461–470 of 543 posts
i was born and raised in california. i left a year ago for the midwest. the situation in california is depressing. and im not talking about human poop or homeless people. im talking about jobs, culture and general lifestyle. california is filled with lots of very ugly urban wasteland. its filled with lots and lots of very disadvantaged people, hordes upon hordes of people who might not be homeless but are involved in…
People who live on the coasts really don’t understand how much of the Millennial existential angst is due to inability to buy a house and live a typical life. My wife went to the University of Iowa, and her friends who stayed in state all bought houses years ago. (We’re in our mid-30s.) Meanwhile few of our friends from law school (many of whom are by now moving up the ranks in their profession, are still trying to g…
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Don't fabs require tons of water?
CA is next to the ocean with plenty of solar power potential. Fab water can also be recycled with some effort.
But until then I have other priorities.
People who live on the coasts really don’t understand how much of the Millennial existential angst is due to inability to buy a house and live a typical life. My wife went to the University of Iowa, and her friends who stayed in state all bought houses years ago. (We’re in our mid-30s.) Meanwhile few of our friends from law school (many of whom are by now moving up the ranks in their profession, are still trying to g…
This can only happen if the upper middle class people move away from somewhere else. There has to be some limit to how far away they'll commute to get access to suburban houses, right?
People who live on the coasts really don’t understand how much of the Millennial existential angst is due to inability to buy a house and live a typical life. My wife went to the University of Iowa, and her friends who stayed in state all bought houses years ago. (We’re in our mid-30s.) Meanwhile few of our friends from law school (many of whom are by now moving up the ranks in their profession, are still trying to g…
This can only happen if the upper middle class people move away from somewhere else. There has to be some limit to how far away they'll commute to get access to suburban houses, right?
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Yes. California has a rich delta, the San Joaquin River Delta, which is a natural rice growing region. People who are ignorant of geography, and think water is much more fungible than it is, would prefer that some small amount more of this water be expelled into the San Francisco Bay, as the great majority of it is already. Contrast with alfalfa, which is grown mostly from aquifer water in the Central Valley, constit…
Also people who are aware of the invention of aqueducts would prefer that agricultural use of water be priced the same as residential use, if water is to be the main argument in opposition to allowing the state's population to grow.
It's a fake issue, made up to disguise a classic NIMBYist fear of changing "the character" of California.
Which, I've been to Yosemite recently, so I get that. But the ship sailed long ago.
California does have unsustainable agricultural practices. Alfalfa growing for feedlot cattle is the big one, eliminate that and Cali can in fact expand on her comparative advantage in growing fruits, nuts, and specialty crops like asparagus and artichoke.
But this is completely unrelated to residential use of water, which is a) a rounding error next to agriculture and b) provisioned through a largely orthogonal system of reservoirs and, yes, aqueducts, which agriculture simply isn't competing with. Expanding that system and stewarding the available water better wouldn't take away from agriculture, which is fed by rivers and aquifers.
Again, the big offender is alfalfa. Rice, irrigated from canals off the Delta, is an irrelevant distraction to agricultural sustainability, let alone residential growth.
California's system of water rights is ancient and corrupt, and isn't serving the state well. But "pricing ag water like residential water" is a nonsensical way of solving that problem, it's just not the same water. Actually auctioning available water, and setting hard limits on aquifer withdrawal, is both necessary and quite sufficient.
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They're not low, certainly, but they aren't extravagant, and they are offset by low property taxes (California 1%, Texas 1.80%, New Hampshire 2.18%), even more so once you've been in a place some years, and are benefiting from Prop 13.
Uh, no, 1% isn’t not a low tax rate when’s starter single family home in the Bay Area is $1M.
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People want to live near jobs, services and amenities, and diversity of those can only be achieved at scale. You could build a million homes in the middle of nowhere and you’d wind up with a million empty houses.
Many people also want to live in large houses or apartments, which is extremely expensive anywhere with high population density.
Even if people are saying this, what they actually do is quite different. People in CA moving out are generally moving into other metropolitan areas or smaller cities. They're not living some kind of Stardew Valley fantasy in the fields.
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The majority of water problems come not from a few entities consuming massive amounts of water. Why we allow growing almond trees in an arid climate is beyond me. After that, you have smaller but water intensive businesses. Being suburban doesn’t mean you waste water. I live in the suburbs and our water use is minimal. I use water saving shower heads, I turn off the water during most of the shower. In fact, the water…
There are always going to be outliers (people in cities who use a lot of water, and people outside who don't), but on average you will always find that city families tend to use less water than non-city families. In other words, public policies that divert people away from cities tend to increase water consumption (and harm the environment by just about any other metric you can name.)
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Law makers pass the laws their constituents want. Blame the voters.
I often remark that SF and the valley are a flawed democratic institution: it has a very high immigrant population that would vote against the majority of things that get voted. Immigrants are generally tough on crime, Yimby, anti-tax, etc.