Population growth without commensurate growth in housing. You can add people, but you gotta let them build houses. If you don't, then prices rise, for reasons that are very easy to understand if you're not financially (or otherwise) motivated to find them confusing.
I'll turn your phrasing around and say show me a city that makes it legal to build as much housing as people desire for 30 years that still has high prices and I'll consider your point of view. But until then, it seems to me that you're going to have to make it legal to build housing if you want more housing.
Same complaints: cost of living / taxes, quality of life, and kids' education.
The only thing keeping me here is my current job and clear opportunities for future [tech] jobs. If WFH became the norm, I'm out of here in 50 milliseconds. There are probably a lot of people like me.
Granted, $120k-150 for a single earner is plenty to live a good life in Texas, even in the cities (as long as you don't have excessive personal debts). Something to think about that I'm sure you've probably considered.
Anecdotal, but everyone I know who left California recently did so due to the high cost of housing, not because of their tax liabilities or a plastic straw ban. Kinda hard to be upset about having to give 9% of your income to the state when you have to give 50% if your income to the landlord (for an 80 year old, 350 sq ft studio heated by radiator in my case when I lived there).
Sorry for noseing-in, but could you elaborate on the part that affects the kids? What sort of factors are there, or what kind of expectations?
Where I will be moving to in TX has more diversity than where I live in San Francisco, which is something I am happy about. My children will be seeing more black & brown people in TX than San Francisco.
But hey, thanks for casually assuming racist motivations!
I'm not going to claim that SF is some amazingly perfect bastion of racial diversity, but if you're mainly only seeing and interacting with white and Asian people here, that speaks more to the circles you spend your time in than the city's diversity.
Other Bay Area cities have different distributions. For example Oakland is approximately 29% non-hispanic white, 26% hispanic, 23% black, 15% asian, 5% mixed, 1% other.
As an aside, I often cringe at arguments involving skin-deep diversity. I’ve lived in towns that bragged of diversity when in reality they tended toward the same monolithic affluent culture regardless of skin tone.
> As of the 2010 census, the ethnic makeup and population of San Francisco included: 390,387 whites (48%), 267,915 Asians (33%), 48,870 African Americans (6%), and others. There were 121,744 Hispanics or Latinos of any race (15%).
> In 2010, residents of Chinese ethnicity constituted the largest single ethnic minority group in San Francisco at 21% of the population; the other Asian groups are Filipinos (5%) and Vietnamese (2%).
So less than 5% Indian.
It runs counter to a lot of their narratives regarding diversity, immigration etc.
Maybe it's your neighborhood, some islands in the city look like a white suburb, like Noe Valley for example.
The typical home value of homes in California is $599,159. [1] The typical home value of homes in Texas is $224,065
California sales tax rate of 7.25% is higher than that of any other state, and its top marginal income tax rate of 13.3% is the highest state income tax rate in the country.
Texas has an 6.25% sales tax and no state income tax. [2]
California's per capita combined state and local taxes is ~$6,000 per person.
Texas's per capita combined state and local taxes is ~$4,000 per person
https://www.zillow.com/ca/home-values/
https://www.thecentersquare.com/texas/texas-residents-pay-8-...
1: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/529-Driscoll-Pl-Palo-Alto...
2: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/37-Colonel-Lindbergh-Ln-M...
Texas also exempts grocery store food purchases from sales tax, barring a few specific luxury categories, so that's something to keep in mind as well if you have a large family. Saving 8% on food could be a decent chunk of change for a lot of families. Restaurant food is still taxed at the normal rate.
California does this too. That said, food prices are higher in California because the local cost of living is factored into all prices.
It's not uncommon to find decent homes in decent neighborhoods well below that average (I'm in a north Houston suburb, in a 1600 sqft corner lot 3/2 that's currently around $160k)
It's a particularly egregious statement given that people the world over (myself included) would love to retire in California some day due to the wonderful weather, the abundance of high-quality food and the lovely ocean next door, not to mention the world-class in-state universities, and the abundant employment opportunities. Yes, SF is expensive, and perhaps it makes sense to move out, but leaving California altogether is a whole other kettle of fish. Resorting to Texas as being significantly better given its poor social safety net, open-carry laws, wide variation in schooling based on neighbourhood wealth, well "significantly better" starts to look downright fishy.
Thankfully you're not owed an explanation of what someone deems to be a significantly better option to another.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/1/26/14340542/wh...
I understand it's an uncomfortable discussion, and I'm happy to stop, although I personally think these discussions are worth having as there are some fundamental issues around diversity and inclusion at play here. For the record, I have not once claimed it's motivated by racism.
> Texas is still predominantly white. I'm wondering if that is the unstated preference here.
Sure, you didn't actually claim it was motivated by racism, you just wondered it out loud.
I think it's pretty amusing the only conclusion you can come to for why a person would possibly move from California to Texas is because of race. If CA has a kool-aid you've been drinking it.
I love where I live, in Colorado. I would not move to California. I'm not racist though, I promise.
[citation needed]
When I type “california public schools” into DuckDuckGo, the top suggestion is “california public schools bad.” Accepting this, the top three results are:
① “California schools were once the nation's envy. What went wrong?”
> The enormous strike in Los Angeles paints a grim picture of wealthy state that is struggling to fund its education system
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jan/19/california...
② “Are California Schools the Worst in the Nation?”
> Roughly speaking, there’s the usual mix of good ones and bad ones, and overall they’re about average.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/01/are-californi...
③ “California Is Home to Some of America's Worst Public Schools”
> In fact, a spokeswoman for WalletHub says, “California has the 12th worst school system in America.”
> The study was based on 17 metrics, including student-to-teacher ratio, dropout rates and average SAT and ACT scores. Compared with the other 49 states and the District of Columbia, California ranked 47th in reading test scores, 46th in math test scores and dead last in student-teacher ratios.
https://www.laweekly.com/california-is-home-to-some-of-ameri...
According to https://www.forbes.com/sites/reneemorad/2020/08/04/states-wi..., Texas public schools rank 28th in the nation, while California’s are now №37.
The local -> state change to the funding structure in CA a few decades ago has benefitted previously grossly underfunded schools in poorer cities, but it is a trade-off for sure. Arguably almost all of the schools statewide are now underfunded.
One problem with funding schools at the state level is that it has made it very difficult to increase school funding, because it requires support from across the state to raise taxes for it, and (a) most people in the USA are generally opposed to any taxes that they can’t see immediate direct benefit from, and (b) Prop 13 makes the bar for tax increases very high.
> Texas is still predominantly white.
Texas is big, it's not monolithic, percentage of ethic origins varies widely geographically. Also have you ever been to Texas, or anywhere. Your comments come off as extremely naive / opinions learned from online rather than experience.
You might have to adjust your statistics regionally for income. Middle class in California is upper middle class everywhere else, even adjusting for salary reduction. Leaving California put us in the 90th percentile for family income in our new region even accounting for change in salary, vs 75th back in the South Bay. That opens up a lot more opportunity for leisure and better schools - we don't have to live in a middling caliber town or neighborhood anymore.
Also, owning a home is a massive improvement in quality of life. Something we couldn't do in California. No more shared walls, a garage, a home office, backyard, basement hobby space, spare bedroom, nursery... I would have to double or triple my take home pay (not everyone takes equity to pay down a mortgage) to have the same quality of home in my old neighborhood than I do today.
Weather is meh, we can afford central heating and cooling and there aren't wildfires that turn the air to poison for days at a time. Snow be damned.
I really wish more homes in Texas had basements, but they add a lot of unnecessary costs to the building that aren't required for code reasons. Plus, then you can spend that money above ground increasing your living area. Unfortunately, most people don't factor in the extra expense of cooling more above ground space, whereas a basement would hold the temperature better. I'd reckon after a decade or so, the energy savings of putting some extra square footage in a basement would event out.
I would recommend anyone building a new home have their basement on a separate HVAC zone, or else the heat rises in the winter and space heaters aren't a great solution.
Our situation in California let us offer everything except stability. Younger kids are fine anywhere as long as their parents are involved, but older kids benefit from social stability so they have time and space to define who they are.
I.e., if the school determines network and schools don’t contribute much to achievement, doesn’t it imply scholastic network effects have limited value?
I sometimes wonder is we dedicate too much mindspace to the wrong area and rationalize our choices
Implying that moving out of California is racist is quite the take.
>California has: Better schools across all grades
No, it doesn't. For example, USNWR ranks TX public schools #33 and CA #37:
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education
More generally, public schools in many affordable parts of California are severely underfunded due to Proposition 13, while the statewide average is boosted by high-ranking schools in ultra-expensive cities like Palo Alto. Texas has less inequality between public schools and has earned international recognition for its Ten Percent Law:
>41.4% Non-Hispanic White
4.8%. that sure makes a world of difference.
I'm wondering if you're implying that there's something wrong with having such a preference though. You have provided some interesting statistics, would you mind if I did so as well?
A cynic would see this as a dog-whistle for "too many Asians/Hispanics/foreigners". (And I have actually heard a white person here in California say that about the schools.)
I suspect though you mean something else.
It's remarkable how "I don't like the Bay Area" translates so easily to "racist dogwhistle".
Quality of life means things like:
- "there are children in my neighborhood"
- "I don't need to keep looking over my shoulder at the playground with my children"
- "I can get a 15-yr mortgage on a house that is 2000 sqft, be financially stable, and safely deal with recurring large medical expenses that we will always have due to pre-existing conditions"
- Massive seasonal forest fires that have become normalized
- Risk (however small) of a catastrophic earthquake
- Dangerous public transport
- Piles of feces, needles, and general filth on (some) city sidewalks
- Daily bumper-to-bumper traffic on freeways from 8AM-11AM and 1PM-6PM
- Extreme regulatory burden and cost of normal things like starting a business, building a home or addition, and owning firearms
Although in all fairness, I am not aware of the drug situation in other parts of the country.