Property costs are high because NIMBY blocking denser housing. Traffic is bad because housing density is too low for the population. Homelessness is bad because houses are too expensive.
Wildfires and earthquakes are the only problems not self inflicted
Massive wildfires (vs small distributed fires) are the result of the policy framework that (a) prohibits preventative controlled burns (b) requires immediate containment of any new fire. The old (more flammable) undergrowth never has a chance to burn off and free up the space for (less flammable) new generation.
As a result CA is one of the most polluting states in the nation as far as co2 emissions https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-wildfires-ca...
Trees trap carbon. When they die, trees release carbon. Unless you bury dead trees underground (e.g. as paper, furniture, etc., in deep landfills), in terms net amount of carbon capture, there's no difference between a massive forest fire, periodic controlled burns, decay, etc.
They differ in time cycles. Even a sequoia will eventually die and release its carbon back into the atmosphere.
There's this myth that forests somehow reduce carbon in the atmosphere. Left to themselves, they store carbon, but they can't capture carbon. They're carbon-neutral. If you cut them down and release the carbon, you have a one-time emission. If you plant new ones, you have a one-time carbon capture.
The only real net change to CO2 comes from:
1) Extracting dinosaur-era carbon, and releasing it.
2) How we handle our waste. Ironically, composting releases all the plant carbon eventually, while burying it underground stores some carbon away from the atmosphere.
More buildings should be constructed from wood, less from concrete, which itself causes major co2 emissions.
I believe the way it's performed elsewhere is a controlled burn after the older trees had been felled. The burn is for the undergrowth.
My age group is at the age of looking to put roots down and have children. For many of us it makes more sense to leave than to wait 10-20 years and hope things get better.
But most of you don't leave because of family who live in CA - the very people who prevent any fixes to the situation, in the first place.
Certainly just increasing density with no other controls just increases traffic congestion.
The best approach would be increasing density while decreasing reliance on personal transportation.
https://www.transformca.org/transform-blog-post/our-take-gre...
Only if you don't need to go to work. Which is working wonderfully in pandemic era. I can pretty much walk anywhere I could need in terms of stores and services.
But jobs, unless you work in one of those stores or services, are of course far away, not in the middle of denser housing. Tech company campus won't be between housing rows.
My town has built tons of housing over the last two decades. Offices are still in the industrial campuses farther away and all that new housing means tons of new local traffic. Uncomfortable but true.
It used to be 2 minutes and one stoplight to get to the highway. Now it is 7 stoplights and up to 15 minutes to get to the highway (from the same house).
It would be wonderful if for every new housing block there was an adjacent office complex block, so most people can walk to work, but that's not how it goes. So in practice, yes, increased housing density just means tons new traffic to fight through.
Hopefully I can just remain work from home forever!
Now it’s possible (maybe) for many more people (although they’ll need larger housing units).
Fancy way to say 'car'.
Take New York as an example. Limited land area. Lots of money. Drove up density and has a low reliance on cars and has an ok public transportation system.
Everywhere else it’s just cheap as hell to buy land and build. California is getting to the point now that some areas are expensive and density is increasing. But its also easy for people to just move somewhere else still
Transport infrastructure (roads, buses, railroads, trams), housing, everyday service infrastructure (supermarkets, medical services, restaurants, haircutters) and employment infrastructure needs to be planned holistically or you're just shifting between problems - in the case of only going for denser housing, you'll lower homelessness a bit but get traffic issues in return.
And on top of that, city planning needs to take entrenched interests into account. Often enough NIMBYist complaints are founded in real fears of exploding traffic or a loss in property value - but these can be counteracted and compensated, if one is willing to.
Dense industrial areas are hard
I'd love that too, but it's not happening. FAANG isn't building their new HQ campus into the first floor of a new apartment complex. It'll be where it'll be and we'll have to fight through ever increasing traffic to get there.
You could build a million homes in the middle of nowhere and you’d wind up with a million empty houses.
Even if people are saying this, what they actually do is quite different. People in CA moving out are generally moving into other metropolitan areas or smaller cities. They're not living some kind of Stardew Valley fantasy in the fields.
Thats the issue with your approach. Supply and demand will cause housing in an area to be knocked down and replaced with denser housing. Townhouses, apartments, skyscrapers eventually.
In some places this natural replacement cycle is feircly resisted and local governments are bent to the will of incumbents.
HN leans heavily liberal but this is one place where conservative "small government" lack of regulations works better. In liberal areas local residents will co-opt the systems for making local regulations to protect their own investments. In conservative areas it's more difficult to NIMBY your way to halt development.
Self-identified liberals are more receptive to nearby apartments than self-identified conservatives.
But the bigger effect is homeowners versus those in apartments. People in apartments are far more supportive of new apartments, and homeowners are less supportive, and this effect is bigger than the political divide.
There's less space but you can always build up. But none of the Cali cities allow this. That's why despite California's huge population you don't see any cities with skyscrapers and traffic is so bad.
Building upwards also solves the transportation issues.
Look at places like Tokyo and Singapore in comparison to Cali coasts. They're are all space constrained but these places managed to fit 20X the people in the same space and they still don't have Cali level traffic problems
As an aside, I came across a Tokyo density map overlaid on a map of CA (Greater Tokyo Area, not just the city of Tokyo) and it would be like taking the entire population of CA and condensing it into the city of Los Angeles.
Water usage in my small, coastal, mountain constrained town has decreased even as population has increased and number of connections to the water system have increased.
Check out page two of this PDF for the statewide picture; our use statewide urban water usage is going down, from a peak in 1995, even as our population increases:
https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/...
I first became aware of this when lots of people were complaining about water use for a new apartment complex that included below-marker-rate units, as it seemed preposterous that <100 new apartments could have any significant impact, especially when the alternative is for the same people to live further out in bigger places that need more watering of lawns.
Turns out that our city's urban water use had decreased quite a bit, despite a slowly growing population, as shown on page 25 of this PDF:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20484267-2020-annual...
There's a lot of really bad and environmentally counterproductive thought from the 1970s that needs to be fact checked. People don't require a fixed amount of resources, they require a fixed amount of services, and we have gotten better and better at providing those same services with far less resources.
This is the same as the hard energy versus soft energy debate from around the same time period. We don't care about total energy available to a person, we care about the services that the energy provides. So things like greater efficiency through insulating homes, switching to more efficient lights, etc, doesn't actually result in more energy usage.
The same surprising (to some) result applies for water, apparently! Swapping out all those old, bad water fixtures, and being better about lawn watering, makes a huge impact.
PG&E?
But instead of going there people prefer the big established cities elsewhere
I've never lived there, but I bet the east and west sides of lake Tahoe have similar quality of life, similar amenities, similar schools, but living just a few km across a border could mean you keep thousands more per year of your compensation.
Yeah, the thing is there are political and regulatory efforts to deal with these, but most people don't hear/read about them, unless they are super wonky.
So the people who tend to get involved are the wealthy people who benefit financially from the outcome, and the occasional non profit. The latter is where you can actually make an impact for good.
Check out https://cayimby.org/ and take part in their campaigns/petitions, and tell your friends to do so.
They have a great track record in terms of housing bills, and an associated organization that is suing communities that are blocking affordable housing.
Mental health, housing and drugs.
Up and down the west coast.
It's impossible to solve homelessness with homelessness nonprofits, government programs for the homeless, as it's an outgrowth of factors like a high cost of living, generational poverty,the working poor lacking a living wage where they can save for emergencies, a lack of social welfare and health care programs, abusive homes, etc.
You have new people who were living paycheck to paycheck who are going to become homeless. Happens all the time.
You have queer and trans youths running away from abusive homes.
So lots of people being added regularly to the homeless population. And of course chronic homeless... because it becomes harder to get back on your feet the longer you are homeless.
The thing that really kills me, and I'm not exactly a marxist or anything, but there is absolutely enough money in America to solve homelessness, enough land to build on and enough money to build the homes. There is enough food to feed everyone (and 1 in 5 US families report not having enough food during covid 19).
We just don't distribute our resources well. The already wealthy got richer during covid 19, while many other Americans slipped deeper into debt/poverty, etc.
So yeah, we are left with our tax dollars funding these issues, because the system is set up to the benefit of some people, and to the detriment of others. And that's not just the way the world is, not some natural state of things, it's how our institutions and culture and laws and financial systems have been made in the US, and how they have been maintained and advanced by interested parties.
It doesn't have to be this way.
These are solvable problems, difficult but managible, which is why I encourage people to actually get involved, write letters, donate, organize and lobby, etc.
It's evident that the free market has failed to house people appropriately, and also evident that it would be cheaper and easier to solve homelessness with state-provided housing first solutions.
Not taking this action is "allowing a homelessness industry to exist".
Growing up, it had been explained that racism was what other people did. Certainly not us.
Everyone's the hero of their own story.
Or the US ended the trade embargo with China?
Or Walt Disney World opened in Florida?
With the passage of the Fair Housing Act, cities embarked upon thorough downzonings to prevent any new construction and "preserve neighborhood character" by not allowing more affordable forms of housing like townhomes and condos.
Prior to the downzonings, zoning capacity was very free, there's a great graph of LA's zoned capacity versus population over time, and it starts decreasing from many many multiples of population, and as population rises it falls to barely more than population. This sort of extremely tight constraint on housing, allowing it only in very certain areas, and in particular only if there is no small subset of homeowners that oppose it, is a huge change from the past.
You can also see similar evidence pretty much all over the Bay Area too. A six story apartment building in the Sunset may exist now, but could never be build now because of downzoning. You'll find lots of older duplexes in some parts of the Bay Area, similarly outlawed now.
This sort of planning trend wasn't limited to California by any means, and the Levittowns of suburban development embraced a development style of having nearly all land "built out," a state of regulation so that nobody with slightly less money could move in because apartments or duplexes were allowed.
Based upon comments I have seen on HN California deliberately does not want to solve many of those problems. Expensive social polices cost more money which means higher taxes, which may or may not provide the intended result irrespective of increased price.
As a better more precise example of that phenomenon look at the city of Austin which has many policies, funding concerns, and results comparable to large California cities despite being the capital of a large deep red state. Compare the Austin experience, in numbers, to other major metros in the same state.
California doesn't care about anyone who isn't rich. (I'm politically ambivalent and non-participatory.) It's the neoliberals (the Clinton lowercase democrats who emulated Republican laissez-faire social darwinism) who let CA become an unequal society and helped along by Reagan Republicans. (The progressives are the group who later became the "true liberals" after the neoliberals stole and bent the uppercase Liberal moniker.)
PS: Heya ATX from I-35 and 5th. I moved to ATX from CIC/SJC/MTV in late 2020 because my mom couldn't financially live in Paradise anymore, or take the smoke and PSPS power outages. Unfortunately, all of the worst of Californians who made it terrible are moving here too. I prefer the original ATX hippie/bike mechanic/entrepreneur/tatted/skater/cool friendly people, not these kidult, a/anti-social, rude, fake, yuppie, ignorant, selfish ahole office jobber transplants who are clueless about what makes ATX culture or the plight of the tent city homeless under I-35. The yuppies I mentioned comprise most of my apt complex, and like stockbrokers, they take more meth and coke than the homeless do.. they bust out the hard drugs, and I leave. I tried being friendly with the neighbors, but they're not people I would be friends with or even want to be acquainted with... they're uncool like posers.
So enlightening from a person who owned Italian and Hollywood Hills villas while saying this.
'Property for me, not for thee'
So in reality the house has doubled in price.
Not sure what that's got to do with anything we're talking about.
That's what piggyback second mortgages are for. There are also subsidized loans for first-time buyers in the US called FHA loans that allow 3.5% to 10% down payments.
and the same $30k invested in the S&P 500 in 1968 would have earned you 186x - or $5,580,000 (using http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm as a guide to calculate returns).
And yet, nobody bats an eye that this amazing returns of stocks, and continues to complain that housing prices are too high today, when it was "cheap" in the past. But was it really cheap in the past?
> and the same $30k invested in the S&P 500 in 1968 would have earned you 186x
OPs grandparents would have a difficult time living under a stock certificate.
Housing is to live in, can't compare it to stocks. Unless you plan to be stock-rich but homeless.
I guess my grandparents could've squatted in the Santa Cruz mountains for a while and kept saving to buy stocks. ;-)
As long as housing is seen as an investment it’s not going to be affordable.
Buying and owning property will always be an investment. If this investment is worth it (aka, it has outsized returns), then it can not be affordable.
Look up rents in the 60s in Los Gatos vs. rents recently to see what a terrible idea that would've been for those people.
Maybe I just know too many assholes – but there has to be a better answer to “people are fleeing California for legitimate reasons” than “good riddance.”
Population growth is a real problem, we are living in an finite system called planet Earth. With 1/4 of the world population everyone would live better - less pollution, 4 times more resources per capita, etc. Imagine California with 10-15 million inhabitants, no homeless people, enough water for everybody.
There is no redeeming the car-dependent suburban style of city planning. Commuter rail suburbs are better, rural life is better small towns are better, urban life is better. But our cars are killing us and we need to look beyond them for a sustainable and healthy future. We will not and do not need to eliminate these places, but we do need to allow transformation.
First half is true, second half ignorant. Your life is better because somewhere out there are half a dozen poor people mining resources and building goods for you, for a tiny fraction of your income.
I personally don’t derive any sense of betterness from being able to afford more goods. I only see the ocean of plastic.
Why is this a bad thing? Less crowd is good for everyone. Is it not?
From my perspective nothing has changed
In particular, Oregon has a higher tax rate than California does for high (~120K+) earners as a result of a lack of sales tax and correspondingly absurdly high income taxes. Oregon is booming. Blue state politics is not what is driving people out of California.
It's certainly part of it (wealth tax, non-nuanced small-biz killing lockdown, signalling > results) though.
Not all 'blue state politics measures/stances' overlap.
The best wealth tax out there, a land tax, has been prohibited in the California constitution via proposition 13, and that tax would go a long way towards eliminating the rentierism that is pushing out people with lower incomes.
I grew up in California. It's still a great place to live if you're rich or if you bought property in a good location a long time ago, but if neither of those are true, you're going to have a huge uphill battle. Most people in my millennial friend groups, including me, have all talked about how we'd like to leave. We're mostly still here because our families are here and good jobs are easier to find. But each year, one by one I see people I know flee to other states.