Ask A Genius 899: California Under Attack?
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/11
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: California is attacked by Conservatives for just being a liberal hell and that people are fleeing California for the free states of Texas and Florida. There’s a lot of bullshit in that California has lost about 1% of its population. Some people made a ton of money in California and want to move into a state with zero or deficient income tax levels. However, having lived in California since ’89, I don’t find the state income tax very oppressive. It’s about 10% at the highest levels, but we generally don’t get over three or 4% even though I’ve made a good living. The State sales tax is pretty high at like 9 and 3/4%, but that’s true of a lot of places, including some Republican states, but the deal with California isn’t that it’s a liberal hell. Yeah, California does have a liberal supermajority. Still, California is such an excellent and exceptionally creative place to do business that many people have made a ton of money and squeezed out poorer people. So, it’s the success of California, I would argue, rather than the liberal hellscape of California that is responsible for a lot of the housing crisis.
LA has maybe 66,000 homeless people, more than any other city in the country, and there are a bunch of reasons for that, but one reason is that freaking LA is excellent if you’re going to be homeless; better to be homeless in January in LA than in Detroit or Baltimore. Also, LA has a lot of drug rehab joints, and people get sent out here from all over the country. These are paid trips because drug rehab, I guess, is a pretty big business. I’m not sure if those people get return tickets or if they do if they use them. But yeah, housing is super expensive in California, and there are good and bad reasons. I’d say it’s a good reason that the housing code book, the building rules, has tripled in thickness in my time in California to include extreme earthquake safety because we have extreme fucking earthquakes. In countries where they have shit building codes and earthquakes, a lot of people get pancaked along with their dwellings. So, we have safe buildings, and then there are a lot of Green Building rules; buildings that don’t fuck up the environment more than they have to, like cement, have a considerable carbon footprint. I don’t think that the building codes do anything about that. Still, they’re pretty thorough in addressing other aspects of the environmental costs of construction and offering bonuses in terms of how big a house you can build on a lot. You can make more extensive if you build greener, which does not seem unreasonable, though it will help contribute to a housing shortage.
There’s nimbyism, not in my backyard-ism, which is you need to build denser housing somewhere to fit all the people who need housing and middle-class and above people don’t want the dense housing in their neighbourhoods. So, California is still an excellent place to live, but you are going to pay a shit ton for housing unless you live in a crappy part of California. You can move to places like Needles, California or even Bakersfield and live cheaply. California is a vast state with many towns you wouldn’t want to live in, and it is affordable.
We’re looking at a changing housing landscape. Housing in California and every place will be disrupted by AI and related powerful technology that may relieve some of this. Also, people’s lifestyles are going to change over the next 30, 40, or 100 years, and people will spend an increasing amount of time… I mean, everybody knows this. It’s a cliche now that everybody’s going to be plugged into VR and that you perhaps won’t need as much great housing as people would want now because people will be living and spending a lot of their time in Matrix-like pods not as all-encompassing, not 24/7 pods but people could be living in virtual reality for 6, 8, or 12 hours a day. Those people may have different housing needs than people who aren’t doing that.
[Recording End]
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