In a place like Hillsborough or Palo Alto, there may be some hope of a retired or free-time competent executive being a local resident and doing a good job for non-economic reasons. Ghetto parts of SoCal, though, have little risk of that happening.
You get good government when there is enough of a media market to pay for people to spend all day, every day, tracking government. The USFG has that.
Richmond, Hercules, Pinole, El Cerrito, San Pablo and El Sobrante don't.
Occasionally you get lucky and get someone like Bloomberg heading up your municipal government, but even with prestigious gigs like that (the mayor of New York is arguably a more important person than most Governors) quality people are still few and far between.
San Diego (especially in the suburbs) has much more of an anti-tax climate than most of California, so I'd guess this is more an attempt by a politician or school board faction to increase services without increasing taxes, George W. Bush-style, with the bill coming due later.
The subprime mortgage crisis was built on respectable hard-working middle-class families that were persuaded to take on debt like this for their own homes.
It doesn’t have exact numbers, but the tl;dr is that people from every income bracket were taking out subprime mortgages, including middle- and upper-class people who could qualify for prime mortgages but wanted to borrow even more.