So, how does driving through the interior with apparently zero knowledge of what the relevant goals are do anything to inform you of whether cities are meeting them.
> When I stop for lunch or a break I like to check out the local real estate scene and its often the case in these cities that there are many houses and other living accommodations available at modest prices.
Modest for you, perhaps. Modest for the incomes in the area? Probsbly less so. In any case, does this tell you anything about whether they are meeting the needs assessments that look at availability in multiple levels? Probably not.
> Hard to imagine a city like Mojave not meeting it "goal".
Mojave is a “census-designated place” in unincorporated Kern County; it not a city or other jurisdiction of its own subject to the targets; Kern County is (the headline about cities is wrong, jurisdictions subject to the targets include both cities and counties, the latter for their unincorporated areas.)
Kern County is among those not meeting targets, though only in the Above Moderate income Regional Housing Needs Assessment, not the Low or Very Low income assessments.
1. What do you consider modest prices?
2. What exactly do you do to check out the local real estate scene?
Because I recently left California to get off the street after moving around California a bit in search of affordable living and doing like 3 years of research, and my point of view and yours are so not on the same page, they aren't even in the same book.
Modest is $150K to $200K for a home. I get there this way; At a salary of $48,000 / year (take home $38,753) and allocating a bit less than a third of the take home to paying the mortgage that is about $1K/month or, at current interest rates a $150K - $200K house. $48K/year is about 60% of the median salary in California.
As far as checking out the scene I look at things like how many days on the market for properties that are for sale, infrastructure (markets, transportation, nominal weather, services, crime statistics, Etc) all the kinds of things that I normally would check if I were moving there.
My experience has been that people who are more comfortably well off than I am are not really looking very closely at the details of homes when they survey the lower end homes. I have had conversations with people who claim there is tons of affordable housing and they pull up some low priced listing in Detroit, a city in such a state of crisis that a woman created a non profit to pay water bills there. I have looked at listings in Detroit. The dirt cheap listings I looked at while homeless were mostly a case of "Oh, god, no! I would rather keep sleeping in a tent!" I am talking about burned out husks or houses that had been flooded and now had horrifying mold problems.
Things I was looking for in a house as someone in genuine need of affordable housing:
In walking distance of basics like a grocery store or, at minimum, able to get to such cheaply and efficiently via public transit.
I want something at $100k or less that can qualify for financing. When you look at a lot of super cheap housing, it is cash only and has defects that disqualify it from any kind of bank financing. I have seen houses listed that explicitly said "No foundation. Will not qualify for financing."
A single family detached house that is not a trailer where the price includes both house and land. When buying a trailer you are frequently buying only the trailer, not the land it sits on, and it is located in a trailer court where you have additional rental fees for being on that land on top of the purchase price of the trailer.
I want a modest home in decent shape. I don't mind a fixer, but a lot of cheap housing in the US has major defects that will cost serious money to remedy. It is a sucker's deal. You should not buy a house like that because budget matters. You buy a house like that because it has amazing views or historic significance or something and you have deep pockets. Poor people buying that kind of house are getting stiffed.
I basically want the kind of house I grew up in, something that affords one a lower middle class life with security and financial stability and a future. And it is extremely challenging to find that anywhere in the US. I concluded it does not exist in California. A lot of lower end housing is trailers and condos and stuff being sold as a tear down because it survived a fire.
So the next time you survey local real estate, maybe consider looking a little more closely at the details. Because your opinion that this is not really a problem in California flies in the face of countless articles about the affordable housing crisis in the state that routinely make the front page of HN. There is lots of homelessness there and people getting roommates to be able to afford a place at all. And I have difficulty fathoming how you can so cavalierly ignore the overwhelming evidence and pronounce this not really a problem.
I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. I have formal education and have done a lot of reading related to this. It is not an uninformed opinion.
I would still be interested in the OPs answer. I wasn't just living on the coast or researching coastal communities before finally looking elsewhere and ultimately leaving.
I (coming from Europe) travelled on the East and West coast and both times was astounded by how much US living relies on having a car. I'm myself pretty anti-car-ownership by now, but I think this is much easier to do in European cities.
One of the reasons I ended up here: I had no problem arranging to get here affordably and efficiently via train and intercity bus. Many of the small towns I researched in the western half of the US were a case of "Good luck trying to get there!" and/or would have cost a great deal more just to get there, on the order of two to three times what it cost me for train and bus tickets to get here just for tickets. And the reality is that if you travel for a couple of days or so, you want the sleeper car if possible or to stay at a hotel at some point, etc. Thus,the places that are that hard to get to wind up having additional expenses involved in just getting there.
An additional benefit of that is that I don't feel trapped here. If I want to go somewhere for any reason, whether for travel or to move again, getting out of here without a car is not some intimidating obstacle. I can readily get on an intercity bus and go to a variety of places in this region. I haven't looked into it, but I imagine it would not be too hard to get to the Seattle Tacoma International Airport and, from there, out into the world.
I was a military wife for a lot of years. I like living within a couple of hours of a major city and a major airport. I have not flown in years, but I have friends and family all over the planet and I always keep it in mind that I might need access to the ability to seriously travel.
Many years ago, I previously lived in Richland, WA and its downtown center was fairly pedestrian friendly as well. I don't know how easily you could get there without a car. It did not make my radar for where to go to get off the street.
Very affordable by coastal standards, but with very low incomes by coastal standards, too. Which somewhat offsets the affordability, unless you are talking about, e.g., long-distance commuters working in the Bay Area.
Nevertheless, yes, the interior is better at meeting the targets for Low and Very Low income affordable housing as specified in the report finding the 97.6% miss rate; lots of the interior jurisdictions are only missing on the Above Modest income targets. (Though there are exceptions, e.g., Fresno County also misses on the lower income targets.)
Anything under 300K? How about 200K? A fraction of the Bay area doesn't necessarily mean affordable.
This is part of why I want details. I need a house under $100k. After looking at what that kind of money buys in Cali -- anywhere in Cali -- and looking at what it buys outside of Cali, I eventually concluded it made more sense to go elsewhere. If you can't afford at least $200k in Cali, you can expect it to be a shithole. It would undermine my fragile health and also need ten's of thousands of dollars worth of work. I am happy to buy a fixer, but not one that will ruin my health and my finances.
I don't even need employment prospects. I have alimony and I make my money online. So that wasn't even a factor, and, no, it didn't fly in Cali.
It really is the middle of nowhere, despite being the fifth most populous city in the state.
But, you say, how can that be: the bigger cities are all embedded in even bigger urban clusters [0]. Fresno is, well, in the middle of nowhere.
[0] And even the smaller central cities; Sacramento, is a little smaller than Fresno if you look at the city itself, but the metro area is a time and a half the Fresno metro area.
Anecdotally, a of my friend moved from the Bay Area to Fresno and explicitly claims it's in the middle of nowhere.
Music events at Woodward Park often attracted women in shorts or skirts and cowboy boots. Culturally, the city reads sort of like half a million farmers and ranchers decided to move to the suburbs.
It is a fairly unique city, with an international airport and multiple national forests nearby. But "check out the natural beauty of our great outdoors!" is typically a small town or rural marketing pitch, not the pitch of a major city.
Last I checked, it was the 5th largest city in California and I think the 34th largest in the US. So I think there are 20 US states that don't have a city of that size. The entire state of Wyoming, our least populous state, has about the same number of people as the city of Fresno, in the neighborhood of about a half million apiece.
Fresno is a very unusual city and I think most people can't really relate to it. I spent considerable time baffled by its terrible reputation and simultaneously trying to wrap my mind around the place. It isn't like most big cities.
It has a terrible reputation for air quality. I found that weird when I lived there because I could see the stars at night better than anyplace else I had lived. On the other hand, moving elsewhere has dramatically improved my health. So, in retrospect, I think there are serious environmental issues there, though I am not entirely sure what they are because I remain baffled by the idea that air quality there is extremely bad when the stars are so much more visible than I am used to.
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Bakersfield-CA/3506_ri...
You're telling OP to live in hell and it still costs more than they can afford.
> Between 1970 and 2010, Bakersfield grew 400% (from 70,000 to 347,483),[33] making it one of the fastest growing cities in California.[17]
It can't be too much hell if so many people want to live there that the population quadrupled in 40 years.
Here, I found another example: > Between 1968 and 1975 the Dubai's population grew by over 300%
Maybe OP could find a sweet oil job there!
I don't know if you realize it, but oil is, in fact, a big part of the economy in Bakersfield. And air quality is terrible because of it.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=bakersfield+economy+oil&FORM=E...
I think its unfair to censor one political view and not the other political views.
Zero. It has zero to do with how California treats its most vulnerable immigrant population, and everything to do with how California funds its schools.
The Berkeley CA School board recently had to make hard choices in its yearly budget. Berkeley is one of the wealthiest cities in the state. It was forced to slash safety officers and special programs due to a $2 million dollar budget shortfall. Less than the cost of a house. [1] America funds its schools primarily via property taxes, so Proposition 13, a measure that freezes that tax revenue, keeps $2 million dollar properties taxed as though they were valued at ~$100,000. It ensures California schools will always be begging to meet the needs of the state's growing population. [2]
[1] http://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/02/09/berkeley-school-board...
[2] https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler/status/962425686039306240
The education "debate" reminds me of the healthcare "debate" in which the sole issue debated is whether we should spend more money on it. The irony is is that we already spend plenty compared to other countries and in many cases get worse results.
We could adapt Japanese or Korean systems for teaching math and science, but that would be way too creative.
[1] https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.... [2] https://www.facethefactsusa.org/facts/money-cant-buy-genius
Also let's do some math shall we. California has 12.3% illegal immigrant student population. Remove them and the same funds that currently exist would be funding 87.7% the current student population.
California currently spends $8,694/student. If you remove the illegal immigrants that becomes 8,694/0.877 = ~9913/student. Not great but a $1219/student gain in funds isn't shabby either. FYI california has ~6 Million k-12 students, or in other words the illegals are costing tax payers 6.66 Billion/year in k-12 education.
Now reducing our student population by 12.3% would also mean reducing the number of schools. There's likely even greater savings as not everything scales horizontally / sub-horizontally.
https://ed100.org/lessons/whopays https://edsource.org/2017/how-does-california-rank-in-per-pu...
2. Some of the kids of unauthorized immigrants are US citizens, if they were born in the US, so your number 12.3% is not accurate. That is the number who's parents are unauthorized.
Edit: According to the source you cite, 80% of the children of unauthorized immigrants are US citizens, much higher than I expected. [1]
3. With proper education, these children will grow up to be productive, contributing members of society as doctors, engineers, etc. They will grow the US economy and pay taxes.
[1] http://www.pewhispanic.org/interactives/unauthorized-immigra...: "Children of unauthorized immigrants made up 7.3% of U.S. students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade in 2014, though the share varies by state. Most (5.9%) are U.S.-born children who are U.S. citizens at birth. The rest (1.3%) are unauthorized immigrants themselves."
It's unlikely the parents pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits like free schooling for their kids.
And at the same time by working here they illegally decrease wages and jobs for the most marginalized Americans.
> Some of the kids of unauthorized immigrants are US citizens
They wouldn't be here in the first place if we enforced our immigration laws.
> With proper education, these children will grow up to be productive
Not with current levels of funding they won't.
And I don't see any political will in California to double the education spending per child.
A couple things to consider:
1) This is a nit pick, but remember that many of these children likely have a parent who is a green card holder or US citizen, and another parent who is an unauthorized citizen.
2) More importantly, these children are here, and they are citizens. You can't (or at least, modern societies should not) retroactively revoke citizenship. There are two separate questions here: first is how do we handle/regulate immigration into the country, and second is what do we do about people who are already here? These are related but separate issues. Figuring out how to educate children of unauthorized immigrants is part of the second question.
Edit:
> Not with current levels of funding they [children of unauthorized immigrants] won't [become doctors and lawyers]
It takes time. The America dream works across multiple generations. Studies show that 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants have much higher income than their parents: for example the median income goes from $45k to $58k from 1st to 2nd generation [1]
[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/second-generation-...
Without solving the illegal immigration problem any fix to the education problem only increases strain on the system.
California has shown no political will to solve the underlying problem of illegal immigration.
> Figuring out how to educate children of unauthorized immigrants is part of the second question.
We (royal we) know how - it will just take time and a lot of money.
Nobody wants to spend that money unless it's for a long term fix.
In the mean time the poor and middle class Americans in California get poorer (or in many cases leave the state).
> It takes time. The America dream works across multiple generations
The American dream is not magic or inevitable.
Like any complex ecosystem it's only sustainable up to a limit.
There is significant evidence we are well past that limit.
I think it's a mistake to assign the educational benefits people receive (whatever age they are at the time) to their parents.
The money has to come from somewhere.
It is a parents duty to provide for their kids.
We have a welfare system that can step in when the parents can't take responsibility and this system only works when those parents are a small minority.
This strategic description really grinds my gears.
I see no problem in providing a counterbalancing perspective. After all, it can be simultaneously true that these people have immigrated illegally and that they are among the most vulnerable. Issues like this are complex, and there aren't easy answers. To wit: what about US-born children - do we now split up families in service of proving a moral point? What about the opportunities for children in diverse schools to learn from other cultures and viewpoints? There's also the longstanding "no human is illegal" debate.
(As you may have guessed by this point, my own bias is globalist / humanitarian. I'd argue we have a moral duty to help those in need, and that it is fallacious to argue this necessarily takes resources away from others because that presumes economics, aid, etc. are zero-sum games. I also think, in a practical sense, that many of our laws around residency, immigration, etc. ignore the reality of an increasingly mobile and globalized world, and that the sooner we can transcend nationalist bullshit the better. Finally: I believe that American prosperity has had a net extractive effect on much of the rest of the world for the past century, much like the colonial empires of yore. Moral / reparative dimensions of that aside, it certainly creates a less peaceful world.)
I'm not sure I could disagree with you more on a lot of what you said, but it doesn't grind any gears to read your opinion because I doubt you copy/pasted that from a VICE article. I really think you've thought about that, and that is your opinion. It does worry me that there doesn't seem to be any common ground though.
We have walked backwards as a society, by putting people in power that would consider even that level of humanity to be too great a political burden to bear.
> we just parrot
Not a parrot, by any means. These people are every bit as real as my neighbors and friends. It's far too easy to fall into a silo when you take a narrow view and consider only the past decade of migrant history. Consider that: before 2003, ICE did not exist. That the first of our immigration laws: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, was rooted in white supremacist ethnocentrism.
Consider: in pursuit of the foreign bogeyman, we have crafted a system of authoritative overreach that extends into a region occupied by 2/3s of our nation's population:
https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone
On the rest, we likely have common ground somewhere; so far, I've stated my position without any nuance, to make its broad outlines relatively clear. Let's start with some extreme examples: we probably agree that no single country can support the entire world's population alone. We probably also agree that nationalism run amok can have terrible consequences, regardless of its potentially beneficial aspects. Most people would generally help out friends / relatives in need, provided they had the means (financial, emotional, logistical, or whatever else it takes) to do so - so we likely have some common ground there.
Other common points that come up in discussions like these...I would agree that some people contribute more than others to society. OTOH, I think we can't necessarily know ahead of time who will contribute more or less - in an immigration context, attempts to do so have a long history fraught with racism and xenophobia. (See: Angel Island near SF, Chinese Exclusion Act, refusing Jewish refugees during WW2, etc.)
And that isn’t a moral judgement of any of those individuals, it’s just a reality that negative social conditions have a big impact on schools in particular. The wealthier schools aren’t just doing better because they have more money per student, they’re doing better because the kids that go there have a better social environment. You could pour 5x the money into the worst schools in the country and you wouldn’t be able to make a big improvement because the schools are not the root cause of the terrible social conditions in those communities.
I doubt it's poverty, I grew up very very poor (as many of my classmates did). Didn't stop me from getting good education.
The majority of LA's Latino / Illegal Immigrant student body failed their standardized tests.
66% failed english language arts
76% failed math
And Latino's also had ~5% more kids failing than the average of LA's Scores. Its a fair argument that removing this population from the schools increase the % of kids who pass these tests by more than 5%.
" The percentage of LA’s Latino students who met or exceeded state academic expectations this year:
34 percent in English language arts, less than 1 percentage point higher than in 2016 24 percent in math, less than 1 percentage point higher than in 2016 The district’s overall average this year was 39.55 percent in English language arts and 29.86 in math. The percentage of Latino students in California who met or exceeded standards this year:
26.05 percent in English language arts, the same as in 2016 16.89 percent in math, slightly lower than in 2016 The state’s overall average this year was 48.56 percent in English language arts and 37.53 percent in math. "
You seem to be conflating two groups: "illegal" immigrants, and Latinos. They are separate groups.
> Its a fair argument that removing this population from the schools increase...
While this is true, this is also the type of ethnic engineering that isn't acceptable in modern society in the United States. We don't remove ethnic populations in order to increase a test score number.
If latino's are scoring poorly, then removing some % of them (due to their illegal immigrant status) would raise test scores overall.
> While this is true, this is also the type of ethnic engineering that isn't acceptable in modern society in the United States. We don't remove ethnic populations in order to increase a test score number.
Hu? I never was talking about ethnic engineering. I was talking about enforcing our immigration laws.
Sure, but you can't use generic statistics about Latinos—who in California are mostly not immigrants, much less illegal, and pretend they are specifically about illegal immigrants, or even accurate for illegal immigrants (fallacy of division.)
The source you cite gives numbers for Latinos and English Learners, neither of which are equivalent to “illegal immigrants”.
As other people have pointed out, if California wants to lead then the state should be something to admire. And being 42nd out of 50 on K-12 education and highest poverty rate, aren't good things to lead with. Lots of opportunities to improve.