more politically defensible.
I think it’s gonna turn out to be a pretty darn good solution, better than waiting longer for a more optimal one.
That's not the rule.
The rule is “approve developments such that you meet state housing requirements or lose your ability to deny planning approval to otherwise legally-compliant developments”.
There is no suing involved: the requirements are known up front, and the consequence of not meeting them is automatic.
> Like, the state already had targets set for cities for a long time, and most cities just kinda ignored them.
Yes, that's why they changed the consequences from just “lose access to certain funding, and lose preference points in applications for other funding” to be that plus losing the ability to block housing developments.
And those new teeth have been biting very hard.
I admit I'm still skeptical that the cities won't find a way to tie this shit up in courts, but it's be great to be proven wrong.
Super weird comparatively as a regulatory framework, but uniquely suited to dealing with California-style procedural obstructionism.
California needs to dramatically cut back on its land use restrictions and figure out how to streamline everything. Even a typical (nominally uncontroversial) single-family home can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to entitle before anybody even breaks ground. It's madness.
Unfortunately, it's simply not in the culture of the people of the state to want to pursue cost-efficiency or reductions in bureaucracy.
California is not great. It hasnt been great for a long time. It's hostile to anyone who is not the elite while also mascarading as a progressive paradise. The problem with people leaving is they export the same politics that got California to it's position as a working class hostile state. In the most common states, Oregon, Nevada, and Texas Californians are looked at with great disdain. It tells you something, at least, when even a left-leaning state like Oregon doesn't want you.
I live where I live and travel to California so often I more or less live there for several days a week. The only thing great about California is the weather.
It's simple, assimilate or stay over there. You left California for a reason - why bring the garbage to every other state? Your voting is the reason California is a dumpster fire in almost every major metro. Walking down Santa Monica, or almost anywhere in San Francisco smells like human waste. You cannot tell me California is "nice". At least the Californians coming here aren't exporting the smell.
Jersey city has massively ramped up development and is filling demand generated by families who want to move out of their NYC shoebox. The entire NJ-PATH route has been expanding rapidly the last decade or so.
Actually, 8/10 of NY state's biggest cities (barring Syracuse, Rochester) are within a commute distance from neighboring states/countries. Although the bottom 9 combined, add up to 10% of NYC's population. So they don't really matter.
So a CA thing
States with most negative change rate: California (-0.9%), Illinois (-0.8%), Louisiana (-0.8%), West Virginia (-0.6%), Hawaii (-0.5%)
Five most positive change rate: South Dakota (1.5%), Texas (1.6%), South Carolina (1.7%), Idaho (1.8%), Florida (1.9%)
Interestingly three states did not have enough change to register: Kansas, Michigan and Vermont.
Also, that’s not the title I’m seeing when I click the link, it’s — California’s population shrinks for third straight year as high costs stress households — which is a lot less editorial.
How does the home price growth rates compare between CA and the states Californians move to?
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2022/comm/perc...
I would agree that it is not particularly notable; a lot of the headlines are “look at the big numerator and ignore the big denominator, because narrative agenda”.
Another reason why property tax is a more stable funding source -- unlike income, you can't take it with you. There is a whole list of reforms that California needs to undertake to recognize the new reality it's in, and shifting itself to being funded primarily by property taxes is one of the biggest necessary changes. The second biggest change is significantly scaling back spending and decreasing its vast administrative bureaucracies.
Ending Prop 13 would not cause "significantly scaling back spending and decreasing its vast administrative bureaucracies." Instead it would have the opposite effect. All other taxes would stay the same, but now they'd have this additional source of money.
"e.g. 1) switch to more funding on property taxes and 2) reduce administrative bloat"
Shockingly, this does not make the two steps "self-contradictory".
And by shifting responsibilities, you could easily do this without hiring anyone else - almost all states have a value-based property tax system, and this includes states with extremely lean administrative load compared to California, so your claim that following their model is some self-contradictory nut to crack is specious.
wow, thanks! Way to patronize.
We don't need "quantitative estimates" -- we just need a qualitative estimate of the propensities of politicians. Especially in California.
Edit: I'll match my quantitative skills against yours anytime. It's just that they don't need to be deployed on this one.
But the article says "a majority" of those leaving were middle- or low-income people.
If you want to see data, we can look at IRS data:
"New York’s tax base shrank by $19.5 billion while California lost $17.8 billion as a result of workers fleeing those states during a time when lockdown measures allowed employees to work remotely, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Other high-tax jurisdictions such as Illinois ($8.5 billion); Massachusetts ($2.6 billion); New Jersey ($2.3 billion); and Maryland ($1.9 billion) also saw an exodus of workers during 2020.
The states that reaped the benefits of the “wealth migration” include Florida, which gained an additional $23.7 billion in gross income; Texas, which gained $6.3 billion; Arizona, which took in $4.8 billion more; North Carolina ($3.8 billion); South Carolina ($3.6 billion); and Tennessee ($2.6 billion)."[1]
[1] https://nypost.com/2022/06/06/ny-cali-biggest-losers-as-weal...
Essentially the south and south west have the worst impacts, with PNW least in the lower 48.
If you have a shrinking/fleeing population you can see what ends up happening by looking at the rust belt.
If people are fleeing a state that often means that the problems are so bad people are willing to overhaul their entire lives to get away from it. This indicates problems have gotten very bad and now you have fewer resources to address them than before.
Basically when you state population is shrinking it indicates it has the largest challenges it's faced with the continually fewer and fewer resources to address them. At that point it requires a legendary genius and heroic effort to overcome the problems occuring.
But much of the outflow is quite easily explained by the Covid shift to remote work allowing everyone in the Bay Area to take their high salary savings and buy houses wherever they fantasized about living.
You can’t really directly compare to previous migrations because those all involved making a career-impacting change. This one required merely overcoming the activation energy of a house move. So the signal about the “cost of staying put” is much weaker than in the past.
This is not to claim that Silicon Valley / SFBA doesn’t have problems, just that the analogy to Detroit probably doesn’t work without significant caveats.
You can continue to believe and argue that it isn't happening and that Cali is still a great place and continue to cover your ears and scream at the reality but the fact is that when I moved a year or so back the new church I started attending was composed about 1/4 of people that had left California in the past few years, with it moving to 1/3 if we include Oregon and Washington. (And no it's not some sort of sampling bias that Californians love my Church) all of them described the various problems with CA that make it sound pretty much unlivable. So continue to believe there is no problem. It seems that Silicon Valley insists on relearning the lessons of the rust belt.
At the margins, the people who move away are the ones who were already unhappy with “issue x” but had not actually left.
Now that “cost of moving” decreases, or “cost of staying” increases, the cost/benefit of moving becomes positive for those marginal residents, but stays negative for those that love where they are.
Clearly plenty of people don’t find it to be unlivable, indeed it’s still objectively ($/sqft to buy) one of the most desirable places to live in the country even despite the problems.
This is also completely consistent with small towns seeing a large influx of people fleeing CA; it doesn’t take a high % of the most-populous state leaving to make a substantial difference in all of the small desirable towns.
I do agree that the remote trend needs to be followed closely; it’s great for senior engineers at big companies, but I wonder if startups and juniors at large companies are soon going to realize that mentoring and rapid collaboration is really hard remote, and we’ll see the pendulum swing back a bit. Or maybe we will solve those problems and the agglomeration effect of the Bay Area fully dissolves.
The median home sold from Marin County to Santa Clara County is $1M+.
That's the same land mass as from Times Square to the Maryland border.
https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1440035534693232640
California is NIMBYism at its worst: the far left opposes more housing, the far right opposes more housing, and the center is sick of traffic from more housing.
But in all seriousness. The ROI on California taxes has to be one of the worst deals in the country. I can’t think of another state (maybe NY) that does so little with so much.
But I’m talking about California. They have high tax rates across the board, certainly not the highest as you’ve pointed out. However, even with high rates, the citizenry gets almost nothing in return.
I don’t think it’s outrageous to say Texas has one of the worst power grids in the nation. Regardless of your personal experience.
I see this same resistance when it comes to building non-single family homes, and Texans are instead thinking more lanes + more sprawl is going to solve the influx of people. Then they lament pricing and make claim that long time Texans have more of a right to live here than new people. I'm sorry but for a capitalist and freedom loving state, it sure is echoing some of the exact same things that helped California's demise.
TX real estate looks cheap to ex-Californians but has TX or any state kept housing affordable for existing residents in the past few years?
(eg a hit on google: https://learn.roofstock.com/blog/fastest-growing-real-estate...)
The household inflation rate is highest in the Rockies.
The household inflation rate is rising fastest in the South, attributed to new arrivals.
It's the banality of evil.
It's not that homeowners are conspiring to create unaffordable housing, it's just that they all just care about the benefit to themselves of rising home prices and maintaining the comfortable exclusivity of their neighborhoods. Everyone hopes someone else is fixing the problem.
Collectively, each city wants some other city to build more affordable housing. It's not a political issue. It's the haves vs. the have nots, just as it's always been.
The only solution is to have the state organize a plan that forces many cities in the bay area to build denser housing is some of their prime locations -- I'm thinking like way Palo Alto's downtown and Caltrain station area is surrounded by single-family suburban houses. Some of which are on huge lots! Any areas surrounding public transit corridors like that should be immediately built up into multi-story housing complexes.
Who are the people moving out? Primarily those without money or assets to stay. People who tend to skew younger.
So you drive out the younger, start a feedback loop where more young people leave, inverting the population pyramid. This is accelerated by the lower birthrate.
Congrats, you now live in a place where young people are overwhelmed by grey pressure and the only realistic alternatives are decreasing quality of services, or siphoning wealth to push for more services. The latter solution nullifies most benefits stubborn NIMBYs amassed for themselves a few decades before they got old.
Aka "congratulations, you played yourself".
Personally, I do not know a single person whose NIMBY is motivated by this.
Not true at all. The far left objects to gentrification, where the supply of housing nominally increases but prices continue to go higher. Short-term rentals and properties being kept vacant for land speculation are two factors. The far left hates landlords and property speculators, for more or less the same reasons Adam Smith did.
Your original claim is just not factual. No rhetorical flourishes are gonna change that.
What do you mean by this? Who is the "far left" and what are they opposing exactly?
That’s tough when we live in a super neoliberal country. Government housing is dreaming.
He lives from a place of comfort since he’s owned his house for a long time.
Kind of like how domestic espionage is justified with calls of “think of the children”. They try to make you seem heartless to oppose their position.
If we had post-ww2 levels of housing development but with mixed use residential then I'm thinking we'd have more of an agreement but that's the issue... No one thinks that will ever happen. So, they advocate for more government housing because that will improve more lives of lower income folks.
But not enough people do want it fixed because they are trapped with their real estate investment which they can’t adored to have decrease in value.
There's already a mountain of private capital ready and consumer demand that the moment laws let them build they will, regardless of gov $ investment.
People in California seem to believe that other parts of the country with lower taxes are hell on earth, they aren't. When I moved to San Francisco, I had many conversations with people denigrating my home state of Florida. In retrospect I can see this for what it was, a coping mechanism for having to live in such a terrible place and pay an absurd amount of money for the privilege of doing so.
The reason California has seen such economic success can be attributed to proximity to the fastest growing economies and largest manufacturing hubs in the past 30 years and a little luck. If you really need to live on the west coast, Washington state is a much better option.
Some years ago I had to deal with California income tax for various reasons. I think at that time you had to earn over 50K to hit 9% marginal. In my state you hit that at about 16K. And this is after deductions where California had a ton more. I believe one needed an income of over 100K before the amount they paid in taxes exceeded that of my state.
Median household income is $84 K in California. The tax rate is only 6%. And in reality it's less due to having more deductions. Contrast with Oregon where the tax rate is almost 9% for anything over 10K.
California ranks 9th for overall tax burden.
And property tax is ridiculously low, although that is offset by the high property values.
As a random data point: In my state, I got zero tax benefit for having a kid - and my household income is under $200K. I'm too "rich". I haven't checked, but I'm sure in California I'd get some deduction for the kid.
Sure, tax burden rankings usually aggregate state and local taxes.
> California cities top the charts for sales tax.
The maximum combined local sales tax rate in California is 3% (There's a 7.25% state rate, on which local district rates can be added to a maximum of 10.25%).
No California cities are in the top 50 for sales tax in the US. [0]
> A lot of these overall tax burden rankings miss that!
It is certainly possible that some might, and its always important to check the methodology, but of those with disclosed methodology, I can't recall encountering the problem.
[0] https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/highest-salestax-cities
Nationwide (as of 2021), three out of five of the cities with the highest effective sales taxes are in California. Californian cities are very much over-represented on this list.
https://taxfoundation.org/sales-tax-rates-by-city-2021/#High...
Yea, California is overpriced and has many problems, but if one saves here enough then moving anywhere with plenty of savings is very comfortable in the future. There’s nothing wrong with willing to live in other places but there’s a good reason people move to California.
Additionally, I think companies and investors are catching on. If I give a company $100 million I don't want $10 million to go to avoidable state income taxes and another $20 million to go into landlord pockets via inflated rent prices (commercial and residential), I want it to go into the business.
Edit: also, bubble? In what sense? Tech? Sure: there's definitely an assumption about the use and understanding of tech here. Politically? Hardly--this place is an oddball mix of libertarianism, hand-wringing liberalism, apathy, and tons more. It's also not a cultural bubble; the exact opposite in fact, especially compared to Florida.
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I have my eye on Chicago. There’s always something going on, it’s very multicultural, and housing is extremely affordable.
You're right about that part
How much is net decline by excess deaths? Probably a low 20k-30k figure (based on AU excess mortality. Web says 28k), but perhaps CA population had excess older demographic Sunbird type people and they relocated?
It would also cut across all classes. I wonder how much is work forced translocation, by the company more than the individual. If Boeing (bad example I know given its Seattle not Los Vegas, so ignore the out of state issue please) stopped an entire line but jobs open up on the east coast for other production lines then internal relocate is cheaper than hire local sometimes.
The Californian economy is huge. Is it maybe moving to fintech and IPR with labour cost out of state?
The law and order situation in the cities is also poor, and open drug use has turned LA, SF and Oakland into urban hellscapes that are an eyesore.
The entire country is in a phase of migration to the south. Westward migration continues but the main trend is migration to the South which is relatively unencumbered by wacko environmental regulation prone to abuse and a lower tolerance toward crime. Also has a better water situation I suppose and overall courteous and friendly people also.
I mean, it sounds like you're throwing a lot at the wall but I can't piece together a narrative other than you think California sucks?
I say this as a California native who left for a litany of reasons, last of them being the politics.
Please comment on the article, not your personal biases.
Frankly, I blame the venture capitalists. They have turned what was once a vibrant region I loved into a soulless husk of itself though money. Our local politics have become unbearaable. Anything that would slightly impact a VC donor is immediately shot down.
Where will you go? Wakanda?
The bay is actually not very progressive. Economically I'd say it's purely neoliberal. We simply refuse to inconvenience the rich to fix things.
In all seriousness, if the parent commenter is expecting modern US woke-inspired progressive policies to be driving decision-making anywhere in Europe, they will be disappointed. (I don't like throwing the word "woke" around but have no better way to summarize the difference between the modern progressive movement and the original progressive movement in the US).
The US doesn’t have a real “left” movement. It has a center movement at most.
Most posters here are talking about economics - which have little to do with “woke” anything.
And it's funny you recognize the usage of "woke" as problematic, but you still use it. Actual liberal politics means schools, roads, health care, climate, etc. It means a social safety net and labour protections. All of that are universal in Europe while most of it is completely lacking, as I said in even the most "liberal" parts of the US.
Confusing policy (what matters) with social media arguments about what a woman is defined as is a distraction. It's meant to divide people that otherwise agree. Don't play into that game.
If you haven't noticed, I am talking about modern-day progressives, not liberal policies. The term "woke" describes best the difference between liberals/the original progressives and the modern type of progressives obsessed with race, sex, gender, and such.
In my experience, left wingers want civil rights for all the above, but are far from "obsessed" with those groups. Right wingers on the other hand..
Progressive politics in the US sadly transformed from mostly socially and economically-oriented (Wilson, Roosevelt) to an amalgamation of Marxism (Boudin), capitalism, wokeism and social impotency that satisfies no one.
> Progressive politics in the US sadly transformed from mostly socially and economically-oriented (Wilson, Roosevelt) to an amalgamation of Marxism (Boudin), capitalism, wokeism and social impotency that satisfies no one.
This sentence is incomprehensible. Progressive politics has turned into Marxism and capitalism?
This is funny indeed. But for a different reason than you think. Bay Area progressives like yourself became so embedded into capitalist thinking that they discarded everything else from a working social system. Everything is solved with money (i.e. capital). Homelessness - money. Mental illness - money. Drug addiction - money. Racism - money. Crime - money.
It's no surprise that you did not understand my last statement - you are the prime example of it. Marxist because it's a class war, we just need to get rid of the rich and everything will be great. Capitalist because we can solve _everything_ with more money (ignore social responsibilities, opportunities, community, fairness). Wokeist because all inequality is caused by racism, sexism and other -isms. It's an amalgamation so intoxicating that even when you read the description, you don't realise it's about you.
All inequality is caused by... all examples of inequalities? As a class reductionist I dislike wokeism as much as the next guy but this statement is meaningless.
its impossible to actually respond to any of the arguments you're making because Marxism = class war and capitalism = more money displays a complete lack of understanding of basic economics. Its not even clear what you're arguing against.
The fact that you both reject the idea that class war is central to Marxism and call yourself a "class reductionist" in the same sentence only further demonstrates your lack of introspection.
Careful, I have said the same and many assumed it meant I'm far right. The extent of my conservative beliefs are wanting very small government, being anti-war, and wanting a balanced budget. I'm pretty egalitarian otherwise but I don't think that's enough to appease those who invest their lives in identity politics.
This is the weird one for me - I'm not sure how it took over the left to where younger people are confused that my father was a serious leftist/communist before identity/racial politics took over, and since he totally rejected identity politics they assume he was some sort of right-winger, which is bonkers if you knew him.
Democrats are a center party - at best. They’re neoliberal at their core.
What’s the best way to get people advocating for left oriented reforms? Break them up. How? Identity politics. Get them to fight each other.
Congrats - you’ve managed to keep power between two neoliberal parties that agree on most everything. (And everything they don’t agree on - it’s mostly for show because money is the number one thing they’re both most concerned about!)
Also, Do smart people really think the nation’s richest collection of businesses owners, VCs and executives are a bunch of lefties?
You mean a portion of the 1% ?
Arnold was (with Steve Poizner as Insurance Commissioner) one of the last two Republicans to win in California statewide 16 years ago. Its been 25 years since Republicans held a majority in either House of the legislature, in the past 21 years, 17 years have had Democratic trifectas (control of the Governor’s office and both houses of the Legislature). Its been 26 years since the Republicans had control of either house of the legislature. Voter registration in California is 46.77% D, 23.93% R, 6.08 Other Party, 23.23% Independent.
It is... not competitive.
> The Public Policy Institute of California reported that between 2015 and 2021, 413,000 adults cited housing as a primary reason they moved out of state; a majority of those leaving were middle- or low-income people. The institute’s state survey found that 64% of adults in California say housing affordability is “a big problem” where they live. The out-migration may be partly attributable to work-from-home policies instituted during the pandemic
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2022/comm/perc...
I moved back at the beginning of 2022 though, primarily because SF had reopened enough. I suspect that there are many people like me, although I also suspect that this change is not going to reverse any time soon.
I don't know a lot about California politics, but maybe housing crisis is just a symptom of something more?
Furthermore, California rural areas will be even more severely, disproportionately UNDER-represented.
Making western nevada and much of the mojave habitable would go a long way. Artificial rivers and lakes, importing sand and desalination (at scale to develop more sustainable water systems not on its own) and bullet trains would be ideal. The money and tech is there just not the collective will.
Places like Parhump NV, Bishop CA and Reno,NV have huge potentia as population centers.
It's so nice there from the mojave to the eastern sierra range and tahoe. Bullet train connecting these areas to PNW and coastal CA plus more water is needed. Why wouldn't you live the towns I mentioned above if LA and SF are 1-2 hours away at most and Seattle is half a day away at most even from LA?
Cali is not very dense, most of it is suburban sprawl. The bay would be much more livable if it was 5x as dense.
To solve housing for millions, there simply is no realistic way anytime in the next few decades in coastal CA that is both profitable, can get past local law and scales enough to actually solve any problem and of course a ton of money would need to be available all while risking bad decisions by anti-development parties.
It's simply easier to build where there is a small number of people and wide undeveloped land.
I think we're at a major inflection point in society and need to make some MASSIVE intentional changes to how we live
The federal agency released these new numbers Thursday showing a third consecutive year of decline.
In 2020, California’s population contracted for the first time in state history, a drop that contributed to the state losing a seat in the House of Representatives.
(Btw, that is altogether way too long to wait.)
I tried to bootstrap the rent/mortgage trade off discussion to some older gen-Zers and millennials at work recently. Couldn’t get far at all until I got talked over about the financial superiority of owning. Frustrating times.