California population declines for first time in more than a century • Hacker News Board

Re: California population declines for first time in more than a century

#431

Post by zrobotics » Sat, May 08, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

AdrianB1 wrote: post #338

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen a good solution for this. If the taxes get locked in, then you get the "2 neighbors with near identical houses paying totally different amounts in taxes" problem. If the taxes are not locked in, then you get the retired lifelong home-owner (or renter) on a fixed income, unable to afford the increasing taxes (or rents).

That is easy, eliminate property taxes. That property was bought with money that was already taxed. If you provide services, ask them to pay for the actual services provided, not for a generic tax. Common services like police can be split to the number of residents.

The reason you are being downvoted is that you are proposing an extremely regressive tax. For example, splitting police costs among the residents evenly means that everyone, regardless of income, has the same tax burden.

The reason property taxes are based on value is that it acts to tax wealthier people at a higher rate than poorer people. Plus, just because the money that purchased the land was taxed means nothing to the local community. Sure, the federal & state governments have already taxed that income, but that means nothing to the local community, who has to pay for schools and EMS every year. And these services act to make the property more valuable, so why shouldn't the residents of the community pay for them?

Re: California population declines for first time in more than a century

#432

Post by teachingassist » Sat, May 08, 2021, 4:01 PM UTC

newsclues wrote: post #367

lsiebert wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But I haven't seen California take meaningful steps to solve any of these" Yeah, the thing is there are political and regulatory efforts to deal with these, but most people don't hear/read about them, unless they are super wonky. So the people who tend to get involved are the wealthy people who benefit financially from the outcome, and the occasional non profit. The latter is where you can actually make an impact fo…

If you rely on nonprofits to solve homelessness, you are essentially allowing a nonprofit homelessness industry to exist and funding it with tax dollars.

Agree.

It's evident that the free market has failed to house people appropriately, and also evident that it would be cheaper and easier to solve homelessness with state-provided housing first solutions.

Not taking this action is "allowing a homelessness industry to exist".

Re: California population declines for first time in more than a century

#433

Post by cptskippy » Sat, May 08, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

username90 wrote: post #279

lotsofpulp wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FL seems happy. Happily full of voters that collect tons of government aid via Medicare, Social Security, and National Flood Insurance Program, and yet happy to decry government help for anyone else. Let me know when FL has parental leave or any half decent employment laws that help those at the bottom.

Florida is a net payer. California is a net beneficiary even though they have so many high end jobs. This includes medicare, social security etc. https://www.businessinsider.com/federal-taxes-federal-servic...

California receives $12 per resident in Federal aid, Florida receives $2187 per resident.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/federal-aid...

Re: California population declines for first time in more than a century

#434

Post by ryandrake » Sat, May 08, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #277

andi999 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Medical insurance paid by company? What is a normal amount people put in a retirement plan? Is that contribution tax deductible? If it is say like 20%, it seems easily 50% of your income are acounted for.

401ks are pretax, so you should max those out. Health premiums are fairly reasonable, I paid about $300/month when I was living in LA, that was just the employee side, the employee side was a lot more probably. None of that is unique to California. Your overall tax burden in California will be about one percent higher than Texas, according to https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur... , though Ca…

I just wanted to reply to say thank you for that WalletHub link. Given the growing possibility my company will accept remote work, I'm more seriously looking into moving in order to minimize my CA induced tax burden, and I've always simply assumed that I was simply looking for places with no income tax. WalletHub's methodology that also includes property and sales taxes, AND presents them each as a share of income, makes a lot of sense, and has definitely changed my thought process significantly! Thank you!

Re: California population declines for first time in more than a century

#435

Post by renewiltord » Sat, May 08, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #214

epistasis wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overcrowding you describe is endemic in California. Likely, nearly all you food is produced by people living in overcrowded housing, worse than you describe. What you describe is common for the people who serve you food in restaurants, and restock the shelves, and do pretty much all the stuff that makes society run these days in California. And we got to that point without concrete boxes at all. Avoiding density…

> Let's imagine that we build so that we don't have to hear our neighbors' partying. I’ve heard (and been kept awake by) my neighbors in every single place I’ve lived that’s not a detached home. Even the fancy condo with super thick walls/floors/ceilings only made it rarer. If nothing else, this is why I want a single family home and hate the idea that this is the desirable future. Invest in remote work and let peopl…

You're welcome to your experience but my fancy London flat was dead quiet from neighbours. One time I met a lady at the lifts and she apologized for her kids making so much noise (they were adjacent to my flat) and to be honest, I hadn't heard a damn thing and I was just lying in bed in the room adjoining their flat the whole morning.

Of course, personally I don't think we should "invest in remote work" or "build flats". I think we should simply allow the market to flow to optima by deregulating.

Many people like single family homes in the suburbs. And clearly many people like a flat in the city. So let them have both by allowing them to sell their land to people who can build arbitrary density.

I've got to tell you that a lot of American construction is pretty shoddy in comparison. I don't know if it's a materials problem or just that America is so rich that $4k/mo flats aren't actually luxury.

Re: California population declines for first time in more than a century

#436

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Sat, May 08, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #407

randompwd wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As has everyone. The parents comment is the residential version of champagne socialism. Somebody advocating for something they've never experienced but demand that it be the future despite most people who have experienced it saying it can be soul destroying. Grow your smaller cities and stop pumping everything in mega cities. Parents comment reminds me of the people drooling at the mouth for Tokyo style housing despi…

> Grow your smaller cities and stop pumping everything in mega cities. This is precisely what has resulted in lots of our overcrowding. We allow greenfield sprawl pretty much all over in the smaller cities, but modestly sized apartment buildings are banned nearly everywhere in the "mega cities." Yet, still, people still want to live in the mega cities. You seem to be unable to comprehend that some people, even a huge…

The shitty part is that a lot of people do try to allow people who want dense urbanization to urbanize and we go somewhere that isn’t dense. You get what you want and we get what we want.

And then more and more people move out where we are because of how nice it is and complain that we don’t want to urbanize the place we moved to escape density. I’m sick of people moving to where I live and blaming me because where they moved isn’t what they wanted so it needs to change to accommodate them. Instead of blaming their job for forcing them to live somewhere they don’t like.

Like if you went to a French restaurant and demanded the owners turn into a pizzeria because yeah there’s a pizzeria a few blocks over you could have gone to in the tenderloin but there aren’t enough pizzerias in general and you want this nice restaurant to be a pizzeria too.

The Right Answer of whether to focus on encouraging companies to spread out versus encouraging people to squeeze together probably depends on how many people want urbanization for job markets versus how many want it for lifestyle.

Re: California population declines for first time in more than a century

#437

Post by CameronNemo » Sat, May 08, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

aspaceman wrote: post #349

CameronNemo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a deflection. Besides, orchards can't grow in just any soil. What about fabs? Why is California an ideal location?

Why does California have to be ideal to build a fab? A fab in California seems like one of the most worthwhile public works projects I’ve heard of in awhile.

More worthwhile than an expanded subway system in LA? Or a light rail in San Diego? Or an offshore wind farm? Or desalination plants? Or energy storage for the electric grid?

Re: California population declines for first time in more than a century

#438

Post by epistasis » Sat, May 08, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

medium_burrito wrote: post #186

epistasis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We definitely need to produce healthy incentives and non-market rate housing, and IMHO housing is a human right (as the UN declared and the US signed on to last century). However, this is not the primary problem in California. The primary problem is that the wealthy are doing all they can to make sure that housing prices rise as much as possible. And because of the 5x leverage that a mortgage with a 20% down payment…

I'm going to disagree the wealthy care very much. This is a giant political can which we are basically kicking down the road. The problem is middle class America has their entire net worth in the property, and it must appreciate. If that goes down, the entire middle class evaporates. China has the same problem except 100x worse. Canada and Australia too, to a lesser degree. What happens when the music stops? edit: mi…

I'm not sure what you mean by "the wealthy care very much." But perhaps it has something to do with the definition of "wealthy." I would say that anybody who owns a house free-and-clear in California, or another high-cost location such as Beijing of Vancouver, as "wealthy."

But I also separate out this sort of wealth from, say, stocks or highly liquid wealth in a bank account. Land, and even structures themselves in a supply constrained location, act as a far more insidious form of capital than dollars or stocks. They are used to extract rents from people, just as monopolies are used to extract wealth, or capitalists with a monopsony on labor can extract the excess value of labor, far more than capital interest would normally demand.

There's a solution to this, capture the excess value that real estate commands and redistribute it, either through taxation, or modified forms of limited ownership. This has two effects, the primary one being that it eliminates the motive to use housing as an appreciating asset. People can still use their homes as a store of value, meaning that they can put work into their homes to improve them to their liking, and not have it all taken away. But they do not take the value that comes merely from excluding people from access to the area, the increase in land values. (Though in places where there is not change in land use allowed, the homes themselves start to behave as land does, commanding excess rents merely due to the inability to let more people have access to an area.) The secondary effect is that these socially created land rents get distributed to all of society, who generate the value, rather than the person who is speculating.

There are two end games to the bubble in land prices that we are currently seeing. A slow deflation, or a sudden pop. However, since so much of our wealth is predicated on housing values, and since so many of our banks are dependent on high valuations, there will always be a strong enough political coalition in the US to stop a pop. We need to build a coalition that prevents the growth of the bubble, committing it to steady deflation.

Re: California population declines for first time in more than a century

#439

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Sat, May 08, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #435

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's imagine that we build so that we don't have to hear our neighbors' partying. I’ve heard (and been kept awake by) my neighbors in every single place I’ve lived that’s not a detached home. Even the fancy condo with super thick walls/floors/ceilings only made it rarer. If nothing else, this is why I want a single family home and hate the idea that this is the desirable future. Invest in remote work and let peopl…

You're welcome to your experience but my fancy London flat was dead quiet from neighbours. One time I met a lady at the lifts and she apologized for her kids making so much noise (they were adjacent to my flat) and to be honest, I hadn't heard a damn thing and I was just lying in bed in the room adjoining their flat the whole morning. Of course, personally I don't think we should "invest in remote work" or "build fla…

Time has shown that the market optima reached by deregulation aren’t optimal for everyone. It’s why we have a minimum wage, for example. There’s a place for letting the market decide, but it’s no panacea.

It’s disingenuous to act like there are no externalities involved and what’s what regulation is needed for. Especially when government investment is needed for the essentials like utilities and transit.

Re: California population declines for first time in more than a century

#440

Post by offtop5 » Sat, May 08, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #81

offtop5 wrote: post #61

The other thing to remember is you generally expect population growth. Even if the decline isn't significant, it means theirs no growth. This is a good thing. California is a horrible horrible place for most working class people. You will never get ahead.

INHO, this is a terrible thing. The drop in population provides no benefit at all to those struggling to get along. Austerity measures never help those who are struggling. It's always a reallocation of resources from those with less to those with more. And California has embraced austerity in housing and land for almost half a century now. Under housing austerity, as the wealthier buy more and more of an ungrowing ho…

>I do agree that California is currently a raw deal for anybody not in a high-paying career.

Even if you make 6 figures it's a horrible place. I was and essentially living paycheck to paycheck.