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California’s population shrinks for third straight year

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Re: California’s population shrinks for third straight year

#81
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with decreasing population, but when your richest citizens are leaving, and poor migrants are coming in, then you start having fiscal problems, particularly for a state that has decided to fund itself with income and sales taxes rather than property taxes. Another reason why property tax is a more stable funding source -- unlike income, you can't take it with you. There is a whole list of reforms that C…

Your last paragraph is self-contradictory. Ending Prop 13 would not cause "significantly scaling back spending and decreasing its vast administrative bureaucracies." Instead it would have the opposite effect. All other taxes would stay the same, but now they'd have this additional source of money.

This may be difficult to understand, and I can accept if you refuse to believe it, but it's possible to say that two steps are needed without the first step also accomplishing the second.

"e.g. 1) switch to more funding on property taxes and 2) reduce administrative bloat"

Shockingly, this does not make the two steps "self-contradictory".

Re: California’s population shrinks for third straight year

#83
post #20

California is a great state in many ways, but it'd be a stretch to say it's even half assed a solution to its housing problem: they've quarter assed it at most. And it does someone no good for a state to be great in many ways if they can't afford to live there. The situation has been dire for some time, but all they do are small incremental steps towards building more housing, it's nowhere close to what's necessary.…

It's not a problem to everyone. For example, it's not a problem to many homeowners that the value of their homes keep going up and to the right. Living in California is expensive, in more ways than just housing. Not everyone can afford it. Just like not everyone can afford a new BMW. In my corner of the state, people who increasingly cannot afford to live here are noisy. I mostly don't engage because I'm aware that I…

For the most part everyone arguing in favor of ideas championed by the left are unable to engage in rational argument they always engage by attempting to personally insult and label the other as bad or selfish. As someone that has always voted Dem prior to this past midterm, this style of argument actually drove me further right. Got to the point where I decided that if an idea can't be championed on it's merits it's probably not something I'm interested in

Re: California’s population shrinks for third straight year

#84
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a problem to everyone. For example, it's not a problem to many homeowners that the value of their homes keep going up and to the right. Living in California is expensive, in more ways than just housing. Not everyone can afford it. Just like not everyone can afford a new BMW. In my corner of the state, people who increasingly cannot afford to live here are noisy. I mostly don't engage because I'm aware that I…

You get anger and vitriol because your views are part of the problem. NIMBY’s pull up the ladder and try to turn a nice semi-affordable car into a Porsche then tell everyone “sorry, it’s just expensive to be here. Not my fault!”

Pretty sure the basics of economics are your issue, not the people you pejoratively call NIMBY

Re: California’s population shrinks for third straight year

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if we made it illegal to manufacture new lawnmowers or sofas or iPhones, then the value of the existing lawnmowers, sofas, and iPhones would skyrocket, which would be (at least in the naive accounting [0]) very good for the current owners of lawnmowers, sofas, and iPhones -- but hopefully you can see how ridiculous that is as policy. [0] I say "naive accounting," because it's not so great if you ever need to buy…

Like most analogies, those fail. One person's quality of life is not affected in any way by another person having a sofa. More housing and population density does lead to increased crowding, which some people consider a decrease in quality of life. We can argue which QOL argument outweighs the other, but it's plain wrong to say that increasing housing has no impact on existing residents.

Of course allowing more housing impacts people. And people on their iPhones impact me -- when they're behind the wheel, when they're talking loudly in a restaurant, when I can't get their attention in a shop. The towers impact me (they're ugly and ubiquitous and use valuable spectrum). And lawnmowers? Those impact me, too! They're loud and stir up dust. I'm struggling to think of anything objectionable about sofas, but that just means 2/3 of my totally-arbitrary examples have significant impacts on others. And, because those examples were totally arbitrary, we could easily substitute three far more objectionable products.

You live in a society. Of course the things other people do impact you. That's a low bar, easily met, and not interesting enough to justify a ban on new housing. The impacts have to be overwhelmingly harmful to justify prohibition. Apartment buildings clearly do not meet that standard. You might not like apartments, but I love them, and banal preferences shouldn't drive policy in a free society.

Re: California’s population shrinks for third straight year

#86
The CA government has a budget the size of Finland’s GDP ($250B), if they wanted to fix the housing issue, they could.

But not enough people do want it fixed because they are trapped with their real estate investment which they can’t adored to have decrease in value.

Re: California’s population shrinks for third straight year

#87
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a problem to me, that's the point. By saying I am a part of the problem, what you really mean is that my views are an obstacle to you getting what you want.

[flagged]

What if people simply don't want refugee camps in their back yard? You are assuming that an improvement for you is logically an improvement for others. It's not. Your opinion is worth as much as everyone else's; 1 vote

Re: California’s population shrinks for third straight year

#88
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a problem to everyone. For example, it's not a problem to many homeowners that the value of their homes keep going up and to the right. Living in California is expensive, in more ways than just housing. Not everyone can afford it. Just like not everyone can afford a new BMW. In my corner of the state, people who increasingly cannot afford to live here are noisy. I mostly don't engage because I'm aware that I…

So if people keep leaving then the property values go down. Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it isn't going to happen. Imagine property values start plunging, people can't leave, they just start abandoning houses, soon you get vast swathes of abandoned houses which lead to increased crime and urban decay. Decades from now people will shake their heads and talk about the golden days of California and t…

You’ve described most of the country outside of job centers. There’s very little rural housing available and people crowd into job centers and drive up costs. Unless you own property or make a high salary, housing is unaffordable in all 50 states.

Re: California’s population shrinks for third straight year

#89

This is “gross” decline, the backing data has a “net” migration of -113k. NY actually had a much higher net decline at -180k which translates to a 3x higher decline as a percentage (0.9% vs 0.3%). This isn’t necessarily a CA thing as people keep positioning it, it’s a high taxes among other things (like housing, and high mobility)

cough covid response cough

Not sure why you are being downvoted. I live in Oregon and know of at least 15 families that moved to Idaho, Arizona, Texas, etc. because they didn’t like Oregon’s approach to Covid.

Re: California’s population shrinks for third straight year

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if we made it illegal to manufacture new lawnmowers or sofas or iPhones, then the value of the existing lawnmowers, sofas, and iPhones would skyrocket, which would be (at least in the naive accounting [0]) very good for the current owners of lawnmowers, sofas, and iPhones -- but hopefully you can see how ridiculous that is as policy. [0] I say "naive accounting," because it's not so great if you ever need to buy…

Like most analogies, those fail. One person's quality of life is not affected in any way by another person having a sofa. More housing and population density does lead to increased crowding, which some people consider a decrease in quality of life. We can argue which QOL argument outweighs the other, but it's plain wrong to say that increasing housing has no impact on existing residents.

If I did not want more people to live near me, I would simply not live in the most economically productive region in the country. People who hate other people are free to sell their homes and move to the country.
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