California: People used to swim here!

Doomsday SnoBorderZero

It's April 14th and yet I'm basically snowed in. So, what are the property prices and rents like in So Cal these days?

Hmmm, seems a bit steep. Do we have a thread about Florida?

Are you guys in a pissing contest with New York?

California is now the world’s 5th largest economy.

Yeah... it's easy to forget how much more expensive the rest of the country is.  Right now I'm living in a decent one bedroom in an inner-ring suburb for less than a thousand a month.  Maybe snow isn't so bad.

California is an interesting place to talk about because there's so much to it. On the one hand Democrats want to tell you how great of a place it is because they're in charge while Republicans want to tell you how lousy of a place it is because they want to be in charge. What's interesting is that they're both right. California does have a good economy, people still come here to get rich, it has everything you would ever want to do and has some of the best weather on the planet. On the other hand poverty does run rampant especially in the central valley. It's easy to think of California as San Diego--Los Angeles--San Francisco--Oregon while forgetting about the hundreds of miles of the Mad Max-style barren landscape in between. We have a huge percentage of the nation's welfare recipients here and if you turn on the news it won't take long until you hear about California's ever-growing homeless epidemic. San Francisco and Los Angeles are spending millions of dollars trying to relocate homeless people and clean up camps where dozens, sometimes hundreds of people live. If you scroll back a few posts you'll see those Mordor type fires from a California freeway. Those fires were started by a homeless camp whose stove fire got out of control. Not long ago I was driving on the 101 freeway and it was dead stopped. By the time I drove past whatever was going on I saw firefighters putting out a fire on the side of the road started by a homeless camp. There are so many cities don't know what to do with them. I've had to literally walk over people as they sleep on the sidewalk. I've seen homeless people punch peoples cars who don't give them money. I watched a homeless person knock another one out for being on his corner. These major cities are just overwhelmed and you can find dozens and dozens of news articles detailing the huge spike in homeless people just over the past couple years.

The natural response to all that is 'just build more housing.' It sounds easy since there's so much open and undeveloped land in many places of California (not kidding) but as anyone will tell you California just bombards you with applications codes, regulations and fees. It's impossible to build more housing in Los Angeles or San Francisco because the city makes it impossible. I have many, many friends and family in real estate, one of the biggest industries here next to tech and agriculture, and every one of them will tell you that the one thing that keeps rents high and construction low is rent control. Sure it sounds great for the person living in their apartment for 15 years but for the new arrivals it's one of the main factors in seeing their rents go through the roof. It's why so many people live in crummy apartments and don't move. It's why developers aren't building apartments anymore in downtown or Hollywood or Silverlake or any of these other areas, they'd rather build luxury condos which is exactly what's happening. You might hear of 'the thousands of people moving out of California' and that's true, there are many. You might assume it's the rich folks because they're being soaked by taxes but they can afford to live here. It's the middle class who's moving out. People who want to open a small business, buy a nice house with a yard, raise a family, they're the ones who are moving to Texas and Arizona by the thousands. My wife and I live in a condo and sometimes she shows me what we could buy in another state for the amount that our condo is worth. If it weren't for my career I might take her up on it but hey, maybe one day I'll be able to considering how even the entertainment industry is fleeing California for greener pastures. Atlanta, New Orleans, Vancouver, so many productions are moving there for the incentives and tax breaks that aren't given in Los Angeles. Have you watched Breaking Bad? Do you know why it's set in Albuquerque? Because it was originally supposed to be set in Riverside, CA, one of the main meth hubs in the US. New Mexico gave them a better deal to produce the show out there and CA said 'nah, we won't match it.' Hello New Mexico, here are hundreds of jobs for you.

Right now California is a solid blue state although that's a pretty recent development. It went red for years up until 2000 and now Republicans are fighting tooth and nail to get whatever scraps they can grab especially since there were a few years where the Democrats had enough seats to do whatever they wanted without Republican support. Fortunately for them there are two huge things that could benefit them come November; one is an annoying gas tax to pay for roads that should have been paid for already, the second is the 'sanctuary state' title Jerry Brown bestowed upon us. The gas tax is especially irksome because Democrats like nothing more than to pat themselves on the back while telling themselves that they care about poor people unlike those dastardly Republicans....but then they make our already insanely expensive gas even more expensive and who does that hurt the most? Poor people of course. Wealthy people don't drive old pick up trucks or Astro vans. It's hard to squeeze more money out of someone's gas tank when they drive a Tesla or Prius. Wealthier people can also afford to live in the big cities like San Francisco or downtown Los Angeles or San Diego. Everyone else has to commute from the suburbs, sometimes 40 or 50 miles each direction. It's not a progressive income tax or a quarter-percent sales tax increase, it's an expense that hits you immediately and visibly and $50 a month more in gas hits someone who's making $40,000 a lot harder than it hits someone making $400.000. As for the sanctuary state title, I think if you were to ask most Californians they would tell you that they don't like the idea of families being broken up and seeing mom or dad deported, it's not right. On the other hand they don't like it when their state representatives say 'whoever wants in, come on in.' Those are two things that Republicans are running hard on getting rid of but there's a big catch; they don't have any high-profile candidates running for governor and if they don't have someone that gets enough votes then that means that the main candidates come November will all be Democrats which then means that Republicans won't show up to the polls at all. No down ballot votes for any Republican reps and Democrats will increase the number of seats in a state where people are getting more and more fed up with Democrats. That's one thing Democrats are banking on to keep their power in California for the foreseeable future.

I could go on, it's fascinating to talk about because there are good points to be made by both sides of the aisle. It's still a nice place to live and I wouldn't live anywhere else but it can certainly be a chore living here. I know that my standard of living would increase if I were to move to another state but I've never shoveled snow out of my driveway and I never plan on it. We'll see what happens as the years go by.

Fucking Celebrity Apprentice losers.

Since I work in a courthouse, I found this bit of news out of California very interesting.  They're eliminating cash and surety bail bonds for the release of defendants.  It will be interesting to see if they can make it work, assuming the bail bond industry doesn't get the law repealed before it has a chance to go into effect.


www.cnn.com/2018/08/28/us/bail-california-bill/index.html

California’s population growth in 2018 was lowest in state history

www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-population-growth-20190501-story.html

I'm fine with people not moving here. Maybe we should put out an anti-Move to California video.

"Pollution here is horrible. Traffic even worse. Plus, we have Devin Nunes. Three terrible things. Stay where you are. OR ELSE!"