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

#251

Post by raldi » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:30 AM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #141

shkkmo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Density makes it easier to build the infrastructure to support population growth. Distribution makes it more expensive to build that infrastructure. Thus inreasing distribution hinders rather than helps the ability of California to support a larger population. That seems to directly contradict the points you were making.

Okay. Let's try this: raldi et al are talking about whether the state can support a 150% population increase, but I'm talking about whether 150% more people will want to live there. Let's walk through some of the numbers and issues in detail, together. As of 2019, San Francisco county has a population density of about 18,000 people per square mile. Let's say that San Francisco county is the ideal scenario for the Ral…

I'll add, I don't think we should be developing new housing on any of our wild lands. Not our beaches, not our mountain passes, not our forests or wetlands or grasslands, and certainly not Muir Woods.

What I'm calling for is to allow the owners of existing single-family houses in urban and suburban job- and transit-centric neighborhoods to voluntarily tear them down and, if they choose, replace them with multifamily housing of, say, four stories.

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

#252

Post by blendo » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:30 AM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #120

California is just at saturation level. There's just too many people for the small strip of coastal land that is inhabitable. All I could think while living there for 5 years was how damn cool it must have been in the 60's/70's with literally half as many people. The traffic, the crowds everywhere at all times, it's all just too much at this point. It's still an amazing paradise playground if you're a millionaire. Bu…

I try and imagine the state before the Sacramento, Feather, American, and San Joaquin rivers were dammed, and before 95% of the salmon runs were destroyed.

With judicious planning, we could probably restore much of the original (aboriginal) ecosystems by 2200 or so, but I don’t see how we could do that with more than a few million people.

Kids, get on it :-)

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

#253

Post by Karrot_Kream » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:31 AM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #156

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am extremely skeptical that, even if all the logistical problems could feasibly be solved, we'd find 70 million people in this country that would choose to live in that region once all the dust settled. Well they'll have to, because there are a limited number of areas in the US making jobs. And the US population is growing not shrinking, so even if jobs fan out to other, less-crowded population centers, we're jus…

Did San Francisco stop making jobs in 2000? Because its population growth has been flatlined or declining since then [1]. The numbers don't support the argument that jobs alone are enough of an incentive for people to move to San Francisco. Guess which California cities are currently the fastest-growing. Ready? Bakersfield and Sacramento [2]. The numbers suggest that the role of jobs tends to be overestimated when it…

> Did San Francisco stop making jobs in 2000? Because its population growth has been flatlined or declining since then [1]. The numbers don't support the argument that jobs alone are enough of an incentive for people to move to San Francisco.

No, it has nothing to do with job growth. San Francisco and Daly City have tried to block as much new housing as possible, so everyone simply spills out into the rest of the Bay Area. Neighboring Daly City [1] gained 3k people out of 103k, so ~3% increase but looking southward, South San Francisco [2] went from 60.6k to 68.1k people, a 12.4% increase. Further down in the Peninsula, Redwood City [3] went from 75.4 to 76.4k people, an increase of 13.3%. San Mateo [4] went from 92.5k to 104.4k people, a 12.9% increase. A bit more South, Mountain View [5] went from 70.7k to a peak of 83.2k, growth of 17.68%. Palo Alto [6] went from 58.6k to 67k people, a 14.3% increase. And finally, San Jose [7] went from 894.9k people to 1M people, an increase of 11.74%. Most cities in the Bay Area have seen tremendous growth in the last 20 years, it's just that San Francisco and Daly City continue to block new housing being built.

Moreover I really don't think jobs will get much more decentralized in the future. Post-COVID, some businesses probably will distribute themselves more, but not enough to have an effect. I only see urbanization increasing in the long term in the US. Clinging to our SFH only model of development is just short-sighted thinking based on our population growth alone, let alone environmental targets that we will need to hit to avert climate change disasters.

[1]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/daly-city-ca-pop...

[2]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/south-san-franci...

[3]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/san-mateo-ca-pop...

[4]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/san-mateo-ca-pop...

[5]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/palo-alto-ca-pop...

[6]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/palo-alto-ca-pop...

[7]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/san-jose-ca-popu...

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

#254

Post by cudgy » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:33 AM UTC

linguae wrote: post #95

gautamcgoel wrote: post #67

I'm a PhD student at Caltech. I'd love to stay in CA and become a prof at one of the world-renown universities in the state. The cost for a nice house is > $800K in all of the cities hosting these universities; on top of that, the state income tax on a prof's salary is 9-10%. CA is basically telling me (and millions of other millennials) that we are not wanted here.

I'm a lifelong Californian whose lived in Santa Cruz County for nearly nine out of the past 11 years, and as someone who wants to become a CS professor at a teaching university one day, I feel the exact same way. I love California and I don't want to leave the state. However, the housing prices signal to me that if I want to buy a house, I need to have a very high income and maintain it during the length of a 30-year…

Why is owning a house so important that people would move away from family to another state? Seems like there would be more important reasons.

Also, professorships are notoriously difficult to obtain and many professors move to far away rural and otherwise undesirable locations for that “privelege”. I’ve known several distinguished professor couples (not in CA) that live separately to pursue their careers … think twice before taking that route.

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

#255

Post by zucker42 » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:33 AM UTC

Hypx_ wrote: post #193

raldi wrote: post #18

Paradise on Earth and home to the world’s brightest-future industry; California could easily grow to 100M residents if it simply allowed housing to be built to accommodate all the people who want to live here. And it would be a net win for the climate, because most of them would be coming from much less eco-friendly places.

That's a bit of a stretch. You would to rethink how American society works for that to happen. Everything from water use and automotive dependency would have be reconsidered. And since this is earthquake country construction is relatively expensive. It doesn't take much math to realize that building enough housing for a 60M population increase would cost around $10T. So while this is an theoretical exercise but in re…

Automotive dependency should be reconsidered.

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

#256

Post by elevenoh » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:35 AM UTC

CheezeIt wrote: post #50

1cvmask wrote: post #25

I can only comment on the Bay area which has plenty of land and lots of entrenched vested interests. Take a town like Atherton which is full of billionaires like Marc Andreesen who talk about how they want builders etc... But they are allergic when it is in their tony neighborhood of the zillionaires. The hypocrisy of the NIMBYs at full display: https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/ https://en.wikipedia.org/…

A16Z’s interests are aligned against nimbyism, not with it, so it’s completely fallacious to treat Marc Andreesen and Atherton as synonymous entities.

I think it's also fallacious to treat a VC firm's interests as synonymous to its cofounder's interests on an individual level.

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

#257

Post by lotsofpulp » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:36 AM UTC

CincinnatiMan wrote: post #137

shkkmo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does letting those pensions go bankrupt help anything? If the funds go bankrupt, it isn't the executives who used financial shenanigans to bleed the funds dry that face consequences. It is the employees who had no role in the management of the pension funds that end up punished. If you want to actually stop that bad behavior, we need to massively overhaul how we address whitecollar crime in this country so that b…

Do you have reading material on how the funds have gotten into dire straits?

The root cause is people are bad at projecting the future. Defined benefit pensions are projecting economic conditions decades into the future, and they’re simply not true (at least not until the government juiced the numbers to offset the anemic growth due to outsourcing and automation). But then that’s just inflating away one’s debts, and the recipient is still screwed.

The second problem with defined benefit pensions is agency risk. Anytime you have a big pot of money, it invites corruption, and in the case of DB pensions it’s very easy for people in power today to tilt the scales towards themselves at the expense of those decades behind them. And so they do, by voting themselves lavish benefits, voting for politicians to enhance benefits, voting to hire the actuary that understated the costs, etc (that stuff is more so in taxpayer funded DB pension land).

For multi employer defined benefit pensions, the simple matter is US economic growth in their businesses didn’t pan out. A lot of businesses contributing to the funds consolidated, got automated away, outsourced to cheaper countries, etc, and so a lot of the assumptions in there don’t hold true and so they come up short.

But keep in mind, every time the government bails someone out, you pay little by little by your USD being worth less and less.

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

#258

Post by lotsofpulp » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:38 AM UTC

shkkmo wrote: post #145

CincinnatiMan wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have reading material on how the funds have gotten into dire straits?

It depends on which type of pension fund and is generally more complicated than a single reason. One big general cause of failure was that companies were allowed to stop paying into the funds without paying enough into the fund to cover their employees who would receive. However, the particulars don't actually matter here. No matter the reason, it will have been the responsibility of the employer, fund manager or gov…

> As such, punishing him will do nothing to de-incentivize this from happening again.

It can, if word spreads that defined benefit pensions aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. My friends and I place zero value on DB pensions, as should anyone else unless they’re promised by the federal government (who can print dollars so they can never be unfunded).

If I am evaluating two jobs offers and one gives me a DB pension (not from government) and one gives me a 401k, I’m going to value the DB pension at zero and go with the 401k.

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

#259

Post by pbuzbee » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:39 AM UTC

0x000000E2 wrote: post #241

pbuzbee wrote: post #178

I feel like it's only going to get worse. California has a good number of problems: housing costs, traffic, wildfires, homelessness, ... and the high tax rate you pay for the privilege of enjoying them. But I haven't seen California take meaningful steps to solve any of these. We're still in the stage of "problems are getting worse", and any solutions will take a long time to materialize. I grew up in California. It'…

Most of California's problems go back to lack of housing and opposition to building more. Everyone wants to live in Cali for nice weather and jobs. If you stop people from building more housing your property value just keeps rising. Property costs are high because NIMBY blocking denser housing. Traffic is bad because housing density is too low for the population. Homelessness is bad because houses are too expensive.…

I agree, I do think building more housing would help. However, my point is that I don't see that happening anytime soon. We've only seen light forms of the policy changes this would require, and many haven't even passed. There's a lot of opposition to these policy changes, and they have money on their side. And even when (if) they do change, it will take some time for them to have an effect.

My age group is at the age of looking to put roots down and have children. For many of us it makes more sense to leave than to wait 10-20 years and hope things get better.

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

#260

Post by zucker42 » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:39 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #205

If you look at a California population graph over the last one hundred years, you see a huge growth in population, being at about parity with Texas in 1940. And now, that really long population boom has leveled off and started to even decline a bit, not a drastic drop. It sounds like maybe California has just reached it’s carrying capacity for the time being, why should we be worried about that?

What's worrying is not the population drop by itself, but the widespread belief that it's caused by ridiculous housing prices that we're not effectively addressing.