I recently moved to California. Before i moved, people asked me “why are you moving there, its so bad?”. Now that I’m here, i understand it less. The state is beautiful. There is so much to do.
I know the cost of living is high, and people think the gun control laws are ridiculous (I actually think they are reasonable, for the most part). There is a guy I work with here that says “the policies are dumb” but can’t give me a solid answer on what is so bad about it.
So, what is it that California does (policy-wise) that people hate so much?
As someone who lived there, Conservatives hate it for very specific reasons, and other people dislike it for other ones.
The political biases were really well expressed above, and I won’t rehash them. But, suffice it to say, it’s seen as a standards-bearer for a way of living and a perspective on life that they fundamentally hate, so they have to tear it down.
For more practical reasons to dislike it, the cost of living is insane - I was priced out of a livable home in two cities and I made six-figure money. By ‘livable’, I mean ‘less than a 1-hour commute to work by car each way’ and ‘pay for my home, a car, and be putting money away each month’. Renting a tiny place beneath my means and socking away money felt good, but was never able to catch up and purchase something that didn’t make me house-poor or kill my soul in traffic. Other people made that sacrifice, I couldn’t. So, I left.
Those real estate prices had many factors contributing - Prop 13 taxes, NIMBY types that kept new home construction well beneath the population growth, typical crap American zoning that prevents mixed-use mid-sized buildings that makes parts of Europe so livable and walkable, corrupt as hell politics that made the few new developments built into car-centric hells, massive influx of Chinese and Russian money investing in real estate pricing normal people out of single-family homes, AirBNB properties undermining and taking away rental properties, etcetera. It’s a wide variety of factors.
The knock-on effects of this are huge - people living house-poor, or having horrible commutes that make them miserable, and at worst, an increasing number of people being bankrupted into homelessness. Combine that with the excellent coastal climate making homelessness survivable, libertarian communities that siphon away public funds while using slimy legal tactics to stop contributing their own, and every conservative government of bordering states buying their own homeless one-way tickets to California, and that’s snowballed out of control. San Francisco, LA, and San Diego are the hardest hit.
It’s kind of a microcosm of the entire country, so it’s not like it has unique problems. But it has a bunch of them coming to fruition right now.
Sounds mostly to me like the free market working as intended. You have a single state expressing the majority of American’s values, so everyone wants to live there. California’s portion of the GDP reflects what the concentration of blue voters does for the economy.
Except in a true free market zoning laws wouldn’t keep adorable, high density housing from being constructed to artificially boost housing prices.
Other than that I agree with you.