But we have air conditioning. Every place has air conditioning. And it run's constantly. But still my power bill is just a fraction of what it was in California.
From late fall through early spring the weather is very California-like: cool and crisp in the morning and warm and dry in the afternoon.
Most people in California are this way though. All of my family who still lives out there pay a premium to watch the same TV shows I watch and to watch Netflix while sitting on their behinds indoors. Very few people are out hiking every possible minute or going out to the coast even when living nearby.
I'm inclined to agree with you, and would say that many folks living in the expensive parts of California aren't even leveraging the majority of what makes it so expensive to live where they do.
I lived in the SF bay area for over a decade, and when employed by the tech industry and spending all my free time outdoors it was very worthwhile.
But whenever I stopped working in the lucrative positions there, the math stopped making sense, even spending all my time outside.
I'm still in California, but a much cheaper part: Joshua Tree. Bought a sizable property in cash, my cost of living is very low and I can still access all the excellent California produce and the coast is only a ~2 hour drive away.
People tend to only talk about the most expensive pockets of CA as if it's representative for the entire state. There's a lot of more rural parts of CA that are very affordable, still beautiful, and not even that far from the ocean.
There is a lot of focus on the expensive parts of CA because thats where the jobs are. If you need to be employed you pretty much have to live in or around the expensive parts and thus it makes sense for people in that situation to relocate. If someone does not need to work or works remotely then one of the cheap parts of the state does make sense.
Just don’t try to send your kids to the schools in the affordable parts of the state. Low cost of living = lower property values = low property taxes = poorly funded schools.
For one thing, the post implied that being indoors came with the higher humidity in Texas. But assuming that the poster really did "accept a life spent indoors in air-conditioned spaces" as you reflexively assume, what is this extra high taxation paying for in California that the person wasn't taking advantage of?
I'm not going to write what amounts to a tourism advertisement here.
Do you really need to be explained all the reasons California is a desirable vacation destination for the entire world?
Living there without spending your time outside is missing the entire point.
Many people live there just for the tech industry, and simultaneously complain about the high cost of living. Well, if you spend all your time at the keyboard indoors, you should shift to remote work and leave the state. Because you're paying to live in the funnest place in the nation, don't blame the state for not taking advantage of it.
Not only did I live in California, but I lived in the middle of a national forest there. And yes, I spent a great deal of time enjoying it. The question remains, and I'll clarify: how much of a resident's taxes pay to maintain the great outdoors versus all of the other services?
I don’t mean to imply that you can go outside. You can. And we do. Just that when it’s 85 at night and 85% humidity, you run your A/C all night, every night.
In support of what jedberg said, the Texas State Board of Education reviews school books and votes on which books to buy, and has the power to get the book authors to change books to their liking. That board, with the help of the Governor, was packed with creationists. Science books had to "teach the controversy" and treat creationism as being as valid as evolution. And guess which religion's creation story is the one chosen? It wasn't about science, it wasn't about religious tolerance; it is about their desire to see government run by their evangelical religion.
The board chair was for many years was Don McLeroy. He is a dentist without any particular educational pedigree. What he had going for him was zeal to promote the cause, nothing more.
It wasn't just science books affected, of course. History books cut out Jefferson to make room for Reagan and Phyllis Shlafly. When you are far to either side, even centrist information looks biased. The SBOE believed the textbooks had terrible liberal bias and needed to be fixed. If you are an American student and have textbooks, they are far from liberal.
As far as I could tell, everyone in Dallas/Austin/Houston/San Antonio lives in gated communities with almost nothing in walking distance and very, very few people walking around.
People walk all over LA. It would be weird to look down the street and not see a couple people walking along the sidewalk at any given time. The sidewalks are filled with food carts, fruit carts, random goods merchants, impromptu daily farmers markets, as well as tent encampments.
Eh you might as well consider some people living in SF/LA in a gated community. If you Uber/Lyft from home to work to your favorite restaurant you’re not really in the community.
Here in Houston we have a few gated communities here and there, e.g., Stablewood, just outside the West Loop and off of Memorial Drive to the south. Agreed about the walking.
Why do you need real integrated diversity anyway? Because it's politically correct?
Let me tell you something about human nature, people like to hang out with people that look like them (and animals in the wild do this too). It's natural, they have similar culture, and therefore similar interests, it's easier to have a conversion if you come from a similar background as someone else.
I have been to Texas a few times, a few different cities, and anecdotally I noticed it is no different from the Bay Area: Whites generally hangout with Whites, Blacks hang out with Blacks, Indians with Indians, Asians with Asians , etc..
I'm currently living in Houston, working as a SWE, and can attest to the pros of living here. Regarding your concerns, the city is quite demographically diverse from people of all walks of life. Summers do get hot and humid, but nothing unbearable. The winters are more than tolerable (its currently 68 degrees outside) as well.
I would argue Bay Area is one of the most diverse places on the planet. More so than Houston.
In the Bay Area we have the following people: white, black, indian, vietnamese, chinese, korean, latinx, middle eastern, russian, polish, european, british, etc.
Whites are a minority at many public schools in the Bay Area..and that is normal here. Yet people on HN love to complain about lack of diversity?
Cons of Houston:
-Traffic is just as bad as the Bay Area if not worse, no?
I lived in Raleigh, NC for a while, and I found it very "purple" with people mostly coexisting amicably. I've been gone a while so I don't know if that aspect of things has changed, but it's a very nice place to live, so well worth checking out :)
I worked one day a week in an office in San Jose and a guy wore his MAGA hat to work the day after Trump won in 2016, he got about 25% of the vote in Santa Clara county so plenty of them here. There are also a few Trump emblazoned trucks/houses if you happen to spend much time in rural areas outside of San Jose/San Francisco. Also, my local little town newspaper had a front page story about a couple that were GOP supporters that went to the Trump inauguration.
If by conservative you mean something akin to capitalistic, and unabashedly out to make money, from the housewife to the CEO, then yes.
If you mean something else, then it really isn't that cut and dry.
Everyone (a very large majority) is from somewhere else, and most came to Houston not because it was some kind of Shangri-La, but because of the opportunities.
Plus, for what it's worth, Houston is one of, if not the, most ethnically diverse city in the US. (Google it so I don't have to provide biased sources.)
It's not the kind of place I want to live (I prefer an order of magnitude of around 100K), but when I actually learned something about Houston, I realized that I had some stereotypes that were not accurate.
> It's worth pointing out that this is in no small part because Houston is affordable.
This is an under appreciated point. Texas in general, has some of the most organically diverse places I’ve been to. Low taxes, low regulation, and low housing costs have done a lot to attract a diverse set of people from the rest of the country, and from other countries. It’s a place where people of color are building families, businesses, and thriving.
This is so true. I grew up in California and was led to believe that it was one of the most diverse places yet it does not hold a candle to where I live now in Houston.
I don't doubt it. And at a statewide level, you'd have to look at news like the small-minded governor excluding legal refugees (something that other very red states like Utah haven't done).
But look up San Francisco's racial makeup vs Houston's and... you can make the case that there's at least a place in the same city for a lot more people in Houston.
> But look up San Francisco's racial makeup vs Houston's and
They're practically the same if you swap the black and asian populations. This makes a lot of sense: Asian immigrant populations came from the west coast, usually SF. Black populations started in the southeast, and its much easier to migrate from Mississippi to Texas than Mississippi to San Francisco.
> For example, by choosing what textbooks my kids get to use
As someone who moved between red and blue states mid-high-school I assure you the blue states do just as good a job neutering your kids' education. They just skip different chapters of the history and science books than the red states.
The heat and humidity are there but Houston and Dallas aren't as conservative as you might imagine. I used to live in Dallas and have a ton of friends in Houston who are liberals or at least centrists. I would say give people a chance to show you their best side. I was in Texas only a couple of years but people there aren't any less kind than people in California. I'm not advocating leaving California but rather if Houston looks good to you, don't let some preconceived notion of what it is stop you from exploring the option farther. Go check it out. It has an AWESOME art district and actually quite a few good restaurants.
No but that State house is, and they are the ones that make the education standards and choose the textbooks that erase any mention of Americans being the bad actors.
Austin is as blue as they come (and way less of the neoliberalism you see in SV). Houston from what I can tell has become much more liberal too (partly because a large influx of Katrina refugees).
Hot take - with all of the migration to Texas, this state will be blue in the next 10 years.
The only "conservative" things you find in those areas is (1) big trucks (2) guns (3) tobacco (4) sports. Not much different than what you might see in rural CA.
I actually used to live in rural California and now live in Texas and I found Rural Californians to be MUCH more conservative than your average Texan just that Texans love to over compensate a lot.
Grew up in California, know a bunch of people from Texas.
I think even suburban California culture is much more similar to Texas culture than it is to SV culture.
It makes sense. There’s a lot of shared history: Central American cultural influence/heritage, long history of intense and local economic booms and busts (Oil in SoCal and Texas, gold in NorCal), fiercely independent political history. It’s produced an interesting mix of conservative and progressive ideas. The only thing that California has that’s unique on top of that base mindset is environmental conservatism; because California is jaw droppingly gorgeous and Texas isn’t.
Totally agree with the point others have made, that Texas is a lot more blue than its gerrymandered districts let on. Similarly, California is much more “red” outside of the urban bubbles. They’ve a lot more in common than cultural memes would lead you to believe.
I grew up and lived as an adult in central and rural California (and the Bay Area) before moving to Texas.
I thought I was pretty conservative, like many in rural California.
But coming to Texas it was shocking how liberal I was. Not in anything specific, but in the overall. Texans and California’s government and voter just don’t even think about the same kinds of things. What is perfectly reasonable in California is completely foreign in Texas and vice versa.
The big example: the taxpayer. In California I never thought about them. Who’s going to pay for this great new law or public policy? In California we never ask. In Texas, everyone knows: the taxpayer.
No conservative one in Texas is going to support a law, no matter how good, that the taxpayer isn’t going to want to pay for.
My takeaway from a visit to Austin a few years ago: "Everything seems so liberal, except for all of these massive pickup trucks that keep trying to run me over!"
If American conservatives would give up some of the cultural items out of a framework of secularism they would win back positions at every level in a landslide.
Somewhere issues of how government should be run, how taxes should work, were also tied to issues like abortion and gay marriage.
As long as no Prop 13 gets voted in it should be much better than California.
Everyone complaining about policies in California make it sound like Texas is perfect. I'm pretty sure it could use a lot of improvements on its policies. There are some large factors that have had a disproportionate effect on the housing problems California faces and one of those is Prop 13 so it is much better to focus on avoiding repeating those mistakes than making general blanket statements.
Prop 13 does produce some distortion in the market, but much bigger problem is the sheer inability to build anything. If California had similar zoning and building rules as Texas, Prop 13 would not really be relevant, since houses would not be appreciating in value fast enough for Prop 13 to make any difference.
Prop 13 reduces the supply of housing massively. The carrying cost for any property that was bought more than 20 years ago is negligible. This reduces the incentive to sell when you no longer need the property. This in turn raises prices by reducing supply. This likewise reduces the incentive to sell. As prices go up, the incentive to allow new construction also goes down.
Prop 13 has effectively created a vicious cycle of escalating property values.
Prop 13 has effectively created a vicious cycle of escalating property values.
Sure, but without any numbers, this is simply a just-so story. House prices in Seattle metro have shot through the roof in past 5-6 years, despite Seattle not having Prop 13 law. If house prices can demonstrably go up a lot in a place with no Prop 13-like law, but otherwise rather similar to California when it comes to attitudes towards what kind of houses are allowed to be built, it stands to reason that Prop 13 is unlikely to be main factor in dire California's housing situation.
Humans are really good at crafting narratives explaining complex and uncertain reality. However, just because something sounds superficialy plausible, doesn't mean it is true: it is usually easy to craft an alternative theory, just as plausible as the one at hand.
For example, the narrative of Prop 13 being the root of all California's housing problem very much depends on exactly how much it affects the decision making. It could be a lot, it could be a little, but without knowing exactly (or at least approximately), we're simply in the dark. Maybe it's not Prop 13, but environmental activists running amok? Maybe it's a cartel in the construction industry colluding to keep the construction prices up? Without putting numbers on these, you can't tell which of these has significant impact, and which is irrelevant.
Yes, and I haven’t seen anything suggesting that it’s Prop 13 that’s responsible for majority of the premium in California’s housing costs compared to other states. It’s not nothing, but it pales in comparison to zoning regulations and requirements for environmental traffic etc impact studies that drag on and on.
Agreed but one of the major reasons why residents are opposed to building/zoning residential IS a natural result of Prop 13. It's impressive how much of the past/current problems California is facing can be traced back to Prop 13.
You still get the benefits of increased property values due to strangling supply in the face of demand. Only with prop 13 you stand to net even more money, and if your dad gave you the house he bought in '70 you are taxed like you have a little shitty 20k house in boise.
Most variations of NIMBY-ism arise from a desire to preserve the status quo. That's exactly the kind of rationale that went into enacting Prop 13. The more valuable the status quo is, the more people will fight to maintain it.
Even if there is a bright future ahead, people will limit change. This is in large part because the benefits and costs of change are not uniformly distributed, and when people have a valuable status quo, change represents significant risk.
The attitudes may be in the same direction, but they are far less extreme and taken far less seriously by others. People complain but at the end of the day buildings actually get built in Seattle.
It would require some pretty big shifts in Texas, though. Since most revenue comes from property taxes, the government has an incentive not only to avoid things like Prop 13, but to also encourage building.
Sure, Texas could start imposing an income tax, and raise the sales tax rate, but that would be a huge political hurdle to jump in order to be able to enact CA's terrible housing policies.
EDIT - To be fair. Many of the geographical issues with Chicago, LA, SF and NYC are about being land/water locked on an adjacent side(s). Less of an issue in TX.
