patrick.net

Thanks to Hollywood's cultural hegemony, everyone in the world seems to "know" California and usually has a mental image of what life in the state is like. Sadly, the reality of the typical CA "lifestyle" today bears almost zero resemblance to the popular Baywatch glamor image slavishly promoted by the media.

For most working-class wage earners (especially for post-Boomers) that lifestyle generally ranges from spartan to awful, and seems to be trending worse by the day. Housing is only one part, albeit a very large one, in the overall progressive deterioration in the quality of life here for regular folks. The deterioration manifests itself in a number of ways: environmental degradation/pollution, overpopulation/urban overcrowding, traffic perma-gridlock, rapidly deteriorating physical infrastructure and schools, and --critically-- the inability of a working-class income to provide a middle-class lifestyle.

Ignoring the current housing bubble for the moment, the secular trend for at least the past 30 years appears to be California transitioning to a completely bifurcated economy and society, strictly divided between a super-wealthy elite "haves" and a permanently impoverished majority, mostly made up of illegal immigrants and marginalized citizens. The emerging reality is closer to what one might expect to find in Mexico or Brazil, not in the U.S. The housing bubble has greatly exaggerated and magnified this trend, of course. However, even when you remove it from the equation, this long-term trend towards housing unaffordability, overpopulation and overall lower quality of life remains.

I present you with three distinct visions of California.

California Past (pre-Prop. 13, SMUG/NIMBY, illegal flood):

Hollywood Fantasy California:

California Present:

#housing