There is a part of California that still has ancient telegraph lines complete with weathered copper with the blueish colour. Nobody has come by to scrap it yet. So it’s really a matter of proximity to wherever antisocial people choose to live.
Bet you if copper price suddenly went up 10x, those ancient telegraph lines would disappear very quickly, one way or another (turns out, "criminals" and "junkies" and "entrepreneurs" are driven by similar incentives, they just sit at different points of the cost/risk tradeoff spectrum).
I think a lot of people don’t realize you can go 2-2.5 hours out side of SF and be in CA MAGA country.
40% is not “near half” - it’s closer to 33% than it is 50% and I think we would both (rightfully) object to me saying “near 1/3rd.” 50% and 40% are very different numbers.
Also, that 40% figure is based on their own definition, not something that is broadly accepted.
I mean, this is pretty solvable if the political will was there to upzone large areas of low-density housing around the Bay and LA...
The fact that these areas are highly competitive is what keeps them desireable.
When I was in Cali, I lived in Tracy, Stockton, and outside Sacremento because while I was a tech worker, I wasn't a top 1% tech worker. Not everyone needs to live in the Bay.
If low density is the crucial factor in determining desirability, why aren't Manhattan apartments basically free and tiny houses in rural Montana being sold for tens of millions?
Did you commute into the Bay?
Because by my count, Stockton to SF or Stockton to Menlo Park is a 3-hours/day commute. 3 hours/day on the highway may be surviving, but it sure as shit isn't living (just in case anyone from outside the US thinks this is an extreme outlier, I worked with a number of QA folks in the Bay who had commutes this bad, or worse)
I made about half as much as my co-workers (I was contract) but I took home more due to the difference in living expenses. Also, I had a house instead of an apartment.
Now, decades later, I have no desire to be anywhere "trendy" or "hip". I want affordability, stability, space, and quiet.
Sometimes it feels like they are well funded but the people running the programs live in a (very expensive) dream world that has no connection to the actual need.
California has social services. They are not sufficient for the scale of the problem. On top of this there's little incentive for states to build out full social nets when there's open borders between states. This is a job for the federal government and nothing else will be sufficient.
Are we going to discover that, by some striking surprise, antisocial people choose to live in places with weaker social support?