What's the matter with California?
The below article really struck a chord with me. I rarely find something where I agree with every word of it, but this just might be one, although I am going to focus on housing here. California is a mess. There are plenty of places in the US where people are moving out of or do not want to move to. Most of those places are just victims of bad luck. No offense to the Midwest, Deep South, Northeast and Appalachia, but most of those places just do not have much going on to attract people there. In California, the wounds are 100% self-inflicted.
California has tons of stuff going on and amazing weather year-round. Quality of life is outstanding. Industries of all kinds are abundant. It has more major cities than any other state. Yet it loses more people than it gains. It is common to blame high taxes, but that is a red herring. The problem is housing, housing and housing. This is because California makes it nearly impossible to build any new housing. San Francisco in particular is a major offender here.
It really is mind boggling how a state run by liberals could be so backwards when it comes to affordable housing and wind up with the highest poverty rate in the nation while also being the most unequal. It is even more bewildering how a state that is supposedly so progressive could be so conservative in practice. The obsession with “preserving character” of neighborhoods is supposed to be associated with snobby, exclusive elitism, not with inclusive progressivism and yet here we are.
The real problem with housing in California is with zoning. Single-family zoning is, in general, a bad idea that I think should not exist, period, but that is for another blog post. What is especially problematic is that zoning is done locally. Local officials are only accountable to those who can vote in local elections. Those who can are almost always existing homeowners who benefit from new housing being banned. The incentives are skewed heavily against building new homes. There have been efforts to take zoning away from local officials, but they have fallen short year after year, often opposed by the very people who claim to want affordable housing.
It is also sadly ironic that a state that supposedly is green would do things that are anything but. Forcing people to live far away from where they work results in more cars on the road, which means more pollution. Denser building would mean fewer cars and less pollution. It would also mean smaller units, which would use less energy and more use of public transportation. In other words, building more housing would do vastly more to fight climate change than spending billions on solar and wind farms or a high-speed rail that will never be built.
All other problems in California aside, if they just allowed for more housing to be built, they really would not need to change anything else even if they should. Tax rates would not need to change. The same goes for all the red tape in every other area. Just building more housing would dramatically lower the cost of living for most everyone and would certainly reduce homelessness and inequality. It would allow for millions more to live there. That is why people are moving to places like Texas. Texas could have as high an income tax rate as California and the number of people moving here would not likely change much if at all.
What is going on in California is emblematic of what is wrong with the left. This is why although I am a committed Democrat, I am not a part of the left and hold most of that crowd in contempt. The fact is the loudest voices on the left such as Bernie Sanders and AOC have little to say about the need to build more housing. They love to talk about raising the minimum wage and fighting for working people. Yet they have little to say about the one thing that would help them the most. As the article points out, it is not uncommon to find people with Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders signs who also oppose every effort to build new housing. This seems to be a phenomenon everywhere the left is in charge, not just in California, but also in places like New York, DC and Boston, which have all made building housing more and more difficult.
The lesson here for the left everywhere, but especially in California, is to either put up or shut up. Those on the left really need to take a hard look in a mirror and decide what truly matters to them. Do they really want to do good or just feel good? Do they care more about improving lives or just talking a good game? If it is the latter then they really are not that different from Trump and his cohorts after all. They need to accept the fact that you do not have to be a conservative Republican to recognize that there is such a thing as too much regulation. It is regulation that makes housing unaffordable and the solution is to deregulate, not to impose rent control or anything else. If more housing will not be built then nothing else will matter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/california-san-francisco-schools.html