california is the largest “sub-national” economy in the world. if california was a country, it would have the fifth largest economy. bigger than the uk, or bigger than india.

if i had to guess, the answer is “success breeds jealousy”

Right now, it’s because Californians are moving to [insert right wing state] and turning it left wing.

California is the target of conservative fear mongering.

It’s a left-leaning, progressive state. Everyone who talks shit about this state in anything other than the cost of living generally doesn’t have an answer because their actual reason for disliking the state is that it’s not a republican state.

It’s all nonsense created by right wing extremists. California is an amazing state for a huge, long list of reasons.

The people here are amazing (not you, LA) and we have some of the most beautiful beaches, coasts and forests in the world.

Okay, let’s start with the environment: most of California doesn’t have enough water, and they’re not doing anything to directly remediate that. Environmentally, a lot of the farming is going to be a disaster when the consequences of climate change really set in. Most of SoCal is a desert, but you wouldn’t know it from the expanses of lawns that you see in wealthy enclaves. (…But you’ll figure it out really fast when you try to go mountain biking without puncture-resistant tires.)

The gun control policy is awful, and likely illegal in light of the last few SCOTUS rulings. But here’s the kicker: California has a Democratic supermajority, and they could do things about the underlying conditions that lead to violence in general, and don’t. They’ve consistently failed to seriously address the economic issues that are closely tied to violent crime, things like economic inequality and poverty, criminal justice reform, systemic racism, and so on and so forth. Instead they’ve opted for policies that make wealthy white people happy without fixing the issues.

Housing; this is where wealthy “liberals” are directly to blame. Dems say that they believe in housing that’s affordable, but wealthy elites–which are overwhelmingly Democratic in California–oppose zoning changes that would allow for high density, affordable housing. The result is shithole houses that can cost over a million dollars, studio apartments in sketchy parts of town (see point #2, above) are thousands of dollars a month, an exploding homeless population, and fuckin’ awful sprawl.

Taxation: California has long had the chance to show that it’s progressive with taxation, and to institute wealth taxes. They don’t.

Education: California still relies on funding largely through property taxes, which ensures that school districts with a poorer tax base will have less funding. Again, this is the product of wealth elites–who are overwhelmingly Democratic in California–working to oppose funding changes that would have the effect of making schools in super-rich neighborhoods less desirable, but would also improve schools everywhere else.

Public transit: California barely has it, and it’s consistently underfunded. Combined with point #3, it leads to traffic gridlock that’s famously awful in major metro areas.

Most of these problems can be solved. The problem is that Dems are being hypocritical; they have a NIMBY attitude that means that, even though they say the right things, they don’t do shit.

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.

Everyone hates liberals. Even other liberals. California is probably the most liberal state. The cost of living is ridiculous. The transport is terrible. However, it is one of the cultural capitals of America. We have San Francisco, Hollywood, Silicon Valley. Probably some other stuff. It is also heavily non-white and has a large unhoused population. So people should hate it just not for any of the reasons people hate it for. It had the home of the KKK, cities with urban blight as bad a Detroit, and breaking bad was originally going to be set here because it is the true home of meth.

Politicals, wokeness, crime, shit on the roads, heat, shoplifting, crazy people, etc.

Car-centric, sprawling concrete jungles define most of California. I hate those things thus I hate California. Additionally their water management policies are using a resource that should be reserved for the citizens of the state are instead diverted to grow non-native crops for a handful of rich fuckers.

California is what late-stage Capitalism looks like.