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Article: California Is Booming. Why Are So Many Californians Unhappy?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/29/business/economy/california-economy-housing-homeless.htmlSAN FRANCISCO — Christine Johnson, a public-finance consultant with an engineering degree, was running for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. She crisscrossed her downtown district talking about her plans to stimulate housing construction, improve public transit and deal with the litter of “needles and poop” that have become a common sight on the city’s sidewalks.
Today, a year after losing the race, Ms. Johnson, who had been in the Bay Area since 2004, lives in Denver with her husband and 4-year-old son. In a recent interview, she spoke for millions of Californians past and present when she described the cloud that high rent and child-care costs had cast over her family’s savings and future.
“I fully intended San Francisco to be my home and wanted to make the neighborhoods better,” she said. “But after the election we started tallying up what life could look like elsewhere, and we didn’t see friends in other parts of the country experiencing challenges the same way.”
California is at a crossroads. The state has a thriving $3 trillion economy with record low unemployment, a surplus of well-paying jobs, and several of the world’s most valuable corporations, including Apple, Google and Facebook. Its median household income has grown about 17 percent since 2011, compared with about 10 percent nationally, adjusted for inflation.
But California also has a pernicious housing and homeless problem and an increasingly destructive fire season that is merely a preview of climate change’s potential effects. Corporations like Charles Schwab are moving their headquarters elsewhere, while Oracle announced that it would no longer stage its annual software conference in San Francisco, in part because of the city’s dirty streets. “Shining example or third-world state?” a recent headline on a local news website asked.
“You get depressed if you listen to everything going on, but you can’t find a contractor and the state continues to create jobs,” said Ed Del Beccaro, an executive vice president with TRI Commercial Real Estate Services, a brokerage and property management company in the Bay Area.
Whether it’s by taming bays and mountains with roads, bridges and power lines or grappling with a lack of water and crippling earthquakes, California is perennially testing the limits of growth. Its population has swelled to 40 million and the state’s economy has grown more than previous generations had thought possible, cramming more cars and more people into cities that were supposed to be tapped out, while seeding new companies and new industries as old ones died or moved elsewhere.
But today it has a new problem. For all its forward-thinking companies and liberal social and environmental policies, the state has mostly put higher-value jobs and industries in expensive coastal enclaves, while pushing lower-paid workers and lower-cost housing to inland areas like the Central Valley.
This has made California the most expensive state — with a median home value of $550,000, about double that of the nation — and created a growing supply of three-hour “super commuters.” And while it has some of the highest wages in the country, it also has the highest poverty rate based on its cost of living, an average of 18.1 percent from 2016 to 2018.
That helps explain why the state has lost more than a million residents to other states since 2006, and why the population growth rate for the year that ended July 1 was the lowest since 1900.
“What’s happening in California right now is a warning shot to the rest of the country,” said Jim Newton, a journalist, historian and lecturer on public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s a warning about income inequality and suburban sprawl, and how those intersect with quality of life and climate change.”
'The law is the law': Virginia Democrats float prosecution, National Guard deployment
Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill say local police who do not enforce gun control measures likely to pass in Virginia should face prosecution and even threats of the National Guard. After November's Virginia Legislature elections that led to Democrats taking control of both chambers, the gun control legislation proposed by some Democrats moved forward, including universal background checks, an “assault weapons” ban, and a red flag law.
Legal firearm owners in the state, however, joined with their sheriffs to form Second Amendment sanctuary counties, which declare the authorities in these municipalities uphold the Second Amendment in the face of any gun control measure passed by Richmond. Over 75 counties in Virginia have so far adopted such Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions in the commonwealth, the latest being Spotsylvania County. The board of supervisors voted unanimously to approve a resolution declaring that county police will not enforce state-level gun laws that violate Second Amendment rights.
Virginia Democratic officials, however, already say local law enforcement supporting these resolutions will face consequences if they do not carry out any law the state Legislature passes.
“I would hope they either resign in good conscience, because they cannot uphold the law which they are sworn to uphold, or they're prosecuted for failure to fulfill their oath,” Democratic Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly told the Washington Examiner of local county police who may refuse to enforce future gun control measures. “The law is the law. If that becomes the law, you don't have a choice, not if you're a sworn officer of the law.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/the-law-is-the-law-virginia-democrats-float-prosecution-national-guard-deployment-if-police-dont-enforce-gun-control
Getting dismayed at life in California, need advice on what to do
I'm poor and I don't earn that much, I'll admit. I just don't have the skills to be earning 6 figures but I love living in California if it wasn't so expensive. This is my home and I grew up here but at this point I don't know what to do anymore and it's literally driving me insane. Even here in the poorer region of the Central Valley the cost of living, especially rent, is just going up every year and I can't keep up anymore at this point unless I further cut my budget even more and live miserably.
What do I do? I don't know anymore, I don't know anyone else in any other state and am afraid to just pack up and start over with little savings, no guarantee of a job and no clue about how life works in other states either. Any serious advice would be appreciated, thank you.
California housing crisis - Homeless mothers, activists take over vacant Oakland house
OAKLAND — Sick of struggling with homelessness under a system they say hasn’t helped them, two Oakland mothers took matters into their own hands Monday — by taking control of a vacant West Oakland house.
In front of a crowd of supporters, community members and media, 34-year-old Dominique Walker and 41-year-old Sameerah Karim moved their belongings into a house on Magnolia Street that they say has been sitting empty for two years. It was the first step in what they hope will snowball into a larger movement to take back vacant, investor-owned houses in the neighborhoods where single, working mothers like themselves grew up but can no longer afford.
“This is my home,” Karim, a second-generation Oakland resident, said of the city. “I was born and raised here. I deserve to be here.”
The women, who founded a collective called Moms 4 Housing to support their mission, do not have permission to be in the house and declined to say how they got inside. The home has functioning water and power, they said.
Representatives from the city of Oakland and the Oakland Police Department did not respond to questions about what legal ramifications, if any, the mothers might face.
The property is owned by Catamount Properties 2018 LLC, according to the Alameda County Assessor’s Office. That company is part of Wedgewood, a Redondo Beach-based real estate investment company that does business throughout the Western U.S. and Florida. “The flip business is the backbone of Wedgewood,” according to the company’s website. Wedgewood did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/11/18/homeless-mothers-activists-take-over-vacant-oakland-house/
German documentary on how poor people survive in the USA
It's pretty depressing so don't watch it unless you're willing to see just how desperate and horrible life here is. Why is this country still so fucked up? And this is in California too so it's probably even worse in other states.
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