Why do conservatives keep saying California has "collapsed"?

[DC Al Fine]

The median home costs more than half a million dollars. What more do you need to know?

That's the inverse of collapse. It's an indication of extreme growth, in which housing supply has not kept up with demand.

California is not growing any faster than the rest of the country in terms of GDP, population, or wages per worker, and it's growing much more slowly compared to other Sun Belt states. States like Texas that have actually experienced "extreme growth" over the past couple of decades have built large numbers of new homes. About the only kind of growth in which California now leads is in its homeless population.

Anyway, "collapse" as applied to California refers to dysfunction and quality of life, not population size. It ranks 49th in the country in housing supply and is building tens of thousands of units per year when market analysts are calling for hundreds of thousands. Home ownership is completely unaffordable for the median family. Renting consumes an enormous portion of working people's incomes. Group housing arrangements and extreme commutes have become common. It may not be the Crisis of the Third Century, but it's a f*cking disaster nonetheless.

Completely agree.

Collapse is too strong a term, but unsustainable dystopia definitely isn't.

On a side note, if the Republicans ever decide to seriously try to win non-white votes, "build baby build" wouldn't be the worst way to do it.

[DC Al Fine]

What is the median housing price in Richmond these days (a city that used to be something of a slum)? Prices are out of control in parts of SoCal too, particularly in neighborhoods that are reasonably desirable in the closer in hoods of Los Angeles (if farther out, welcome to unmitigated traffic hell). Even in still pretty rough neighborhoods, a 1500 square foot house can cost 500K. I own a house I planned to retire to in Silverlake (about 5 miles from downtown LA) that I paid 825K for about 9 years ago. It is worth close to two million now. What was once merely a quite expensive housing market, has now become catastrophically expensive. Public policy on this issue has been an epic fail, with self serving nimby zoning being perhaps the primary culprit. Can one build a frigging thing these days in Marin County, which must be left pristine to save the planet and a bucolic setting or something?

You really ought to sell. That extra million would by you a mansion in many more reasonable places with pleasant climates.

[DC Al Fine]

Newly moved to the West Coast (albeit not California), I get the impression that the way in which liberals try to deal with poverty on the state and local level is fatally flawed. For example take the homeless situation in Portland for example, I get bombarded with campaigns to pass bond issues to "deal with" the problem by enacting a government program, yet no effort is made at all to alleviate the structural problems that result in such extreme problems with homelessness in the first place: the high cost of living, restrictive zoning laws, land use policies, NIMBYism, tolerant drug culture, the state lottery, etc. Oregon is willing to pay lip service to the problem of poverty, and indeed runs massive campaigns upon it, but completely unwilling to even seriously consider the sort of lifestyle changes needed to address the structural causes of poverty.

'Tolerant drug culture?'  You're now either a nanny state liberal or an authoritarian conservative?  

C-OR

[DC Al Fine]

Newly moved to the West Coast (albeit not California), I get the impression that the way in which liberals try to deal with poverty on the state and local level is fatally flawed. For example take the homeless situation in Portland for example, I get bombarded with campaigns to pass bond issues to "deal with" the problem by enacting a government program, yet no effort is made at all to alleviate the structural problems that result in such extreme problems with homelessness in the first place: the high cost of living, restrictive zoning laws, land use policies, NIMBYism, tolerant drug culture, the state lottery, etc. Oregon is willing to pay lip service to the problem of poverty, and indeed runs massive campaigns upon it, but completely unwilling to even seriously consider the sort of lifestyle changes needed to address the structural causes of poverty.

'Tolerant drug culture?'  You're now either a nanny state liberal or an authoritarian conservative?  

C-OR

?

TJ's avatar is C-OR or Constitution Party-Oregon. A Liberal conservative he ain't.