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?
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.
It’s not so much wealthy elites that are the problem here as everyday homeowners.
Because of the zoning ladder-pull people started decades ago, there’s a lot of older middle class homeowners that bought an affordable house that’s now worth millions. They’re incredibly afraid of their house losing its value because it’s probably the single largest part of their net worth, so they have a ton of cognitive dissonance over affordable housing.
They want affordable housing in the abstract, but they’re 100% opposed to anything they think might lower the value of their house. And you can’t really make housing more affordable without lowering the value of houses; they’re kinda synonymous. So they come up with all kinds of bullshit special pleading to justify NIMBY policies.
The problem is that in most of the neighborhoods that are consistently rejecting plans to build high density housing, the ‘everyday homeowners’ are the wealthy elites. As you note, they’re people that bought houses when they were affordable in an area, and their home has appreciated in value to the point of being worth millions; that does make them millionaires in the classic sense (e.g., assets worth more than a million dollars on paper).
My town recently closed down a homeless shelter because they were afraid it was ‘attracting’ homeless people and would lead to drug problems. Which, yeah, that’s true; it was pulling them into the homeless shelter instead of them living int he woods, out of sight. The homeless people are already here, and the drug problems (meth and opiates) are there too, they just can’t see them. Opening a homeless shelter? Try that in a small town, amirite?
There’s a lot of truth to this, however for public transport, there were plans to modernize the public transport until Musk derailed those plans with a failed hyperloop
The people that were elected could have entirely ignored Musk; they always had that power.
I’ve seen opposition to expanding public transport near me; Atlanta was trying to expand MARTA north (into Fulton county, IIRC), and the measure was overwhelmingly rejected by people in Fulton because it would have made it easier for “those” people from Cobb county (Atlanta proper) to move to Fulton. Certain wealthy people view public transport as something that only the poors use–rather than as a benefit to the entire public–and oppose it because of fears that it will devalue their property.