California will be losing a House seat following the release of the 2020 census results. This is not because California's population has gone down. On the contrary, it's increased from 37.3 million in 2010 to 39.5 million in 2020. However, that's only a 5.9% increase, compared to a 7.4% increase for the nation as a whole. This chart tells the story:
California peaked in 2015 at 12.12% of the nation's population and has been declining ever since. In 2020, California accounted for only 11.93% of the country's population.
This will spawn a tedious new set of conservative essays trying to make the case that liberals have ruined the Golden State blah blah blah. It's one of their favorite topics. However, the real reason for the population decline is a simple one: California has rolled up the welcome mat and told people to stay away. This has been done indirectly by refusing to build new housing, thus making shelter so expensive that fewer people can afford to live here.
In other words, California is still a very popular destination, and if the state wanted more people it could easily attract them. But it doesn't.
Totally reasonable for CA to start discouraging immigration, what with the drought and concommitant wildfires. Note that CA has been one of the major "It" destinations for well over a century, we have all but loved it to death. (As always.)
Would that include international migration?
No.
Wildfires and drought don't affect the urban areas.
Drought affects the entire state given the nature of the distribution of water here. And while urban areas don't burn during wildfires, they do get smoked.
Depends. There is plenty of water for the urban areas. Problem is CA has A LOT of farmland which is economically valuable. So urban areas must be told to conserve so the farms can continue to water their fields willy nilly.
Of course CA is also likely to be the center for new water-saving hydroponics technologies. Those will be centered in urban areas too.
Last I looked CA had 11 desalinization plants operational and 10 more planned
Has this made any dent in the water supply issues?
What's needed are ten plants about the size of San Diego.
Uhh, yes they do, FFS!
Speak to anyone who lives in Los Angeles!!!
The state doesn't build new housing. The easy places to build have been used up - for example the LA basin is full of houses - so prices have gone way up. Zoning is only part of the problem. You can't build tall buildings in California because of earthquake risk, or at least not as cheaply as you can in say New York City. There are other problem such as water shortage.
There is a middle ground between one and two story single family detached houses and Manhattan-style sky scrapers. Just sayin'.
True that. And there's also the geology thing. Like, there's a reason there aren't any skyscrapers in the Village.
Geology is less an issue now, but California is full of places that can handle mid-rise structures.
In Los Angeles this is much less a zoning issues than a "Georgist" issue. There are few barriers (legal or technical) to building midrise structures, and plenty of them are going up.
But they are still very expensive. Why?
For the SAME REASON that so many mansions are going up...
Because the LAND is so expensive that, once you have bought it, you might as well put as much house as you like on it -- the nicest house you can imagine will still only cost the same number of dollars as the underlying land. And the same calculus holds for apartments. Build the crappiest, lowest-amenity apartment you like -- that won't change the minimum viable cost because of the underlying LAND cost...
Zoning WILL NOT FIX THIS. The issues are
- lotsa people want to live in a *few* specific places
- all the issues surrounding land rents that Henry George identified 150 years ago.
Sure you can make some tweaks to zoning at the margin. You may be able to improve things in a few specific places like the core of SF (though I doubt it even there). But you can't pack 3 million people into a space that sensibly fits 1 million, regardless of what you do with zoning. At some point the issue is that too many people want to live in the *exact* same place...
Honestly the best you can hope for is patience. Let the sprawl grow out beyond San Bernardino, out past Dublin to Gilroy. And allow 20+ years for the rest of city amenities to follow that sprawl so that those places become nicer.
But of course the exact same crowd that complain about housing costs in SF or LA are the people who are angriest about "sprawl" beyond San Bernardino and Dublin...
I should introduce you to Japan, Mr "You can't build tall buildings in an earthquake area".
Yeah I thought I remembered seeing plenty of buildings exceeding 25 stories or more in SF, LA, SD last time I was there.
But also even if “tall buildings” aren’t possible in those places, there’s still tons of empty and underused lots in all those sad towns and cities along I-5 between Chico and Bakersfield that could be redeveloped into single family homes or low rise multi family units, especially if high speed trains connected those places with SF or LA (instead of connecting them all to each other as is currently/poorly planned).
And those Japanese apartments are cheap, are they? Hmm...
Same cost structure as LA or SF, for the same reasons -- to many people, too litlle land, massive land costs. Techno high rises only help you fit in even more people; they don't change the cost structure.
The easy places to build have been used up - for example the LA basin is full of houses - so prices have gone way up. Zoning is only part of the problem. You can't build tall buildings in California because of earthquake risk...
Seems wrong. Cities all over the Pacific rim are chock full of tall buildings. Moreover, you don't have to build gigantic high rises to house lots more people. Constructing modest-sized multi family units and squat (say, 4-8 story) apartment buildings can make a huge difference when they're replacing single family homes. Which should be economically viable, given California's high housing costs (that is, it should be profitable to buy a few single family houses and put up multi-families units).
The problem, in the main, is that it's illegal to build this kind of housing in much of California. Full stop.
Yes, population growth=debt expansion and ponzi service sector schemes. Most contards and Fox news lovers don't want to admit it. Socialism doesn't care about that. You work with what you got and live off to the lands ability. The higher the elite push it, the harder it has to fall. Florida would be done as a state in that case as global capital flows collapse and excessive consumption is turned into production. Colored guys like Desantis would be meeting the guillotine.
Um ... whoa. I think someone needs to adjust their medications.
If by "adjust their medications" you mean "don't drown them in vodka chasers" then I suspect you're right.
Do we need the racism? Really?
My view on Desantis's ancestors is what created the 1920's immigration bill(which failed, immigration didn't crater until FDR basically banned it due to the depression).
So about 0.2%.
Can I call attention to deceptive use of the y axis?
It's not deceptive if we're talking about a minute change in growth.
I think most conservatives would include California's housing policy as one of the ways liberals have ruined the state. (Compare Houston, which has no zoning.) Correlatively, I don't think Kevin or his liberal compatriots can really claim a lot of credit for the weather, which obviously continues to be attractive to many.
Of course, conservatives are mostly at fault for it.
They always vote against policies which encourage more density or housing turnover.
Maybe in California, though I doubt it. In most states, conservatives are shills for developers who want to build, whereas liberals protect nature and historic neighborhoods. Anyway, conservatives have no power in California, so they can't be responsible for anything there regardless of what they might want.
But were actually talking about two different groups, conservative voters and conservative politicians. The voters are dead set against density but the politicians they elect are in the pocket of developers.
LOL, the conservative voters are the real problem in California. Both of them?
“ LOL, the conservative voters are the real problem in California. Both of them?”
Go check how many votes the GOP presidential candidate got in 2020. I assume it wasn’t people voting ironically; ergo, we have millions and millions of idiot conservatives here. They aren’t shrinking violets, either.
Density sucks. It turns cool towns like Dana Point into mini Santa Monicas. It means less sunlight, more crowds on sidewalks, hard parking, and just in general lower quality of life. And it certainly isn't 'conservatives' of the GOP type that discourage density. It is in fact the newly blue suburban soccer Moms from behind their community gates.
There's a LOT more scrubland around Houston than there is of any kind within the ring of mountains around both the Bay Area and the LA Basin. Houston can grow to Flatonia and meet San Antonio in a blissful merger of sprawl mania.
I'm confused. What does the scrubland around Houston have to do with the presence or absence of zoning within Houston?
You say 'scrubland', I say 'habitat'.
The Tucker Carlson crowd is very much leading the charge these days to retain restrictive zoning in the face of YIMBY efforts to jettison it.
These days, YIMBYism is a largely liberal undertaking, although some places we associate with low land/housing costs do benefit from legacy "shall build" regulatory regimes (Texas is like this, IIRC, but there nonetheless a number of suburbs in the Dallas area that have tough NIMBY rules).
YIMBYism is an increasingly prominent movement in much of urban America, and it's also something that needs to succeed if immigration inflows are going to increase at some point, and therefore NIMBYish will increasingly be associated with the right.
"In other words, California is still a very popular destination, and if the state wanted more people it could easily attract them. But it doesn't."
I'd actually argue that this is unintentional, not intentional.
Really? I mean, I doubt many Californian's who support the NIMBY status quo or who show up at community meetings to shout down development plans have the state's demographic big picture in mind. So in that sense it's "unintentional." But on the other hand if there are folks who tend to be hostile to the construction of new housing -- and a lot of Californians plainly are -- it's pretty hard to avoid the conclusion they don't want to "attract more people."
I guess we see now what Kevin was trying to find that had him so upset about the Census Bureau's website.
And Kevin is correct when he says that California's population has not declined - relative to the 2010 census... But if I am recalling correctly, we no longer have an increasing population year over year, and it may even be in slight decline. And frankly, the equity in my house notwithstanding, that is a good thing. Given we are alternatively either burning, flooding, desiccated or shaking I would assert that it is good the population is no longer increasing. And frankly, the US and world population should cease increasing and start a nice, steady decline to something which can be described as a 32-bit unsigned quantity.
When I was casting about for "California population" I came across:
Well Kevin, are you willing for your duplex to become a four-plex? Or your neighborhood to shift from duplexes to say four-story apartment complexes? The true purpose of the CA High Speed Rail program you so often and correctly decry is to allow the Central Valley to be turned into bedroom communities for SF and LA...
That may well have been the original purpose of the High Speed Rail, but given that the plan no longer connects to either SF or LA, it seems unlikely it will have that effect.
People would commute to work on a HSR line? I never heard of that happening anywhere. No one commutes on the Acela except maybe Joe Biden (before he was president).
Here in China a good number of people commute to the city first thing Monday morning and head back home to the village on the weekend. So, it's a form of commuting. But doing it daily is pretty rare, I think.
Well Kevin, are you willing for your duplex to become a four-plex? Or your neighborhood to shift from duplexes to say four-story apartment complexes?
I don't know Kevin personally, but my guess is he's more "YIMBY" than "NIMBY." But holding the former position doesn't require one to personally want one's own neighborhood to be radically transformed in the interest of consistency. It simply requires that one support changing laws and regulations (and letting the chips fall where they may with respect to development).
But California has been more than welcoming to *not* Americans. It doles out money for illegal aliens, it lauds international migrants. At the same time it tries its best to drive out the heirs of the Okies and the 'back east' post WWII people.
But of course in your childless, boomer 'enclave' of Hong Irvine, where low rise apartment blocks spring up in the former strawberry fields, you can pronounce judgement.
Do we need the racist lies here?
I have no problem being called 'racist', but where's the lie?
Apparently one good thing the hated Coral system did was scrub out more of the racist slurs from comments. Now that Kevin has his own website, he needs to spend more time investigating ways to punish commenters who have unleashed their formerly repressed racist comments all over his site... or just let jabberwocking.com become a racist cesspool like so much of the rest of the internet is.
CALIFORNIA will abide.
I remember California before WW2. It was a nice place.
It was even nice in the 1980s...air quality has certainly improved, but that's about the only thing.
I miss the Zoot Suit Riots.
I miss the bum blockade:
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ca-bumblockade/
We have a lack of buildable land in California (except for the Central Valley where nobody wants to live because it is too much like Texas).
Too many hills drives land prices up and ALSO increase regulations.
http://www.freddiemac.com/research/insight/20170929_is_geography_destiny.page
"Imagine we could replace San Francisco’s current land use regulations with the regulations of the same strictness (same value of the Wharton index) as those in Kansas City. In this imaginary San Francisco, this regulatory relief would reduce the median house price by 26 percent, from $775,000 (2015 median) to $571,000.
... Stretch your imagination a bit further and consider leaving San Francisco’s land use regulations unchanged but, instead, replacing San Francisco’s considerable geographic constraints with the almost-total lack of constraints in Kansas City. If this were possible18, the median house price in San Francisco would drop by an astonishing 54 percent in the long run to $359,000."
Do you realize how incoherent a sentence that is? "where nobody wants to live because it is too much like Texas"
Texas population grew by 16.4% over the last decade, second highest behind Utah.
And yet you dismiss all those people who clearly do want to live in Texas as nobody!
Nothing corrodes civility so much as contempt. And this is the on-going contempt that a certain type of liberal has for any human being who might differ from them in some way. Sure, lots of verbiage about diversity and acceptance -- but anyone who might possibly want to live in Texas gets demoted to the status of non-human...
Nobody wants to live there, they just have to.
If California is going to lose a House seat, I suggest merging the 22nd Congressional District and the 23rd.
They've lightened up a bit, allowing some more by-right structures and accessory dwelling units. Now if they could just make duplexes and triplexes by-right, it'd really ease up on the housing situation.
Local zoning laws and various combinations of state and local permitting and environmental regulations make it prohibitively expensive to build anything but exurban McMansions or ultra-luxury condos in California these days. Anyone aside from high-end developers like Toll Brothers won't touch the state with a ten-foot pole. Current homeowners of course enjoy the little million-dollar nestegg they currently have and will always vote to make sure those byzantine anti-development regulations stay in place. So it's a vicious circle. California seems doomed to remain beautiful but inaccessible to anyone but Google engineers.
So it's a vicious circle. California seems doomed to remain beautiful but inaccessible to anyone but Google engineers.
Sounds wrong. Last time I looked California's home ownership rate was perilously close to falling below 50%. (It's been declining for years). Eventually voters who rent will outnumber voters who own, and we'll see laws change. Mind you I'm not suggesting a radical transformation toward YIMBY rules overnight. But I don't think California is "doomed" in perpetuity to be a place where new housing supply is so restricted. It's a bad policy for an increasingly large percentage of the electorate.
OT: https://bityl.co/6ZNY
FB's internal report about Jan 6 and its role. The saddest excuse from FB: We didn't know what was going on because we couldn't see the bigger picture.
Can CA pull an DE and put a sign up saying they're closed?
(I think that actually happened--and people were like, ok)
Here it is:
https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/local/2014/01/16/dialogue-delaware-sorry-folks-delaware-is-closed/4523785/
Oh California already attempted that way before Candid Camera's Delaware episode. There was a sheriff who tried to prevent Okies from entering the state during the Great Depression.