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?
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.
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.
It’s not so much wealthy elites that are the problem here as everyday homeowners.
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?
