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California's Vanished Dream, by the Numbers

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Re: California's Vanished Dream, by the Numbers

#121

Post by confidantlake »

peder wrote: post #40
ceeplusplus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly urge you to just stand in an SF Walgreens and watch how many people walk out the door with stolen goods. None of those incidents are reported, the security guards don't even bother getting up.

And why are people so staunchly in denial about crime in Seattle/San Francisco? Why do they seem to feel personally attacked?

San Francisco is not in the top 10 most dangerous cities in the US. Yet article after article is written about crime in SF. I haven't seen anyone deny there is crime in SF. More just tired of the outsized attention it gets compared to more dangerous cities. I don't see article after article complaining about the DA of Baton Rouge or how Memphis's crime is out of control.

Re: California's Vanished Dream, by the Numbers

#122

Post by justinzollars »

confidantlake wrote: post #114
justinzollars wrote: post #81

I did the math for Mountain View: Average Home | Downpayment | Finance | Monthly payment (Loan + Insurance + Tax) | Necessary Annual income $2,140,000.00 | $428,000.00 | $1,712,000.00 | $11,517.00 | $414,612.00 Mix that with high taxes across every category, very high crime, homelessness and extremely poor indebted government providing poor service. The state needs to hit the reset button. Taxes are already high, and…

Do you mean default on their debt? If so that is a really bad idea. I don't really get it being uncompetitive. California has a higher gdp per capita then either Texas or Florida.

I mean default as in bankruptcy, then restructure the fixed costs in a way to become competitive with Texas and Florida.

Re: California's Vanished Dream, by the Numbers

#123

Post by TimTheTinker »

sofixa wrote: post #72
arbor_day wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities don't vote, people do. I own a single family home in the Palo Alto. If I wanted to living in a city like Paris, I would. I like it here. I don't care about the price of my house, since I do not plan to sell it this decade. I care a TON about my neighborhood. I love that my neighborhood is quiet, not crowded, and has easy parking. I will vote against any proposals or elected officials who represent me that woul…

Quoted post unavailable.

> NIMBYs really are selfish and shallow people

My parents bought a house in an almost-rural region of southern California in 1991. It was difficult to lose the beautiful field across the street when a housing development went in, but they shrugged their shoulders and moved on -- no biggie.

But more recently, the tiny empty lot next to theirs has been sold and 3 really ugly apartments just went in that are totally out of character with the rest of the neighborhood. If they could have blocked this from happening, they would have -- and I don't think that's selfish NIMBYism. Your next-door neighbors' behavior affects your life profoundly, and when they do dumb stuff like building ugly, stuffed-in apartments that don't fit in with the houses next door, it will affect you negatively.

All to say, NIMBYism gets a bad rap, but having a basic standard of caring about the quality of one's neighborhood (especially next-door lots) isn't selfish or shallow.

By extension, you'd have to say it's "selfish and shallow" to pay more to not live in a bad part of town... is it really?

Re: California's Vanished Dream, by the Numbers

#124

Post by mrkstu »

RangerScience wrote: post #41
FpUser wrote: post #35

Here is some cherry on top. This treatment of people looks like it belongs to China: https://www.calhealthreport.org/2018/01/25/anti-homeless-law... >"Kimberly Sandoval holds a ticket in her hand in disbelief. Her infraction: being in possession of spare bicycle parts." >"She has also been ticketed for being in possession of a tent, a lawn chair and a Bluetooth speaker—all items newly banned at the Civic Center under…

Notable: Santa Ana (and the rest of Orange County) is substantially more conservative than many people realize.

Read: 'slightly less liberal'

https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/california/santa_ana

Re: California's Vanished Dream, by the Numbers

#125

Post by Maarten88 »

tablespoon wrote: post #71
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You won't get a beautiful city like those with any kind of zoning. It's too expensive. You'd get flimsy modern cookie-cutter buildings. Are you claiming those cities don't have zoning?

> Are you claiming those cities don't have zoning? I'm claiming modern construction isn't very beautiful. If you drop single family zoning for something denser, you're not going to get something like those beautiful cities that were cited above. It's false advertising to suggest that denser zoning would give us another Paris (at least not the parts people are referring to when they bring it up). You'd get McMansion H…

There are many examples in the world of successful new city developments. I used to live near Java Island in Amsterdam, a newly developed neighborhood which is very densely populated (60.000 people per square mile) and quite popular. There are modern versions of traditional canal houses, which most people think look very nice. It is not inexpensive anymore, however.

I think in the US there are some comparable developments, where they also try building walkable neighborhoods with high density, having shops and restaurants mixed in. But that is still very rare in the US.

Re: California's Vanished Dream, by the Numbers

#126

Post by dragonwriter »

ffggvv wrote: post #89
jollybean wrote: post #28

Among myriad of issues, one is that the tax rates for the very rich are not high enough. And the absolute parrallel there is - people probably wouldn't feel their money is being spent effectively. I really do feel that rich Californians would accept higher taxes if the money was really well spent. Impossible to talk about is the 'low end' - where you have (and bringing in) people in very, very low skilled and economi…

california is among the highest state tax rates in the country...

> california is among the highest state tax rates in the country...

Yes, but it's not even enough to offset the maximum federal tax subsidy to the top from the preferential treatment of long-term capital gains (that is, the federal top LTCG rate plus the top California income tax rate is less than the top, or even second, and almost third, federal income tax rate alone—and that's not even considering the additional federal taxes on labor income.)

Re: California's Vanished Dream, by the Numbers

#127

Post by Enginerrrd »

jollybean wrote: post #28

Among myriad of issues, one is that the tax rates for the very rich are not high enough. And the absolute parrallel there is - people probably wouldn't feel their money is being spent effectively. I really do feel that rich Californians would accept higher taxes if the money was really well spent. Impossible to talk about is the 'low end' - where you have (and bringing in) people in very, very low skilled and economi…

I'm genuinely confused at what reasoning you are using to conclude this since CA already has the highest income taxes in the nation by a large margin. ...And they have higher taxes in a lot of other categories as well.

This just seems like the same progressive denial and pipedream which has led to the very bloated bureaucracy and regulatory environment to the detriment of CA which we are presently discussing.

Re: California's Vanished Dream, by the Numbers

#128

Post by rayiner »

ffggvv wrote: post #88
rayiner wrote: post #85

I’m convinced that tax rates on the upper middle class (top 10%) need to be much, much higher. An interesting premise of Modern Monetary Theory is that taxes can and should be used to control inflation, and further that this can be done in a controlled way based on where inflation is occurring. If that is correct, one can reason that inflation for things like housing, education, etc., is caused by taxes being too low…

astounds me people are still referencing MMT when its exactly what got us into this inflation mess in the first place. the tantalizing cancerous idea which will never die

I’m not sure why you’d blame MMT. The theory behind MMT is that inflation is the primary check on government spending. When significant inflation occurs, you need to raise taxes to remove cash from the system. Obviously that’s not what we’re doing (instead we’re dumping more cash into the system by doing gas tax holidays and subsidizing gas).

Re: California's Vanished Dream, by the Numbers

#129

Post by infamouscow »

colpabar wrote: post #50
peder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why are people so staunchly in denial about crime in Seattle/San Francisco? Why do they seem to feel personally attacked?

Because a lot of the burglars are black, which means doing anything about it will be seen as racist. SF no longer release tapes of crimes that happen on public transit for the same reason. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholdin...

Why is it about one's skin color? I thought we were past this.

Re: California's Vanished Dream, by the Numbers

#130

Post by AnimalMuppet »

confidantlake wrote: post #104
guelo wrote: post #57

Why are there so many "California/San Francisco is horrible" articles? As if every state didn't have different sets of issues. To me it looks like conservative bias in our media since all I hear these days is how everything is liberals fault.

SF isn't even in the top 10 most dangerous cities. Yet article after article about how it is falling apart. Where are all the articles about St Louis or Jackson Mississippi?

We expect St Louis to be falling apart. We don't expect San Francisco to be.

But I don't agree with the GP either. "Conservative bias in our media"? Either you're to the left of CNN (in which case you're far from the median, and so in a bad position to judge), or you're looking at a very skewed subset of the media.

Personally, I think it's a backlash. I think the liberals have been loudly triumphalist since... maybe the beginning of Obama's presidency? Somewhere in there. There's been this aura of "We're going to re-order the country to our approach, and we're going to fix all the problems." And they did re-order it, not completely, but to a large degree.

So when that fails to produce the paradise that was promised, people point out that the liberal agenda, in a place where they were pretty free to carry it out, failed to produce what the liberals claimed it would.

There's no shortage of articles pointing out that the conservative agenda, in places where they were free to carry it out, also failed to produce. But those articles get less traction, I suspect because people find "conservative agenda fails to produce" to be less surprising than "liberal agenda fails to produce". (Or maybe just because "the conservative agenda will produce" lately has been less widely trumpeted than "the liberal agenda will produce".)

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