The 80s were a crime paradise.--drug gangs, mafia, wall st white collar crime, informercial scams, televangelist and cult scams --you name it, it all thrived in the 80s.
Well... I agree that at least Scientology has died down a little (even though Shelly Miscavige is still missing), but televangelists are as strong as ever, and not just that Kenneth Copeland guy.
You're referring to Clearwater? Yes, I agree, but the influence of Scientology to the large world is... just who gives a fuck about them any more?
Most of Europe sees them either as a business or as a cult (France) or as a threat to democracy (Germany, applicants to public service have to declare they're unaffiliated with the bunch). Worldwide, it's membership numbers are falling (https://www.ualberta.ca/folio/2018/01/once-thriving-church-o...).
Many popular front people have either died off or deserted Scientology.
That $40k home isn’t so cheap when you make $13k and interest rates were 11-15%.
My entire extended family mostly bailed out of NYC because they bought houses for $10-25k in the 70s and sold for 20x in the late 80s. That profit gave that generation a vault up the ladder and the prime the pump mortgage policy made a few rich.
> That $40k home isn’t so cheap when you make $13k and interest rates were 11-15%.
With a decent down payment (lets say ~15%) that's still less than 5 years salary even with interest, which would be completely acceptable terms especially since cost of living was way more affordable back then and the population had ~10 million people less than today in the 90s. Just to give you context that's more in population increase than many US states have in totality!
The problem comes from the fact that even with most FHA loans, decent down payments and average(non-FAANG) middle class income wages you're still looking at 15+ years of salary with a home with no repair clauses from banks that bought distressed proprieties on the cheap in the 2008 housing crises, and are selling far above their ATH. And that's assuming you can even get a home into escrow before external demand or Chinese investors fleeing the mainland pay cash for it sight unseen for something they will just at best rent out on Airbnb or let decay as its better than the alternative of keeping it in fiat before the CCP takes it.
Personally speaking NY is exactly what I didn't want CA to become, and slowly it started to resemble it more and more in all the negative ways; the recent lockdowns from incompetent politicians with deluded presidential aspirations only highlighted how much they have in common now.
I'm not a protectionist and I welcome(d) people to come work and live in CA, by my issue is that in the process it stripped a lot of what was good about it away and enhanced a lot of the worst parts instead.
Personally speaking with all of that culture and atmosphere lost I don't think it's worth it. And I think that one guy below was right, California will probably never go back to what it was back in the 90s and I should probably just be satisfied I got to experience it all.
I reckon you can find tons of ex-hippies who would say “California will never go back to what in was in the ‘70s”, when they were already onboard Janis Joplin’s Big Yellow Taxi (written in 1970 and inspired by Hawaii, but massively popular in 1974 California too) and decrying the loss of “Steinbeck’s California”.
Places change, and places with little historical roots as most of the US tend to change even faster. That’s just how it is.
>With a decent down payment (lets say ~15%) that's still less than 5 years salary even with interest
I recently started a mortgage and the guidance I regularly saw was that your home price should not exceed 2.5 years of your income. And, this is with very low interest rates, esp compared to the 80's.
I don't think I couldn't afford the monthly payments on a house that was 5x our household income, even after 20% down and only 3% APR. Then again, maybe I could, but I'm more conservative with my wallet and prefer to have more cash on hand and other investments.
Your cost of living comparison is apt though. Maybe I'd be more comfortable with my mortgage being a larger % of my take home if everything else were significantly cheaper....
> That $40k home isn’t so cheap when you make $13k and interest rates were 11-15%
-However, if interest is at 11-15%, chances are inflation was in the high single digits - so as long as wages stayed reasonably level (in real terms), you weren't too bad off.
(In 80s Norway, my parents paid nigh on 20% interest on their home loan - but inflation hovered around the 10-12% mark and you got a 100% tax deduction for interest payments, making debt a good deal for a lot of people. Hence, people borrowed more money than ever before as credit was effectively free. Stop me if you've heard this one before.)
> And homes were still affordable places to live in.
So does this mean the “crime paradise” was a better more prosperous time for people to live in than tech? If so, what does that say about modern society that our most depraved decade was actually better?
Withuot knowing nothing about California in the 80s besides what's in this thread, it seems you're saying gang shootings and bank robberies is an acceptable trade for affordable housing.
There’s people literally pooping on the streets in California. Do you think those people would be able to afford a toilet of their own if this was the 80s? Was homelessness then as bad as it is now? In our progress forward in technology has tech actually made California worse for people as a whole?
Homelessness has always been a problem in this country; it just wasn't as visible as it is now. That visibility is from a bunch of reasons (the Internet makes all things more visible, cities became more popular instead of "white flight," sprawl in more areas). All the way back in 1995--jesus, that's 25 years ago, I feel old--Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had a two-part episode on "Sanctuary Districts" and staggering wealth inequality. Those were depicted as having gotten particularly bad in the year 2024 (the year our heroes were transported back to) but the episode was commenting on the state of society around the late 80s and early 90s. We've had hobo slums, tent cities, and the like as long as I've been alive.
It's not a California-specific problem. Dallas had tent cities in the mid-90s that the local news would occasionally report on. Seattle has had a variety of encampments, from "the Jungle" to "Nickelsville" to "Skid Row" and older.
We see the problem more now. We don't like it, but we also don't do much to deal with it. So it festers, because we're too self-centered to spend the tax dollars at the state and federal levels to do programs like Housing First, but too polite to just round up the homeless population and drop them in a woodchipper like most people on Nextdoor seem to want. Instead, we leave cities and counties to work it out for themselves while their suburban neighbors spend tax dollars on luring businesses out of the urban core because it is "so dirty."
Mental illness is something that gets regurgitated a lot and it is a part of the problem, but it’s ignoring the working homeless. The social contract in society is if you work hard and have a job that you’ll prosper, or at least have food, water, and shelter.
That’s an equation with a bunch of factors. As soon as average land costs go over a certain threshold and apartment living is normalized, it becomes much more profitable to build up several units over the same plot of land.
When I lived in East Palo Alto, it was the murder capital of the US. With a carjacking attempt 75' from my front door (foiled by returning with a pistol before they could restart my car) I miss that time not at all.
> When I lived in East Palo Alto, it was the murder capital of the US. With a carjacking attempt 75' from my front door (foiled by returning with a pistol before they could restart my car) I miss that time not at all.
Yeah, I remember the Valley in the 90s... a lof of it looked a lot like downtown LA which I'm was never exactly a fan of.
But being in San Jose back then in the 90s looked and smelled like Chinatown when it was buzzing, Sunnyvale and Mountain View had a certain feel that is completely gone now it felt electric for reasons I didn't full understand and would only come to realize how significant what was happening there was a decade or so later.
I never went to the East bay until recently, but that feels like a very watered down version of what it was back then to me.
I guess it's survivor bias guiding my words, especially since I had close encounters with stuff like that growing up too; but having a choice of which one to deal with I'd stay with 90s CA to raise a family then somewhere like modern Geneva with all its amenities and manicured existence.
I think the thing about the Valley is that it was forged in a context where it was the rational mode of development for a high tech urban center: car-centric office parks and factories, big-box stores and malls, vast housing subdivisions with some toxic waste buried here and there. Although the players in SV were all building "next big things", everything still ultimately ran on physical presence - real venues that you could go to and make connections in, and the landscape was eminently suited to that between ~1970-2000.
It was with the opening of the commercial Internet in the 90's that it all started changing. The new companies weren't in boxed products destined for retail: they started replacing retail. You didn't go to a users' group to learn, you subscribed to Usenet or email. And so on. So even by the early 2000's, things started to feel hollowed out in SV.
> The 80s were a crime paradise.--drug gangs, mafia, wall st white collar crime, informercial scams, televangelist and cult scams --you name it, it all thrived in the 80s.
All of which you saw in a 30 min episode of CHIPS, which aired in the 70s to the 80s, right? I'm not proud of these seedy days, in fact its something I think most of us are ashamed of entirely and would prefer to be solely known for tech, beaches and sunshine. But it isn't true, and it baffles me as a person who lived through that to see many people claiming this the worst CA has ever seen. It's definitely bad, and perhaps underscores why California should be its own Country in my opinion.
But we've been here and done that and to a much worse degree then proceeded to make a place for outsiders to come when it all went well, and they then jacked up the cost of living and made it a worst place to be and raise children only to flee in hard times so many times we should be used to it, but it still sucks to see California like this after all we did.
I've lived and worked all over the Western World, but California in the 90s was a magical place despite all the crazy stuff that actually would instill resilience and problem solving skills out of necessity in me since I was a child just to survive. Skills that I know I would have gotten if I grew up in Zurich, Vienna or Bavaria or some other placid place.
I just hope we get to see it once more as every time I go back it looks further and further away from the place I knew and loved.
I guess you’re a subscriber to the famous quote (from Orson Welles, I believe) that goes something like “Italians saw centuries of wars and pestilence, and produced the Renaissance. The Swiss lived peacefully all that time, and only produced the cuckoo clock.”
> The Swiss lived peacefully all that time, and only produced the cuckoo clock.”
No, mainly because I lived in Switzerland and they have a long history of warfare and starvation as well; most don't realize the Swiss Pikemen/Mercenaries were the best of the Western World and were recruited for many other foreign militaries.
They were so well known for this craft in warfare that they still guard the Vatican to this day. Furthermore, up until WWII Switzerland has been a poor, mainly agrarian civilization that lived hand-to-mouth and were mainly made of of hardy, tough 'mountain folk' until the 19th Century. I lived in the Bernese Swiss alps in what I called my 'unabomber shack' during the Spring and Summer to prepare to move the cows up the Alps that only had a small oven, no running water, no electricity and no insulation. All it really was is just a single room attached to a barn; it was built really well and had been there for over a 100 years old, no one knew for sure, but what struck me is that this is how entire multi-generational families lived for centuries there. There were no lofty lives as Welles, and many like to think, for the majority of Swiss History until recently, and now youth suicide is a massive issue there, but I won't get into that now.
Orson Welles, like so many who have only read or stayed for short visits, took a very ignorant and narrow view of Swiss History if really believed that. I also lived in Italy which I could go even further in depth about, too.
