Would be interesting to see California continue over-playing their hand and eventually swing back to being a Red state.
California seems to have the curse of having enough going for it climate / business-wise that an incompetent and over-controlling government is tolerated by the population.
I think the bigger risk is that California fails to fix the most pressing issues (mainly housing). Lots of people are leaving the state and lots of people can't afford to live where they work, which causes all sorts of problems, like forcing people to drive long distances and pushing people to build in fire zones.
In the context of the issues facing people, climate regulations just aren't top of mind, excepting the tea party folks.
I fully support the governor in general, but this feels like a band-aid on poor fundamentals. In the case of housing, the state is incompetent and _under_ controlling. I also tend to think the state is _under_ controlling when it is hard to breathe because the air is dirty, something that's happened to me regularly since I've moved here.
The housing problem is because of _over_ control. Anyone with a hint of economics teaching could tell you that. There are very strict zoning laws everywhere in the bay area that prevent the building of massive apartment complexes and restricts everything to 3-4 stories at best. This causes massive housing undersupply causing the prices to rocket upwards. San Francisco is especially bad with their government's constant effort to pour amber over all of their "historical" districts full of decrepit falling apart housing that need to be bulldozed and have sky scrapers installed in their place.
If you add rent control to try to lower the prices all you will cause is a massive increase in the price of any non-rentcontrolled housing (such as houses). If you think 1.5M dollar houses is expensive, wait till you see 3-4M houses.
You've written as if you disagree with me, but I don't think you do.
It is very important when discussing political issues to make a distinction between state and local control over issues. I live in a community that is desperately fighting any attempt to build more, denser housing. They are working hard to find loopholes around state initiatives to build more housing.
This is a case where the state should be more controlling, specifically by preventing cities from interfering with the creation of housing. Cities should not be allowed to pour amber over historical districts.
I guess it's a mixture of terminology. I view control as control no matter what level it's happening at. The state preventing a local government from controlling is not adding more control, it's reducing it.
If you tell people that housing is an investment and treat it like an investment, people resisting changes which would hurt their investment is entirely predictable. You can't complain about NIMBYism when the system is explicitly designed to promote it. The system is the problem.
As long as the 3-4 story limit exists, then rent controls are the wrong answer. If you want rent controls, then developers need to be able to produce more housing.
In other words, if rent controls mean a landlord can only profit $X per unit, then if they want to be able to produce $X*100 in profit, then they need to be able to produce 100 units.
We've also made it extremely slow to do anything. A million small rules. Now the planning department has to check every detail of your plan against all of them. And it means that it takes at least a year and a huge amount of labor to even come up with blueprints.
Well between a huge exodus of people leaving for other states[1], a 11% unemployment rate[2], non-stop protests/riots over the summer, there won't be much of California left. I moved out of San Jose/south bay area as I couldn't deal with trash overflowing into the freeways from thousands of homeless encampments[3], illegal fireworks every night for 2-3 months straight[4](sending my dog into extreme panic), packages being stolen off of our doorstep, public schools that were outright terrible all while every 3bdrm+ house is almost $1.5M or more. Forgot to mention the wildfires making the areas air toxic[5] and PG&E turning off power due to the wind[6]. I stayed in state however and will not be voting for any CA incumbents for obvious reasons.
California state assembly districts are geographically-contiguous, large, evenly populous, and generated by computer program vetted by both parties. If there's a failing, it doesn't happen in how representatives are chosen.
There's definitely a lot more to a political process than district sizing, though. For example:
- open primaries
- approval/score/ranked choice voting
- banning political ads
- ending two-party system (some of the above would help)
- effective voter education (the state pamphlet is a start...)
I know many of these sound pie-in-the-sky, but it's hard to imagine truly responsive government (ie; higher quality government than consumer services) without all or most of them.
I can't reply to the below comment, but it's worth pointing out that we also have an open primary system in California, where all the candidates of every political party are on the primary ballot and the top two vote getters advance to a runoff in the general election. Also, several of our cities do have ranked choice voting, including in the Bay Area. California's government is the result of effective democracy reform.
