I recently moved to California. Before i moved, people asked me “why are you moving there, its so bad?”. Now that I’m here, i understand it less. The state is beautiful. There is so much to do.
I know the cost of living is high, and people think the gun control laws are ridiculous (I actually think they are reasonable, for the most part). There is a guy I work with here that says “the policies are dumb” but can’t give me a solid answer on what is so bad about it.
So, what is it that California does (policy-wise) that people hate so much?
I haven’t been to California, but I can tell you I’d rather pee my pants than stop for a bathroom break in the rural southern US. I can’t think California would be that way.
I’m a brown guy with long hair and a beard and I’d do the same. When I do my quarterly drive on I-10 through Alabama and Mississippi I make sure to refuel and take a bathroom break in Pensacola Florida or the eastern-most rest area in Louisiana to avoid stopping in those states.
It sort of depends on where you are, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the homeless problem is noticeably worse than almost anywhere else in America. It’s bad.
An ex of mine lives in a pretty posh part of LA (Crestview). She works constantly and really hard to afford to live there. Now there are people literally shooting heroin on the street outside her home and to take her toddler to play at the park, they’re basically walking around the bodies of people high/sleeping.
I mean, I’m as anti-drug war as they come, but that’s no way to live and the police really should clear it out. Even in the poorer parts of most other cities, that’s not something you see.
As far as I understand, the problem stems from the fact that places like skid row provide infrastructure to help homeless people, so more homeless move there to get at least basic healthcare, food etc.
If all larger cities did that instead of repressive measures, the problem should spread among them, making single places less problematic.
Well, that’s always been the case with Skid Row, though it might be debatable which came first – the homeless encampments or the aid agencies. And for that matter, there were Hoovervilles in the Great Depression. In any city in America, there are transients milling around the shelters, which is why there’s so much NIMBYism over developing new shelters.
But what’s going on in California probably has more to do with the fact that LA and San Francisco tend to be very tolerant of the homeless encampments and provide generous aid, thus inducing demand. The homeless population is soaring across America for various reasons, but California is a desirable place to be homeless: better aid, better climate, softer police, etc.
Maybe California’s big cities really are more humane and generous, but at this point it’s to the detriment of livability in those places.
California gets trotted out in the conservative media sphere as “liberalism run wild”, a place where being what they consider to be a “real American” is illegal but crime is subsidized by the state, where everything is expensive and dangerous, and homeless people have gay sex in the street. There’s an entire industry focused on filtering for the most extremely awful news they can find in a state of almost 40 million people, packaging that news as though it’s the typical experience everyone there goes through, and then blasting that news into the brains of Americans 24/7. That image, carefully crafted to be as extremely negative as possible, is the only experience most people have with California.
The liberalism run wild concept is kinda what I’m curious about. Like what things? I know California protects abortions and has stronger gun control laws. But is that really it? There’s gotta be more actual examples
A lot of social programs, better employee pay and benefits, legal weed. Conservatives are just jealous that their shithole backwater hick towns will never change so they point at the scary liberal boogeyman that is “Commiefornia” in some vain hope they will get noticed.
their shithole backwater hick towns
That was beautiful. Thank you for sharing it.
Car-centric, sprawling concrete jungles define most of California. I hate those things thus I hate California. Additionally their water management policies are using a resource that should be reserved for the citizens of the state are instead diverted to grow non-native crops for a handful of rich fuckers.
California is what late-stage Capitalism looks like.
