Two things that really shook my views on the last several years was (1) living in downtown DC for a year; and (2) traveling regularly to Texas. In DC we lived in Chinatown, which has been completely gentrified. Everyone was rich, and nobody had children (the local schools are still terrible). There was an extreme disparity between the (white and Asian) gentrifiers and the people of color they were displacing. Despite there being lots of white people, you almost never saw a white kid working a service job. (All this gave me flashbacks to Bangladesh, so I packed up and moved my family to somewhere less dysfunctional.)
Texas, especially East Texas, was the opposite. Thriving suburbs of people enjoying Big Box amenities. No Michelin star restaurants and lots of religion, but with much lower display of class and race distinctions. Tons of families with children. I encountered a cab driver in Austin who sang the city’s praises. He was from Morocco and had moved to the Austin suburbs about a decade ago. He and other cab drivers were able to buy three bedroom homes with pools in a good school district. He was living the American dream.
As to cost of living in California, that goes to my point. California isn’t “liberal capitalist” in terms of housing. It’s centrally planned in the extreme.
Yes, DC has a very dark past in that regard, but decades of progressivism hasn't fixed anything. And the most recent trend in the city has been yuppies who vote the right way and say the right things pushing out all the people of color, leaving a starkly segregated and stratified society. Meanwhile, given what's going on at the border, I don't think it's accurate to say that Texas doesn't have its own issues with respect to disenfranchised demographic groups. But the combination of cheap housing and plentiful jobs is allowing broad-based prosperity in Texas.
> Have you double clicked your experience as it relates to deep social issues - Texas has the lowest rate of insured for example. Or protections against LGBT rights or incarceration rates ?
There is a place to talk about social issues, but that's not what I'm talking about here. The material prosperity of the people in the middle is a really important thing too. Indeed, that is deeply inter-connected with social justice issues, such as how easy it is for immigrants to assimilate into the country and establish themselves.
Speaking as an immigrant myself, what was important to my family when we were first starting out wasn't the incarceration rate, or how our neighbors felt about people from Muslim countries like the one we came from. It was the fact that, on a middle class income, without my mom working, we could afford a decent house in a good school district. That's something that Texas delivers on, and that results in tangible prosperity even (especially?) among immigrant groups.
The median income for a hispanic household is just 2% higher in California than Texas, but the median house in California costs 3 times as much. If I were in my parents' shoes, trying to pick a place in this country to get started, I'd pick the suburbs of Houston or Dallas over the suburbs of San Francisco in a hearbeat. It wouldn't even be a question.
> California housing is the opposite of central planning. It is an outcome of intense democracy and a patch work of very local zoning laws.
That it's the product of democracy and local zoning laws doesn't mean it's not central planning. Californians have used democracy to create a zoning system that forces construction into centrally planned models. You can't renovate your house or build a new one (or, god forbid, turn your single family home into an apartment building) without going through a central bureaucracy. That bureaucracy considers things like the "zoning plan" and the "character of the neighborhood." That's central planning!
But I would caution you from contrasting this too much with how class differences and racial disparities manifest in more rural states. How the white working poor are treated by their “betters” (including the middle class) is often as vicious and cruel, but masked by a veneer of racial and cultural homogeneity. And the private, “dinner party” racism among middle class whites in these regions is amongst the most extreme and normalized I have ever witnessed. People do go a lot further to mask this though, hence things like the concept of “Midwestern nice.”
I fail to see how housing in California is centrally planned in anyway. It seems entirely defined by laws that protect incumbent property owners and developers, who then use their resulting wealth to buy off the government and protect this advantage. But maybe this is a difference in definitions because I mean “liberal Capitalism” in its lived, pragmatic, and arguably corrupt sense, not as a philosophical ideal.
As a brown person myself, I don't know what midwesterners say at dinner parties. But I also don't really care. "Midwestern nice" is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned. What is important, to me, is that it's a society that's flatter and more egalitarian than anything I've observed on the coasts. Middle class people aren't on the outside looking in, people aren't jockeying to send their kids to private schools or a handful of competitive magnets, those kids can get normal jobs and afford to live near where they grew up. You aren't defined by your job and there are institutions that draw broad swaths of society into shared experience. (Often, because there is no alternative--in small town Iowa, the surgeon's kid goes to the same high school as the farm worker's kid because that's the only high school.) And all that appears to pay real dividends in quantifiable statistics such as poverty rates and homelessness rates.
> I fail to see how housing in California is centrally planned in anyway.
If you need permission from the government to build anything, and permission is granted based on a central zoning plan, and you have to jump through hoops and follow detailed specifications on height limits, etc., that's central planning. By definition.
Fair enough, but that really doesn’t jive with my experience. I graduated from a class of 300 people in a farming community and many of my classmates I know have left because of an inability to find decent paying or meaningful work.
The nearest large town of about 100,000 people is in the middle of a housing crisis and has to grapple with all the same issues that large coastal cities have been dealing with for a decade. And they’re certainly not egalitarian about any of the solutions. Large, national real estate companies have moved in, developing primarily luxury stock, but also buying up existing housing and apartments to make sure prices and rents stay high. There’s all kinds of eliminationist rhetoric about the poor and homeless being tossed around (which honestly was always the case, even when I was a kid). Local politics are controlled by a handful of extremely wealthy families. They’re archly right-wing, which is different from the coast, but not really too much in terms of how much the poor are cared for. I looked up the stats for Texas and they seemed pretty bad on inequality, healthcare, etc.
> You aren't defined by your job and there are institutions that draw broad swaths of society into shared experience. (Often, because there is no alternative--in small town Iowa, the surgeon's kid goes to the same high school as the farm worker's kid because that's the only high school.)
Again, I really want to emphasize that just because it doesn’t seem as apparent to you doesn’t mean it’s there. In my very small school, the class distinctions were very sharp, even if we weren’t as easily segregated. That happened too, but mostly in the form of kids being sent off to expensive religious schools for middle and high school.
Wealthy kids bullied and mocked kids from families who were service workers. Everyone knew who lived in the trailer parks versus the subdivisions. Poorer, working farmers were mocked by those who had wealthy hobby farms (and often took care of animals like horses for the rich kids). It’s definitely a different tapestry of cruelty from city life, but it shouldn’t be romanticized or misunderstood in anyway.
> If you need permission from the government to build anything, and permission is granted based on a central zoning plan
Right, but there’s not a central zoning plan as far as I’m aware, there are many competing corrupt ones who seemingly stifle all but the most unaffordable development. A state-level, less restrictive, centralized zoning plan would probably actually be an improvement.
I’m just curious - are you from one of these places? Because the class distinctions you’re describing are very much in place in the same way as in big cities, they’re just mediated through many of the same forces. So you have the rich church and the poor church, but also god forbid if you’re poor and don’t go to church at all. The lowest of the low. And many people likewise just feign belief in this culture because the material circumstances are much worse on the outside than in.
As to your point about homelessness, given the cost of living in California, wouldn’t you expect people to be more prone to homelessness than in a place Kansas? Especially since wages are actually quite bad in California (for the median household), relatively speaking.
If you’re argument is that liberal Capitalism is more openly cruel than liberal Capitalism, mediated through religious in-groupings, I’d say sure, that’s possible.