Why California Has So Many Problems

California is an island, not literally, of course, but geography and history have subjected the state to the same pressures and influences that make real islands so insular. Towering mountains separate most of the state from its neighbors, then America's largest desert places hundreds of miles of harsh, sparsely populated landscape between it and the more populous states further east. By contrast, California's largest, richest, and most influential cities are located on the coast: San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. This is not a coincidence. With statehood in 1850, California began its interaction with the rest of the nation across the ocean.

It did not border any other state; the next closest was Texas. The interior was considered a hostile and dangerous desert, but it was also fundamentally roadless, so steamships left the east coast, meandered through the Caribbean, and dropped off passengers in Panama. There, travelers crossed the country on foot, horseback, and boat to reach Panama City, where they waited for another steamship to take them to California; at best a thirty or forty day journey, but incredibly, the quickest way to get there. from one half of America to the other. This disconnect meant that California initially operated more like a colony, especially considering that until telegraph lines spanned the country a decade later, this weeks-long journey was also the fastest way to get information from coast to coast.

It wasn't until the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 that the state was truly reliably connected to the rest of the country by land, giving California two pivotal decades to define its identity in isolation. This legacy persists: disconnection manifests itself in small ways that add up to a significant sum. For example, most of the rest of the country is connected by a network of pipelines, allowing for cheap and efficient transportation of the resource from well to refinery to pump. California is different: With those towering mountains and desolate deserts separating it from the east, the economics never worked out to extend an oil pipeline into the state.

California therefore largely buys crude oil from foreign countries, imports it in huge tankers, and refines it locally, which (in addition to the state's strict environmental regulations) explains the higher prices typically seen at its pumps. California even has a small degree of disconnection from the rest of the American highway network: it is the only state that requires all travelers to go through some kind of border formality upon entry. It is not immigration per se, but rather an agricultural inspection to check for invasive species, but the point is not that these controls in themselves significantly separate the State from the rest.

Furthermore, the fact that California is able to isolate and protect itself from the plagues prevalent in the rest of the continent with some degree of success demonstrates how naturally disconnected it is. The only state that has a similarly extensive agricultural inspection system is Hawaii, literally made up of islands. But the reason California can be so isolated is because it is really, absurdly, filthy rich. The center of the state, if defined by the concentration of wealth, is here: Silicon Valley. It would be easy to assume that the area's riches are exaggerated, but the figures offer a quick counterpoint.

Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco (the three counties that encompass the core of Silicon Valley) have a collective GDP of $725 billion. This is as close as it gets to Poland: the 21st largest nation in the world, home to 38 million people. The uninitiated might assume that San Francisco and Silicon Valley are more or less the same. Sure, San Francisco has a big tech scene, but the main headquarters are spread across the towns and cities to the south: Google is in Mountain View, Apple is in Cupertino, Netflix is ​​in Los Gatos. What this means is that these tech titans, some of the largest companies in the world, are based in some pretty small cities: 82,000, 60,000, and 34,000 residents, respectively.

Therefore, they are regulated by small, hyper-competitive local governments. In fact, San Francisco (the city you know best) isn't even the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area. San Jose has 983,000 residents versus San Francisco's 815,000, because the entire area is simply subdivided into a lot of smaller cities and towns, which is kind of a trend. Los Angeles County, which encompasses most but not all of the metropolitan area, is made up of 88 different cities, plus unincorporated areas. In the state's two largest urbanized masses, what functions as one city operates as dozens, even hundreds, leaving few comprehensive, overarching bodies to align incentives.

Zooming in, considering the strange relationships and power dynamics of neighboring communities, or zooming out, considering the state's historical and contemporary isolation, California is the most unique state there is. Uniqueness has brought benefits, but it has also created unique

problems

and strange, sometimes complicated, ways to solve them. Take homelessness, for example. This is a hot and highly visible topic, with complicated causes and largely theoretical solutions, so it's easy for conversations about it to go off scale. However, a quick look at the statistics makes one thing unequivocally clear: California's homeless problem is uniquely serious. Of the 582,462 homeless people nationwide in 2022, 171,521 were in California.

That's nearly 30% of the country's total, or, by comparison, about 97,000 more than New York and about 150,000 more than Florida, the states with the second and third largest homeless populations. But California is the most populous state in the country, so this must be considered on a per-resident basis. And here too, California tops the rest, with 44 homeless people per 10,000. What's even more worrying is that despite the higher total and higher rate, the problem is only getting worse. From 2020 to 2022, while 23 states saw declines in their homeless populations, California's increased another six percent—ten thousand people. So it's a big, bad, and getting worse problem, and while it's at the top of meeting agendas from small town halls to Sacramento, it doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon.

While no state has figured out how to solve homelessness, it is generally understood that providing shelters and stable housing programs is associated with a reduction in numbers. It follows, then, that California has comparatively few shelter beds, as the state has chosen to prioritize permanent housing projects that have proven expensive and incredibly slow to build. This has left more and more people in the relative cold. In 2022, two-thirds of California's homeless were considered unsheltered: living in tents, cars, RVs, or on the streets, far from shelters and services that could potentially turn things around. Now, the state government has watched this problem grow and spread, and has tried to come up with solutions while pouring millions and millions of dollars into it.

However, the state still has the largest and most visible homeless problem in the nation and has few solutions, or even stopgap measures, to alleviate the problem. Much of this is a function of a simple reality that the state government has surprisingly little control over: It's really hard to build in California. The difficulty in finding housing extends to everyone here: the state is in the midst of a housing crisis. But this is not due to a faltering economy or meager wages. Year after year, California ranks as one of the highest average-income states in the nation, and yet in an analysis of 2019 numbers, once adjusted for the cost of living, it plummets to 48th place.

More than unemployment or low-paying jobs, it is the sky-high cost of living that puts so

many

people so dangerously close to losing their homes; all you might need is a medical emergency. Interestingly, the explanation could be that the state's economy is too strong for its own good. Let's take this simple metric: the jobs-housing ratio which considers how

many

jobs are created relative to how many housing units are added to a given area. To keep local employment healthy without increasing congestion, traffic, or displacing long-time residents, the U.S. EPA considers a ratio ranging between 0.75 and 1.5 healthy for an urban area.

In the last decade, clearly rising popular cities have begun to push into the upper reaches of this range. The Phoenix metro area sits at 1.34; Seattle: 1.43; Austin: 1.47; and Denver's: 1.73. But California has surpassed this range: the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metropolitan area reached No. 2, Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario reached 2.72, and the ratio of new jobs per new housing unit of San Jose-Sunnyvale- Santa Clara was affected. a truly amazing 3.19. Of course, a ruthless economy here only represents the numerator: jobs. The denominator is equally responsible for the state's housing crisis, but it's the result of a slightly more nebulous concept: the California Dream. Of all the floating, intangible assumptions about what life in California is supposed to be like—the long sunny days and balmy temperatures, along with the plethora of good jobs, beaches, and open spaces—it's the single-family home with a lawn and maybe a group that has proven to be the most important, the most concrete and currently the most controversial.

And it is this fundamental principle that is causing such enormous

problems

. After all, Californians desperately want to keep what they were sold and are willing to fight for it. Take Atherton, a small Silicon Valley town just minutes from Stanford. In 2022, to keep up with state mandates on housing requirements, City Council began the process of rezoning a single-family lot to build an apartment building. The project was quickly cancelled. It wasn't a lack of money or a lack of municipal will: it was eliminated because the city's most influential and powerful executives, and even basketball superstar Steph Curry, banded together and pressured the city to get out of it.

For them, the project would hurt their property values, cut off their views, change the character of the community and create more traffic. So the project and its 16 desperately needed housing units died in the dust, forcing city planners to go back to the drawing board. While the characters may not be as prominent as Atherton's, this happens all the time, all over the state. Here, the city government decided to designate itself as a mountain lion sanctuary, which was strange, but conveniently allowed it to forgo new housing developments. Here, in 2019, construction began on a 154-bed shelter only for Venice Beach to sue the city of Los Angeles to stop construction.

Here, residents of San Francisco's Embarcadero area did the same, suing the city for establishing a 200-bed shelter in the neighborhood. And throughout the Bay Area, those who want California to remain the same low-density California of yesteryear have created their own organizations, councils and committees: Better Cupertino and Palo Alto for Sensible Zoning, to name a few. This is not just a fringe issue: increasingly, anti-density advocates are winning local elections. After all, this is all in the local interest: if one small town has enough power to move the problem to the next, clearly an electorate will opt for that over something that could hurt their property values.

The state has the money and the interest in solving its problems of homelessness and housing shortages, but it can only do so much when powerful local governments resist even the smallest of zoning changes and the smallest of development projects. living place. So the current problems have grown to an exceptional size, and as the current solution of simply building more housing is rejected, the state legislature is resorting to the spectacular: launching projects to systematically convert motels into housing units, endorsing anti-NIMBY laws and file lawsuits. against their own cities. And all this absurd mess is limited to the issue of housing.

Of course, there are fires. There is also too much water in some places and too little in others. There are disputes over who deserves Colorado River water at the state and local levels. There is traffic, there is outdated infrastructure, there are companies leaving the state and middle-class workers following them. There are many discussions and much to discuss. It is clear that the problems in California have accumulated to an unsustainable level and are systematically not being addressed.they resolve. Something seems fundamentally wrong with the state, so maybe it needs a fundamental fix: Maybe California should just be a country.

Sounds ridiculous, right? Of course California can't become a country. That would never happen. Congress would never allow it. But perhaps the point worth focusing on is how much less ridiculous it sounds when considering the argument. After all, California wouldn't be out of place as a country. It would rank 59th in physical size, between Iraq and Paraguay; 38th in population, between Canada and Poland; and fifth in GDP, between Germany and India, so it would actually be above average in all major scale metrics. One of the most common refrains against secessionist movements is that the separatist regions could not survive economically on their own.

For example, according to the UK government, for every dollar Scotland pays in taxes, it receives around $1.32 back; the country would have an immediate and dramatic budget deficit upon full independence. This fact underpins some of the greatest hesitation among the Scots themselves on the matter. But California is different. In 2019, before the pandemic distorted the data, the state received just 97 cents in federal spending for every dollar it sent to the federal government. This placed the state, each year, in a small group of about ten that received less than they gave, while others, such as Mississippi, Kentucky, and West Virginia, consistently received more than two dollars for every dollar they sent.

Of course, this is intentional: America's progressive tax system is supposed to disproportionately go to the rich and give disproportionately to the less wealthy, but from California's perspective, many wonder why they're sending all their dollars to states ungrateful to them. thousands of kilometers away. And besides, California doesn't even have much of a say in how those dollars are spent. Given the unequal distribution of electoral votes in presidential elections, each individual in Wyoming has the voting power of approximately 3.7 Californians, while the Senate system of two senators per state, regardless of population, further exacerbates this weak representation. Again, the system was deliberately designed hundreds of years ago to amplify the voices of smaller states, but from California's perspective, they bear the brunt.

Feeling underrepresented by Washington, California has long legislated less like a state and more like a nation, passing sweeping and powerful laws when it feels the federal government can't or won't. For example, there has long been a ban on assault rifles, similar to the one the Biden administration is trying to pass; has announced a ban on gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035, similar to other bans passed by countries; has established its own immigration law, focused largely on educating detainees about their rights before turning them over to what the state could characterize as abusive federal authorities; It has even formed relationships with countries, having signed a joint environmental agreement with New Zealand at COP26.

In many ways, addressing perceived federal shortcomings has become a central focus of California politics, but this dynamic has unsurprisingly spurred tensions with DC, especially as federal power tilts to the right. There is certainly no political will for California to secede right now (not even close), but if there were a major perceived encroachment on California's rights (a removal of the assault rifle ban or a nationwide abortion ban ), one would imagine that the political will for California secession at this point (not even close) will build up quickly. But it remains a largely moot point because it would almost certainly solve one problem by creating a bigger one.

As much as California may be held back from sending dollars to Washington or submitting to its laws, the state is enormously encouraged by its inclusion in the world's largest economy. Leaving the United States would have dire economic consequences that would surely outweigh any benefits. Perhaps the closest equivalent is Brexit (much of the political will arose from the belief that the European Union was taking the country's money and encroaching on its sovereignty), but now, just a few years later, with growing problems over trade and travel, public opinion has turned decisively towards regret: most agree that kicking the UK out of the world's third-largest economy was not the right decision.

Public opinion on California independence has never approached a majority, but there have been enough fringe movements seeking secession that the question has been included in legitimate political polls, reliably demonstrating surprising support for the idea: Between 14% and 32% of respondents favored California independence. nationhood. In fact, in a survey conducted by a Stanford-affiliated think tank, the 18- to 29-year-old demographic responded with a nearly even 36% in favor and only 40% against, demonstrating that while the majority opinion does not at all support the extreme and unprecedented measure In terms of modern state secession, the perceived disconnection with Washington has taken the idea to surprising levels of legitimacy.

We all know pragmatically that secession will never happen in anything like this reality... but partition could. The underlying idea is the same: that California is a big, underrepresented, overtaxed country. The solution is simply less extreme: break it up into smaller states. This has been proposed, rightfully, more than two hundred times, with the most recent concerted push being led by billionaire investor Tim Draper in 2018. He proposed splitting the state into three parts called Northern California, Southern California, and California, in an attempt to balance the population. , wealth and politics somewhat evenly among the three. The central argument was that the state government was out of touch with local governments given the enormous size difference between the two, and that the federal government was out of touch with the state government given the diluted representation, so the solution was reduce the size of the state and also, given the two senators per state system, give more powerful federal representation to the population.

This argument was persuasive enough to generate far more than the 367,000 signatures needed to get the question on the ballot but, before Election Day, it was struck down by the state Supreme Court on constitutional grounds. Still, it probably wouldn't have passed (polls showed its support between 13% and 17%) but even if the state voted for it, it would be up to the federal government to approve such a split, and the federal government would almost certainly I would never approve of a division. Democrats would balk at the fact that it would fracture a strongly democratic state, Republicans would balk at the four additional left-leaning congressmen it would send to DC, everyone would wonder if it wouldn't be too dangerous a precedent to set.

So big solutions are unreasonable and small solutions don't work. Maybe the answer is that California is too unique, because it definitely is. There is no state, region or other national subdivision with a larger economy in the world and, on the list, there are not even equivalents. Texas comes in second, but is run by conservative small governments, meaning state intervention in problems is limited. New York is third, but almost all of its GDP is concentrated in one huge metropolitan area, meaning its structure is much simpler. Then we have England, but it acts as a nation within a nation; then Guangdong and Jiangsu, but China is not a democratic State; then Florida, but has a lean toward Texas-style small government; then Shandong and Zhejiang, also China; then Illinois, mostly a city; then Henan, also China; and finally Pennsylvania.

With its comparatively conservative and smaller-government politics, it is not a great equivalent to California, but it is the closest so far considering that its wealth is somewhat distributed geographically and its government is more open to intervention than in Florida or Texas. . That is to say, California is not only unique from the rest of the United States, but it is unique in the world: no one is really trying to manage such a large economy with anything less than national status. You have unique problems, you feel disconnected from the nation, you lack the power of the nation, and yet you feel like you need to act like a nation.

This should sound familiar, because in 1776, thirteen North American colonies declared independence from Great Britain, citing their unique problems, their sense of disconnection, their lack of power on a national scale, and the idea that simply being a nation was a way to solve everything. What happened next was the United States. And what happened next was American exceptionalism: the belief that America is fundamentally and dramatically unique. This is true in many ways. There are simply no places that reflect the scale, geography, and demographics of the United States, but this sentiment underpins perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of American politics: the belief that, as a unique place, the United States needs unique solutions.

There is a systematic rejection of solutions that have repeatedly worked in close cultural equivalents because of the belief that they are incompatible with what makes America unique or with uniqueness itself. That means California is the exception to the exception. The state is exceptional, it is fundamentally different from the rest of the nation, and therefore an analogous idea of ​​Californian exceptionalism permeates throughout Sacramento, supporting the belief that they too require unique solutions. After all, California is supposed to be a land of economic opportunity, a destination free of persecution, an idyllic antithesis to the status quo: California is America's America.

The exception to the exception is not the norm, it is something more than the exception. California is like the hyper-distilled version of the United States itself: developing for many of the same reasons as the nation itself, just a century or two later. It is not surprising that the state focused on rejecting norms of the country focused on rejecting norms can deviate from the most obvious path. Nor is it surprising that, in the same way that the United States becomes the international media's crush, a source of political entertainment, so does California for the United States. At the end of the day, California politicians may be terrible (the GOP talking points may be correct and the State may be evidence that liberal politics is structurally flawed), but it's nearly impossible to examine the political rhetoric and, of course, In fact, objectively analyze this.

However, it is reasonably clear that California politicians, like American politicians, have a more difficult task to face in dealing with a truly unique situation. Unprecedented decisions are made and then in retrospect, once the precedents are established, the failures seem obvious. So the question of how to solve California's problems is more the question of how to solve America's problems: should I keep trying to find something new, fight exceptionalism with exceptionalism, or can non-exceptional solutions work for non-exceptional problems? exceptional, even when they occur in exceptional places. Last year, in a video on carbon offsets, we covered California's unique cap-and-trade program that was supposed to be an elegant way to curb industrial emissions, but in practice propped up ineffective carbon offsets and illogical management practices forest.

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