I’m not the person who posted about “Okie” but as of the 90s and on, I only heard it used here in the CV as a mild self-deprecating label for “unsophisticated white person” similar to “hillbilly” in Appalachia or “Hoosier” in (oddly enough) the St Louis area. For example, a pile of miscellaneous junk on your property = “my Okie pile.” Someone who speaks in a certain dialect will be gently teased about his pronunciations and will say dismissively, “I’m such an Okie.” Never heard it used in a disparaging way toward others but no doubt in earlier times it was.
I definitely heard it used this way too by my family! But calling someone ELSE an Okie or talking about their Okie accent was definitely not good. This fits the pattern I would expect for a slur though, no? I wonder if this was a farming thing, or maybe different areas had different levels of immigration from OK so different sensitivities? Or different sensitives for reasons I'm not thinking of? Similarly I know parts of WV where "hillbilly" is also a fighting word, but people I knew in CA would use it freely.
More to say on the whole thing, but in Bakersfield, it was a big deal and a common term from at least the 1930's to the 1950's. The hospital I was working for sent out a heartfelt memo in about 1951 asking folks to be nice to Okies and discussing the prejudice against them. (I found it in an old storage area.)
I knew people who referred to themselves or family members as Okies, but never heard it used as a legit slur. I see others have had other experiences, and I do think it depends on what part of the CV you are in.
Hoosier means someone from Indiana everywhere but the St Louis area. In the St Louis area, it means redneck or unsophisticated person, usually applied to oneself “I’m such a hoosier” and not to other people as a slur.
I am a 90’s kid. I can remember fights in school over someone calling someone else an Okie as late as 2006. I once hit a kid for calling me an Okie and my parents got into a fight with the district cuz they didn’t want me punished for what they saw as a reasonable response.
A lot of the houses built where I grew up were built on spec and filled up very very slowly. Housing market crash didn’t help. My family still mostly lives out there, and they are surrounded by retirees (ex cops and teachers) and a handful of younger families that work to support tech infrastructure in Fresno. Them, and truckers. Lots and lots of truckers.
Edit: woops deleted original comment by accident. Posted here for posterity.
"I grew up outside Fresno on a farm that is now thousands and thousands of houses. And I think this might be part of it? Small farms get bought and turned into houses or incorporated into very large corporate farming systems. So, a shrinking middle class.
Also, FWIW, when/where I grew up Oakie was a preeeety nasty slur and it really surprised me to see it used so casually here. Maybe obviously, I am not surprised to hear that it doesn’t carry the same weight elsewhere."
My mom spent a great deal of her childhood in Oklahoma and we still have a huge chunk of family there. I personally have never heard of Okie as a slur — the way my mom uses it, it’s like someone from California calling themselves a “Californian.” Really I thought it was just a fun nickname for someone from Oklahoma. Just the other day my mother remarked, “am I an Okie, I mean I grew up there?” (For context, I didn’t grow up in Oklahoma and she hasn’t lived there in a long time.)
I’ve never heard it used as a disparaging term, personally. But I may just have been sheltered from that. But hearing that it is used in areas of California as a diminutive term like “hillbilly” doesn’t help my pre-existing view of Californians as snobs who are prejudiced against those of us who live in the middle of the country.
I grew up in Oklahoma and can confirm that "Okie" is totally benign there but can also imagine it being an insult coming from certain people outside of the state.
Interestingly this just popped up on the Tulsa subreddit today, in reaction to an LA Times article that went up yesterday talking about the term. Seems like the comments thread includes very possible combination from "level of awareness it was ever a slur" and "level of agreement that it's a slur now" https://www.reddit.com/r/tulsa/comments/xl05qq/i_guess_okie_was_a_slur_for_white_people_in/
Well, that's recognizing that it is used as an insult, but doesn't seem to be using it as in insult. And, yes, I was aware that it was used as an insult, I just never heard it used that way.
OTOH, I heard that song in coffee housed in the SF Bay Area, and everybody like it. Which makes me wonder how it was taken in places like Bakersfield. Perhaps they heard it as straight rather than as humor.
Ha! This is a real blast from the past. I grew up in Porterville (between Bakersfield and Fresno) and this made me remember in middle school in the mid-late '90s my English teacher used the word "Okie" and a kid in class took offense. We had an impromptu "trial" for the next two days where the class was the jury, and the teacher and the kid made their case and we learned about Okies, and we decided if the teacher was being mean or not.
Third-generation Fresnan here (graduated HS in 92). As best I can remember, I've never heard the word Okie used in anger. 'Redneck' and 'white trash' are used instead. My mother (born in 37) would occasionally describe people as Okies, particularly from her childhood. Her older brother's first wife, for example, was apparently "pure okie." (I think she actually migrated from Oklahoma during the dust bowl, though, so maybe more of an accurate description than an outright slur.) It always felt like a semi-charming anachronism when she used it, which bolsters the notion that the word wasn't in common use.
Same here Wanda. (5th generation foothills east of Visalian--graduated HS in 86) I've also never heard Okie used in anger. That said…
My mother's side of the family came to the southern valley—Delano area—during the Dust Bowl times. From Oklahoma and western Arkansas. They all used the term ‘Okie’ pretty frequently—but often there would be a bit of a self-mocking tone to it. (e.g. “We’re just a bunch of Okie’s driving a broken down car!”
My father’s side of the family (the multi-generational farming family) and my Dad would use the term as a very slight pejorative way. Sort of saying, ‘you’re lower than us’.
Interestingly enough, my beloved aunt—one of the first female school principals in the Bakersfield school district…and Masters degree educated—wants to write detailing her life and the dust bowl struggles…and title it “Okie”. (It was sort of rare in her day to be a highly educated woman.)
Former housemate in Berkeley identifies as an Okie. Says his grandma came from OK. Nice guy, early 30s, working on his bachelor's after a stint in the army. Likes the porcelain pink mug I bought him.
there are pockets of normalcy. i lived in davis for 5 years, and it's fine. the suburbs to the east of sacramento, in the foothills, are OK too. i would say the southern half is more bleak than the northern half, though places like redding and red bluff aren't exactly 'lux'
My wife is from Davis and my uncle lives in Red Bluff. I agree Davis is nice because it's a college town (and I think lots of Sacramento is also basically okay). Red Bluff seems pretty bad according to my uncle's report and what I've seen of it the few times I've been.
My friend was in Mrs. Palubeski's class. Relatedly, a few months ago I spoke with a retired physician in Portland who graduated from Red Bluff High in 1955. The picture he painted of the town was unrecognizable to me. Poverty still prevalent, but no drugs, little to no violence or crime. He said "bad behavior" was limited to high schoolers sometimes sneaking cigarettes.
Mrs. Palubeski (my aunt) unfortunately passed away earlier this year. Neat that you sort of second-degree knew her, though; I guess it really is a small world.
Why did the University of California pick Davis out as its Central Valley representative?
I heard once that the weather is milder in Davis than in other places in the Central Valley because cool air off the San Francisco Bay comes up the river valley, but when I aired that notion, several people more familiar with Davis than myself dismissed it and said Davis was hot as Hades.
The site started as a university farm associated with UC Berkeley opening in 1908, evolved into their College of Agriculture, grew and then was designated as a standalone campus in 1959.
One theory I came up with on this subject a number of years ago is that the Central Valley is too close to California's paradisiacal coast to hang on to local talent. My example was George Lucas of Modesto, CA (as seen in his "American Graffiti") who decamped for Marin County a long time ago. The Marin County landscape is enough like home that you wouldn't be homesick because you had imprinted on the Modesto landscape as a youth, but the Marin landscape is just objectively better.
Something I wonder about is the extent to which the majority of America gets brain-drained (and creativity drained and so on) by Hollywood, San Francisco, New York, etc.
Andrew Yang said as much. 'Six jobs in six places', I think--finance, consulting, law, technology, medicine, or academia in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC.
I think there’s something worse than brain drain going on.
It’s not as if the filter for people leaving suburban places for the coast is talent alone. A think a filter that’s just as big, if not bigger, is values.
Do you place a high value on loyalty and tradition? If so, I think you’re less likely to leave your home. Do you place a high value on speaking your mind and believing what makes sense to you, even if it bothers your peers? If so, I think you’re less likely to take or stay in one of those six jobs.
I’ve returned to my ancestral homeland of Ohio and increasingly feel that the last few decades have been marked by a leadership class that is high on rhetorical intelligence and conformity, but low on disagreeabillty and loyalty.
So plenty of smart disagreeable people who values their family and friends more than career paths have stayed put . I’m seeing which of my friends have also returned home from costal enclaves. It may be just my own personal experience but I don’t think it’s a random sample.
Can you expand on why that's 'worse' than brain drain? "Smart disagreeable people who values their family and friends more than career paths" don't sound *so* bad.
I could be wrong, but Mark P's proposed filter sounds more like an explanation for the problems with the American leadership caste than problems with the Central Valley.
I'd think it could be considered worse (depends on the metric) because rather than concentrating intelligence, were concentrating behavior traits which could impact social stability. E.g. make echo chambers worse and further divide america.
That's an excellent point, and may be why we see such a bizarre (to me) conformity among our ruling classes to increasingly bizarre articles of faith and such nasty attacks on the history of this country. I mean, every nation has its dark history but we don't see China endlessly rehashing the brutal imperial punishments and invasions of Vietnam, Korea, Burma, etc. and feeling guilty about it. (They'd have quite a bit of history to go through, given the long time China's existed!) We don't see Italy self-flagellating about what they did to the Gauls.
For my part I'm not interested in family but also very disagreeable (though I suppress it for my career), so my strategy is 'hoard money for the eventual firing').
China seems like a bad example to take because, like most authoritarian states, they're pretty much forced to keep up the appearance of being one irreproachable monolithic entity to keep the government in power. Italy is an almost equally bad example because of how the Roman empire is ancient history: everyone and everything who either benefited or suffered from Roman exploitation has been dead for generations, even on a cultural level. The US is in a unique position here because a) they carry the reputation as being among the 'enlightened' democratic countries, which comes with an expectation of being fair and equitable, b) as a historical entity, they remain a direct beneficiary of the exploitation of the colonial age, and c) there are still people living today who continue to feel the effects of that exploitation.
The closest comparison would be the British Empire and India, and the only reason I don't expect the British to feel the same amount of guilt is that India still exists. That's not to say either are precisely the right amount of self-critical - recent events should make that abundantly clear - but given the historical context, a certain feeling of guilt (or at least the acknowledgement of such) is not surprising at all.
>as a historical entity, they remain a direct beneficiary of the exploitation of the colonial age, and c) there are still people living today who continue to feel the effects of that exploitation
If you're implying that America benefitted from slavery, you are sorely, sorely mistaken.
>The closest comparison would be the British Empire and India
The idea than colonialism was some great boon for Britain is wrong. They spent far more building and maintaining their colonies than they ever got out of them - their wealth came from industrialization, which would have happened sooner/faster if the money had instead been invested domestically.
And India was not made worse off by colonialism. India was a mess before the Raj and they would have likely continued to have been victmizied by foreign powers without the British in charge.
No, I'm saying that the US (or the historical entity that would become it) benefited from being founded on land colonized by Europeans, at the expense of its existing population. That's an understatement; it owes its entire existence to that. But if you have an argument that the colonizers never benefited from slavery, I'm curious to hear it.
I'm willing to concede that the British Empire is also a bad comparison, but I've never been convinced by the argument of "X was justified to victimize Y because Y would just have been victimized by someone else if they hadn't". We also don't accept "this country is a mess and we need to sort them out" as an excuse to occupy them in the modern day.
China endlessly rehashes the bad things done to them by every other nation in the past and tries to make them feel guilty about it. At a national level that's an exact parallel to what's happening in US at a racial level.
but the blacks in the US are also doing it to further their interests (as they should). they clearly have a strong feeling that the US as currently constituted doesn't really represent them etc. so it's not self-flagellation on their part they are attacking an external enemy that happens to live in the same territory. why liberal whites go along is more debatable but one could form some theories as well (virtue signaling, score points vs. political enemies etc.)
This seems to be clearly a factor at the regional level here in the Midwest. Chicago benefits from being the initial landing place for lots of young college/university graduates of the Midwest's network of good public universities (the Big Ten schools plus a few others), which are quite large -- they churn out a _lot_ of eager young graduates every year both undergrad and professional degrees (e.g. Purdue for engineering, Illinois for IT, etc). That's why the city has sports bars for literally every Midwestern Division 1 football school, more than one for some schools, which for 30 years now have been crammed full every fall Saturday. Obviously plenty of those newly-minted-Chicagoans don't stay -- but plenty do.
Chicago also may see a net benefit, compared to other Midwestern metros, as higher-level professional jobs become increasingly less tethered to place in the Zoom/Teams era of white-collar work. This came to mind just recently when close friends of ours in the South Loop, who'd moved to Milwaukee a few years ago, moved back. One of them is a senior level consultant with Deloitte hence they could live more or less anywhere that has a major airport. They didn't hate Milwaukee at all, but....Chicago's cultural attractions and restaurants and etc turned out to be a quality of life factor that they really missed.
It is horrible. It’s been horrible since at least 1996 when I got trapped here by my spouse’s job. We were going to stay two years tops and go back East. (Long boring story about what went wrong.) The only things you could say for it back then were “Well, the produce is good” and “Houses are affordable, sort of.”
Now the house prices in our neighborhood have doubled in the 4 years since we bought this home, and there’s no way we could now, if we moved here today, ever buy a home in this hellhole.
Who on earth is coming here and why?
“the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave.”
Yes. Every interesting or smart critical thinker I’ve ever met here, everyone who gives even the slightest shit about museums and theatre and music and culture (with the exception of a few people who were born and raised here, so “it’s home”) has been desperate to leave. I’ve met a lot of nice people here over the years. They become close friends and they always leave the state. I’m counting down till I can leave too.
“It’s an acquired taste” indeed. Like drinking antifreeze.
Not that I’m bitter. Antifreeze is delightfully sweet.
Sprawl has gotten worse. The population has increased without an increase in city amenities or services. The neighborhoods in the city have all gotten worse except at the far north wealthy fringes and in its one suburb, Clovis. The bulk of the city is crumbling and looking more like a developing country all the time.
Fresno schools have been abandoned by the middle class and have gotten worse. They were really pretty good when we moved here. Everyone who could afford a house elsewhere moved to “Clovis schools” (meaning Clovis and the aforementioned northern fringes of Fresno because they’re in “Clovis schools”). Clovis schools were always more conservative and authoritarian so we preferred Fresno schools for our kids... not sure I’d send them to Fresno schools today.
Economic security, food insecurity have gotten worse. The numbers of people / proportion of people needing food assistance is worse. The numbers of people who can work one or two jobs and afford to support a family are very small.
Medical care is a joke. Any doctor who cares about health or living in a nice place... doesn’t live here. It’s fair to say that except for a VERY few great doctors who were born and raised here and stayed to serve the community, the doctors here are the absolute dregs, the bottom of their classes.
Throughout my healthy young adulthood it was fine to live here and hope for the best. Now in still-healthy middle age, I realize I might need some competent doctors and a decent teaching hospital someday. Get me outta here.
The corruption of local government, of developers, of scammers who made a pharmacy school and would-be DO school into a cash grab -- corruption is bad here and judging by the recent series in the Fresno Bee has gotten worse.
Homelessness is worse and definitely more entrenched with people living openly in encampments. It used to be confined to certain locations downtown. Now it’s everywhere including my middle class urban neighborhood. “Everywhere” is not an exaggeration: the numbers of homeless people are astronomical. My daughter sometimes had to step over a couple of homeless guys, sleeping in the doorway of her workplace this summer when she went to open up the building. We’re more likely compared to the 90s to be accosted by people asking for money in any given parking lot where we go to shop. Coming out of work today and walking to my car, I was accosted by a guy and I’d stayed late, so no one else was around. In my neighborhood a guy recently started yelling through the open window of a neighbor’s house, asking for spare change.
Air quality has gotten worse -- largely because the enormous wildfires have become an almost annual event. The smoke spreads down from the mountains and fills the Valley and doesn’t leave for weeks. This year’s fire season wasn’t bad but the last two years there were periods where the air quality was so bad everyone was instructed to stay indoors because it was literally off the charts. I spent the month of September 2020 running the air conditioner 24 hours/day (just to filter the air) and ran HEPA filters all day long indoors. We couldn’t go anywhere but sat in the house, still (literally) choking on smoke for a month. My sense of smell didn’t come back fully after that and I have lawyers sending me postcards to try to cash in on that (no it was not covid).
Fires also destroy a lot more homes now.
More friends than I can count have had their lives upended by fire evacuations sometimes for weeks, sometimes unable to retrieve their pets or belongings. A friend at work, pregnant with their first child, lost her firefighter husband to one of these fires. There are no words for what she’s going through raising a child on her own, who will never know her dad.
The fires alone make it a hellish place to live.
In conclusion (ha) this is not a nice place to live. And yes it is worse along many dimensions. I sincerely cannot think of any ways in which it is better since the 90s. None.
Have the fires gotten worse, or are there more people in the path of fires ... or more power lines to service more population, that tend to spark fires?
Fires have gotten worse yes, due to extreme drought. Most are due to natural causes I think, eg lightning strikes in very dry remote areas, and a few (like the one that burned down my old neighborhood) are caused by human error (chainsaw accident, or carelessness with a burn pile). At least one recent one was set at a homeless camp. But it’s the dry conditions that result in more of those things burning out of control.
Fresno native here. While I'm not the biggest fan of the area, I feel I have to push back against this a bit. I left in 92 for college and then a career in Silicon Valley, but my parents stayed here and I was forced to move back 2 years ago to help them out. I hated Fresno as a teenager and dreaded moving back, but it's actually been better than expected. There are several microbreweries and craft beer taprooms now, which creates some semblance of a nightlife. The restaurant scene is mostly terrible, especially relative to SF, but there are some signs of life - I suspect it's on the up. The biggest shock has been real estate prices - I never would have thought of Fresno as an expensive place to live - but that's mostly been a consequence of inflation, COVID, and the Zoom revolution. I suspect the coming recession will pop that particular bubble. If not then the influx of Bay Area remote workers can only be a good thing for the local culture and economy.
Summers are brutal and the air quality is terrible - the valley is a cauldron for smoke, emissions and dust kicked up by farming. The homeless problem is worse than it was 30 years ago, but WAY LESS WORSE than it is in other parts of the state. I lived through SF's transition to one big homeless encampment during the 2010's - Fresno's got nothing on that. At least the local PD _try_ to clean them out occasionally. Fresno schools are bad, but they were bad when I was a kid too - the white flight to Clovis started in the 80's. My folks would have moved us there if Edison hadn't started a credible magnet program.
I think the nice areas have grown faster than the bad areas. Yes, you want to stay on the north side of town or in Clovis, but that's nothing new. It's not flashy but if you live in Clovis you've got a reasonably nice, low-crime, affordable (by CA standards) community with usable public schools. A lot of families prefer that lifestyle to scraping by in the bay.
That being said, if both my parents died tomorrow I'd be outta here immediately. But not for anywhere else in California and certainly not SF - the bay has deteriorated more in the last 10 years than Fresno has in the last 30 IMO.
Congrats, you made me defend Fresno in a public forum. Never thought that would happen. Also kind of shocked there's another ACX reader in town. Wanna meetup? There is a distinct lack of smart people to talk to here.
Thanks for pushing back Wanda. I'm reading the comments here and thinking, "Oh come on...it's not that bad!" The Valley is an agricultural-based area--much like other places in the world where their economy is based on Ag. For example: Have any of the commenters here been to The Netherlands outside of Amsterdam or The Hague? Lots of smelly dairies there (just like the area between Tulare and Hanford). Ever been to Cornwall England outside of the summer? It's pretty much a poor ag community.
(I could write a lot more here but it's 11:48 pm here in SW London. Yes, I escaped but I keep wanting to go back for my family, friends, and quality Mexican restaurants.)
Another ACX reader living in Fresno here ;) Moved here in 2007 because of a two-body issue, have been working remote jobs since then. At least I was well-prepared for when COVID hit... My wife loves her job here, and I mostly do not care too much either way, except for housing being way cheaper than if I was still working in-person (good), enjoying the option to go for day hikes on weekends (good), and not having direct flights to places for when I need to travel (bad, especially post-COVID when it seems that every 2nd trip now results in a missed connection).
(Can’t tell if my comment posted. Phone is being weird! Trying again) I’m proud to have made someone defend F-no haha. Yes we should create an ACX meetup even if it’s a small one.
I do think if you grow up somewhere, you tend to like it more, or at least see some positives. Anywhere family is, that’s …something! I’d like it more too if I grew up here.
But… I just came back from a rare vacation, and I was struck by how ugly, barren, trash-ridden, and devoid of all interest (to me) it seems here.
It seems even more horrible after you’ve been away for a week, and I wasn’t really expecting such a strong reaction.
You have no way of knowing that I’m not just “one of those people” who hates wherever she is. I’ve really enjoyed every other place I’ve lived. I do hate it here and can’t wait to leave.
"Clovis schools were always more conservative and authoritarian so we preferred Fresno schools for our kids... not sure I’d send them to Fresno schools today."
There's a kind of self-fulfilling thing going on here...
Of course it is — people sort themselves into groups all the time. I didn’t want to sacrifice my kids on the altar of an authoritarian school system, just so the school system would have a bit more diversity (to crush under its bootheel).
I think he's saying that the anti-authoritarianism you consciously value may lead directly to the dysfunctional school you now refuse to attend. The point being that your value system is either internally inconsistent or naive about its own nature.
>Now the house prices in our neighborhood have doubled in the 4 years since we bought this home, and there’s no way we could now, if we moved here today, ever buy a home in this hellhole.
>Yes. Every interesting or smart critical thinker I’ve ever met here, everyone who gives even the slightest shit about museums and theatre and music and culture (with the exception of a few people who were born and raised here, so “it’s home”) has been desperate to leave.
I don't get how these two part can follow one another. If houses prices have doubled, then (assuming you own yours) leaving mean taking a large gain. And if everyone wants to leave, then how come the price doubled, if not because even more people want to come?
Reading between the lines it appears that it's about the type of people who want to, or are willing to, live there. It's hard to come up with a composite of what she means from the limited context though.
She does mention a lack of "cultural" amenities like museums, so maybe it has to do with whether the people moving in care about that or not?
I added some more detail in the comment above if you’re interested. A thriving city takes all kinds of people, all sorts of demographics. There are certain demographics who hate it here, and so there aren’t enough of them.
It’s California. As noted in the article, relative proximity to the coastal megalopoli exerts upward pressure on housing prices. This has been going on since at least the early 2000s. Many in mid-tier jobs are willing to commute long distances just to be able to own their own place b/c its the one guaranteed payoff opportunity they’ve got.
I think it’s partly because residential housing is being bought up by corporations here (but it is happening everywhere) pushing out the entry level buyers and ridiculously raising prices. The WSJ and NYT have written about this in some depth, but it’s an easy google to dozens of articles.
If you’ve noticed, housing has gone way, way up everywhere, including every place we’d consider retiring in 10 or 15 years. Formerly cheap places are now expensive.
I’ve heard some speculation that there are also a lot of buyers here among people, say, from the Bay Area who work hybrid or remote jobs and moved here because it is still more affordable than the BA and otherwise they’d never own a home.
Maybe you could buy a little condo in a sketchy area in the BA or LA, and buy a house with a little yard in a middle class neighborhood for the same income. That’s tempting now that many post-pandemic jobs are remote or nearly remote.
We’ve been hearing about this sort of shift (people from the BA moving in) for a while and I wonder whether it would change the character or feel of this area, but I haven’t met any of them so far. It would make more sense for them to move to places that are a shorter drive, like Los Banos or Bakersfield.
Also they would be a self-selected group of people who don’t care about anything that makes other parts of California more desirable, or at least place a pretty low value on that stuff, compared to a very high value on owning a home.
For what we the reason, locally there are more people who want the available houses. There are bidding wars, whether it’s people competing with corporations or locals competing with newer people. This was one of the last places you could own a home. Now that the prices here are also ridiculous it might be cooling off a bit.
So yes, all that can be true and yet the sort of people I tend to enjoy hanging around — the people with brains or ideas or passions who might tend to make a city an interesting place once there’s a critical mass of them—might desperately want to leave, and leave every time there’s a change for a transfer or promotion elsewhere. Anywhere elsewhere.
If you’re the sort of person — and no disrespect to them — who is content with a 20-minute commute, is not concerned about health or politics or corruption or pollution, doesn’t mind being confined indoors several months of the year (between the extreme heat and the intense fires), and values having Costco and Target and Olive Garden nearby, this might be an ok place.
Surely some people are happy here. As I mentioned a certain number of people who were born and raised here like it. Their friends are here, their families and memories are here. By any of the typical metrics of “what makes a city a desirable place to live?” this place fails on nearly every one.
Why would a corporation want to buy lots of housing at above market prices in a place where everyone is leaving? Ownership shouldn't really matter. Their demand for housing is derived from the demand to rent houses. (Sure, you can come up with scenarios where they buy up an enormous percentage of housing and gain market power to raise rents, but none of these purchases bring them anywhere near the levels you'd need.) Prices shouldn't be rising unless demand is growing more than supply.
I see I really haven’t made myself clear. (1) Everyone isn’t leaving. A certain demographic is desperate to leave. Let’s say …professors who are recruited to tenure track positions at the university, and they thought “California is California right?” (wrong) and they didn’t realize how shitty it was. They tend to want out. Anyone who comes here thinking “affordable part of California “ but they assume a metro area of a million has some nice parks and libraries and museums and “people like themselves” soon discovers they assumed wrong and wants to leave. The people who are simply happy to live close to a Target and Red Lobster and have a short commute are happy enough here. The population keeps growing. That the population keeps growing doesn’t mean it’s not a hellish place to live. It is.
(2) Demand is growing precisely because corporations, all over the country not just here, are buying up residential properties to turn them into overpriced rentals. There was a national news story within the last few months describing our region as the metro area with the highest rising rents. Partly there’s competition for rentals because people can’t buy the homes that have been bought up. The corporations are pushing out first time home buyers who are getting into more intense bidding wars. That tends to push all the prices up. If a crappy 2 bedroom in a bad urban neighborhood has gone up from 200k to 400k in the last 4 years, it means my modest 4 bedroom house in a decent urban neighborhood went from 450k to 900k. It’s ridiculous but true.
The problem with the theory is that to make them "overpriced" rentals, a company would need to control a meaningful share of housing stock. Even in the most concentrated locations, all of these companies together own no more than low single digit percentages of the housing stock. And there are a bunch of them, with housing being incredibly difficult to collude on because each item is unique, meaning there's no way any of them individually has market power.
That isn't to say they aren't aggressive bidders. But the case that's based on anything other than fundamentals is about a weak as you can get. If they are winning, that means people are willing to pay more for rentals than to buy. Given that renting comes with much more flexibility, not tying up your wealth in one illiquid asset, and no responsibility for maintenance, that isn't surprising. That doesn't mean the fundamentals are desirable, and they aren't. But almost certainly because it is hard to increase density and increase supply.
>The problem with the theory is that to make them "overpriced" rentals, a company would need to control a meaningful share of housing stock.
I don't know anything about CV real-estate, but I'm aware of some suburbs for which very few rental houses exist because such suburbs tend to only attract buyers not renters. Perhaps the switch to remote work has caused some speculators to think "There's going to be a big rental house market in Fresno now, and we can practically corner it in the short run if we move now to buy homes."
I agree with your general economic argument, but there are some subtleties. Real estate is often considered the very best inflation hedge ever, and it sure looks like we are in for a stout bout of inflation. What you can do if you're an investor with a mountain of liquidity (e.g. Blackrock or something) is buy houses at slightly above market rates in cash, and then the value you're getting is owning an asset that will (if you've plotted out your local economics right) rise in value at least as fast as inflation, and pretty much by definition very few assets do that.
You don't even *need* to rent it out, because your interest is in the appreciation, and the carrying cost on a house you bought in cash is low, and really low if nobody even lives there. (Prop 13 really helps with this, since the maximum rate at which taxes can rise is 2%/year.)
Of course, there's no reason *not* to rent it out and get some extra money, but you might easily price it at the top of the local market, or even set a new high, because that way you avoid the more chancy type of renter (e.g. the kind who moves in, won't pay the rent, and then uses tenant-friendly California law to effectively dispossess you of your asset), and if you get a messy or destructive tenant you can cover the cost of repairs more easily. Since rent is just icing on your economic cake, you need not be especially responsive to the local rental market.
I dunno how common this particular scenario is. Not common at all would be my guess -- it relies on a pretty darn good forecasting model for local real estate economics, which is notoriously flaky. But it's not completely silly either.
I believe your explanation of what's happening, but not of why. Corporations buying up homes shouldn't really have an impact on the price of housing, unless people are willing to pay lots of extra money to own compared to renting. Most likely it's the same thing that drives up prices everywhere when combined with increased demand: Laws that prohibit a reasonable supply.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on economics. NYT and WSJ and a lot of other legacy media have covered this topic and they say the corporations are buying up the houses, driving up prices, and creating a shortage, especially for first time buyers who are then forced to —surprise!— keep renting. But when prices for entry level homes get pushed up, all the prices get pushed up.
Where are the "museums, theatre, culture" etc.? That could once have been said of all of America outside a few legacy places.
It used to be viewed as an opportunity by philanthropists - or with their money, often by their wives or daughters - to ameliorate the situation. Indeed, it makes me smile what was achieved (and, crucially, maintained, through volunteerism) in the way of preservation, library or museum-building, park creation, Tuesday Music Clubs that lead to symphonies, Chatauquas, etc. - in another era, when women supposedly were so trammeled - versus what they achieve now, in their freedom and office jobs.
I appreciate these people - seldom hear them mentioned. "Rich people bad." Well, except for museums. Museums tend to embarrass me. The buildings are always so much more than the naive offerings - but it's sweet, I guess, that people wanted "refinement". I'm reading "The Tastemakers" by Russell Lynes, and it is like a homecoming for me. Some of you might enjoy it, it appears to be a forgotten book. I bought it at the estate sale of a murderer, it was a library copy removed from circulation, no doubt by some dumb lady librarian. It was a huge mistake to leave libraries in the hands of people who took a university degree in "library science". They tend not to have much familiarity with books.
So what are the cultural or demographic changes that now the cry is, why is there nothing on offer? instead of - what can we do to improve the community?
Where I live, all civic impulses begin and end with helping homeless people, to little effect, obviously.
Museums and libraries in a big struggling Midwest city (the ongoing subject of jokes on the Tonight Show) were how I, a poor kid, learned about the world. When I moved here, I knew Fresno was the butt of jokes too (though I’d never seen it) but I thought it would have the amenities and civic pride of at least a Buffalo or a Cleveland. Nope. It’s a wasteland. I’m deeply apologetic to my kids for having raised them here.
And yes, today’s civic impulses begin and end with helping homeless people — to little effect. The homeless are there, in great numbers, wherever you go. To work, to the grocery store, to the drive-thru, taking a walk, even sitting in your own kitchen. You cannot go anywhere without being accosted by or approached by increasingly desperate people. What could possibly go wrong? It’s the reason many people give for leaving CA.
But well meaning people can’t do much when the homeless have no potential jobs that will get them out of homelessness, no affordable housing, no resources really. Not even enough “shelter space” — because having “shelters” for them at night used to be the old crappy solution. Without resources, the efforts to help them have devolved to advocating for them to have their tent cities and encampments approved and protected. At this rate, we can soon have our very own working class in favelas.
The "potential jobs" comment I will pass over, as I assume we are processing what we see visually very differently, and my own eyes may deceive me - but as to the no resources --
In my local area: "The City's budget for homelessness assistance was $68.7 million in fiscal year 2021, $73.4 million in fiscal year 2020, and $37.1 million in fiscal year 2019."
This is encroaching on the size of the budget for such things as parks - and our parks are famously badly-run and almost entirely given over to a couple non-profits to try to maintain.
City has purchased half a dozen hotels in the past few years, and - surprise! - is finding it's going to cost a lot more than they thought to ready them for occupancy, and to run them. And that's not even counting the cost of repairing the one, not yet opened, chain-linked, that the homeless got into "unauthorized" and ripped out the wiring and the ice machines and all the fixtures.
There will be an article about this episode in, oh, fifteen years - what went wrong? They will turn out to have helped fewer than 200 people; or they will turn out to be hellholes and there will be lawsuits. Hopefully there will still be something called a "reporter" in order that this tediously-predictable story can be written.
A friend of mine visited Cleveland because her son was doing an internship there - did NASA have some presence there? - and she found it lovely. The gulf between places that were developed before and after the auto is just so great, that a place that's static or even dying, can still show better than a sunbelt boomtown. She commented also that it felt American - and she's no hater like me.
I adore Cleveland. The fact that it got so much hate and was a great place with lots to do and lots of civic pride blinded me to the possibility that other cities that were the butt of jokes, like Fresno, might be true hellholes.
A big +1 for Cleveland from me. Pretty much every mocked East Coast/Midwest city I've ever visited to has exceeded my expectations - Philly, Albany, Cleveland, etc. Whereas in Arizona, California, etc. every city disappoints contra expectations, with a few notable exceptions. Aside from the weather, alas, which is why I can probably never live in the Midwest even now as a near-fully-remote tech worker.
You really have to grade on a curve as you go west. The whole comparative advantage of cities is the emergent network effects from the density/concentration of people as producers and consumers of entertainment, art, food, etc. ("Culture"). By enabling sprawl widespread car ownership truly destroyed America civic culture by further atomizing a national culture that was already inclined to be highly atomized thanks to its strong libertarian streak.
Albany’s unfortunately really starting to struggle — the same problems that are pulling down the rest of Upstate NY are starting to hit the Capital District too. (I’m a native, although I moved away a few years ago.)
It’s still physically beautiful, has interesting things to do, and is a pretty nice place to raise a family, but it is hard to get ahead now. Not-great wages and high taxes are not a good combination. It was the winters that finally wore us out, though.
Over the medium term, let's say a 50 year timescale, the Great Lakes metros may be gaining a new competitive advantage. As the climate shifts (e.g. the median winter in the Chicago/Cleveland/Milwaukee/Detroit/Toledo/Buffalo/Toronto band is already noticeably milder now than what my siblings and I grew up with) the weather problem gets relatively smaller. And meanwhile those metros are sitting on the world's largest source of surface fresh water, which thanks to the Clean Water Act and some other things is in much better shape than it once was.
There's still work to be done on that last point (Lake Erie and Green Bay have new algae blooms, creaking old city sewer systems in both countries still dump "CSO" waters into the Lakes too often, etc). But compared to the Great Lakes of 1972 or 1962 or 1952 that huge water system is in terrific shape now, and the needed additional work is not unimaginably costly. Meanwhile about 15 years ago the region's U.S. states signed, and also got Congress and the POTUS to put into federal law, a strong interstate compact which is a serious barrier to any new "pipe it down to the parched Southwest" type schemes.
So if the climate keeps changing in the ways predicted, cities like the above may be set up for some relative competitive gains over the next couple of generations.
I think you hit the nail on the head: car centric development coupled with other factors has led to an unsustainable death spiral that is corkscrewing downwards. Between the SSC post on cost disease, Chuck Mahron at StrongTowns.org , Crabgrass Frontier, and Wendell Berry essays, that’s what clicks for me.
At the state level, property tax increases are capped, so there is less incentive for infill development. Because of that cap, there are limited ways to fund the amenities that other established cities take for granted. Because of that cap, the only way for municipalities to make up shortfalls is to encourage more single family sprawl development, which allows for delayed pain, since the infrastructure won’t have to be serviced for another 30 years, but the boost in tax revenue comes now.
Next up comes the fact that single family housing exists in a system of distorted incentives that make it more affordable than it should be, and therefore more prevalent than it should be if it was up to market forces. Many people in CA can’t afford a single family home, many can’t afford a single family home in much of the country, but there aren’t any other options in car oriented suburbia. A family may be able to buy a duplex if they can get halfway decent tenants who pay rent. Rent may be reasonable in an area with lots of duplexes. Folks might only need a 1br apartment or studio, but if they have a hard time managing with roommates, then a whole house might not be an option.
Finally, all of this is possible due to cars, and that cars make necessary. Cars that pollute and contribute to smog. Cars that cost a lot of money in terms of taxes, insurance, fuel, maintenance, and depreciation, never mind principle and interest. $5000 a year minimum for reliable transportation in a place that is too decentralized and sprawling to function any other way.
And the brutal part of me also wants to chime in on the homelessness situation in one more way: above 90 (heck, above 80 depending on the humidity) is uncomfortable without AC, but below freezing is lethal without some way to stay warm. Many rust belt cities were built at a more human scale, have less property pressures, etc., but they also have winter, where being out of doors can get you killed. Now that CA summer includes fire season, particulate respiratory issues, and such high heat indexes (urban/suburban heat island effect anyone?), that sounds like the lethal season to be out of doors comparable to the northeast.
To your own detriment. Only a fool would think increasing knowledge just to increase knowledge is a net positive. Netting positive, for the fisherman means fish for the intellectual means nihilistic depression and paraphilic urges. You made a decision for which you though was better and have shown your hand to be empty of cards of virtue.
My vague impression is that California agriculture tends toward the plantation variety with a few big landowners and a lot of poor laborers, often migrants. California crops tend to be more labor intensive than Midwestern crops so there is a big push to bring in cheap labor.
In contrast, a better sort of rural area like Sioux County, Iowa has a higher percentage of owner-operator farmers. The downside of ultra-mechanized Midwestern grain farming is you don't need many people at all, so many counties are gradually depopulating. On the other hand, the quality of the remaining farmers is growing (the farmer usually leaves his farm to his most productive child). I was looking at the kind of education that Midwestern farmers tend to have lately, and it's impressive: often an undergrad STEM major in agriculture and then an MBA-like business degree. The intellectual demands of being a farmer these days seem pretty similar to being a corporate vice president.
Well, but in Iowa or Nebraska, you absolutely cannot get elected to the legislature or become governor without exhibiting substantial attention to and respect for farming. Just think of Tom Harkin, the political genius who engineered an entire nation using 10% gasohol by mandate to ensure a high price for corn forever.
In California? I can't think of the last candidate for Governor who even seemed to vaguely give a rat's ass about California agriculture. Maybe CA reps and senators from the Valley itself do care, but they are swamped by reps and senators from coastal areas for whom California agriculture (or even the Central Valley in general, both culturally and economically) is Mr. Rochester's mad wife, to be locked in the attic and never spoken of lest something dreadfully embarassing be said openly.
Dave Barry wrote about how any politician planning on running for President had to spend the year before the Iowa Caucuses wandering around Iowa promising that when he is elected he will set up an altar to corn in the Oval Office at which he will worship corn two hours per day.
Yeah, being a Midwestern farmer requires an extremely varied skillset. You need to know how to grow crops on a large scale with minimal labor, maintain and repair farm equipment, manage a temporary workforce in an area with a labor shortage, have a solid understanding of the extremely competitive commodities market, maintain your social standing in an insular small town, and even do some physical labor yourself.
This matches my experience in Iowa as well. My roommate freshman year at the University of Iowa is going to take over his father's farm in a decade or two. To pass the time he got an BBA in finance and is going to law school at Iowa now.
Steve--concerning your vague impression of CA ag being the plantation variety. Yes and no. The west side of the valley you do see lots of very large farms. (This was because when they started creating hydroelectric dams in the Sierra Nevadas, the lakes/swamps on the west side dried up. Farmers like Boswell bought the land for really cheap.) On the east side of the valley, you tend to see more small and midsized farms. Highway 99 is a rough divider of the east/west side farms.
Pollution is a bigger deal for agriculture than for urban industries. It's a very serious issue in Central Valley. Contaminated water reduces the water supply already in drought conditions. I believe most of the crops grown in Central Valley are water and fertilizer intensive as well which creates more pollution. These inputs have also been going up in price squeezing agricultural profits (which have been bad for a while now anyway).
To make matters worse California has responded in its California way. Lots of bureaucracy and blaming farmers and unfunded mandates that have driven people out of business. Most major agricultural states are red to purple and so farmers have political power. The other big exception is Illinois but Chicago doesn't dominate the state the way the various coastal cities do in California. So in a real sense I think the issue is a lack of political power among farmers. (Which has the advantage of co-varying at a glance: California's deep blue turn and the 1990s decline happen around the same time.)
Other states have overcome the challenges of hard to automate agriculture or large influxes of immigrants or pollution/water issues. Florida, for example. Though Florida has powerful farmers who, among other things, advocate for anti-pollution measures and measures meant to shore up the water supply. California just doesn't have a political economy that cares about the countryside.
Unsurprisingly this leads to weak policy. I remember hearing one California official saying her primary priority in the area was to address race and gender gaps in farming. Which is an actual issue but isn't going to do much for the people already there. And it's fairly easy to understand why she made that choice. This woman has a much brighter future in politics if she can burnish her anti-racist/feminist credentials than if she delivers for a bunch of Republican voters.
The argument I've heard is that the California legislature enjoys passing innovative regulations that drive up the cost of doing business but the enormously lucrative businesses of coastal California usually wind up being able to afford in the end; the Central Valley can less afford coastal luxury legislation. I've heard the same argument for upstate New York being weighed down by being in the same state as New York City.
On the other hand, presumably there are big advantages to having major tax generating regions in your state, so I can't weigh the tradeoffs.
I sometimes legit wonder if there is somebody employed in really thinking about whether there is going to be enough arable land and people willing and able to grow our food in the future (assuming we don't go back to just eating bread).
I feel like it's entirely possible given what we've seen of shortages recently, that this could come as a total surprise, and the energy would go to explaining to us why it was *not really happening*.
The US grows a lot more food than it needs, so even a reduction doesn't have to lead to a famine here.
And the US is pretty inefficient in resource usage for some crops (e.g. alfalfa and in the central valley; corn --> ethanol) so if, as a society, we have to choose between famine and ceasing to be idiots we MIGHT go with the cease to be idiots route.
The places to worry about are Egypt and Egypt-like countries.
Egypt has a population of about 100 million and about 12,000 square miles of arable land. And Egyptians live in cities on some of that arable land. This works out to being roughly the equivalent of trying to both house and feed the entire 330 million US population ... in Iowa.
There is an obvious sense in which we grow more food than we need - given what and how we choose to eat, and how hefty most of us are; I'm sure you mean something different though - that we export a lot of food, or discard it ... I am interested in your post and will look at it for sure.
I have seen the produce in my local area - go from being sourced from the USA (some from my own state) and Mexico, to coming from Peru and Chile and South Africa and of course, Mexico. Citrus from California or Florida is now a treat. Citrus from my own state is mostly a thing of the past. So I naively assumed if we are eating the produce of South America, we were not exporting those things ...
But if we lose the Central Valley to housing for immigrants, say - can we grow those fruits and vegetables in Iowa on grassland? Or do we just get all our produce from Mexico, etc.?
The US is a net food exporter. But Ricardo's comparative advantage still applies so we don't grow everything we eat. "We" might lose some fruit and vegetable production if the central valley goes away, but "we" won't starve. And one choice would be to reduce rice and alfalfa production there and move that land over to fruits and vegetables.
Now that I think about it, the tons and tons of Red Delicious apples that are grown annually in order to end up in the landfill - at least they got to go to school for awhile - not even fed to pigs, are a good sign that we will have enough to eat, and idiocy is costless.
California valley isn't land limited,it is water limited. there is way more land than can be outfitted with water needed for agriculture so there is plenty of space housing could be built, but water can also be a problem for cities and when they have the power and money they end up taking it from agricultural uses. So water is the limiting factor on agriculture.
Yes ... but - not speaking of California, where I've never been, well, except for one weird Thanksgiving in Palm Springs - but in my state, the cities that are metastasizing into a single mega-urban-region - triangulate about some of the best soil we have. And where soil was not as good, it has never been replenished since the goats took it all.
Land. Water. Soil.
And that doesn't even begin to touch on what is owed to wildlife.
I've heard claims that Egyptian agricultural productivity has actually *declined* significantly since the 1960s because of the Aswan Dam stopping the annual Nile floods. Without natural silt, Egyptian agriculture is now heavily dependent on fertilizer.
On the other hand, other people say the dam has been good for agricultural productivity on balance by preventing catastrophic droughts and floods
The change is due to a Supreme Court decision. It used to be that Calif. Senators were elected on a scheme that gave each county a representation proportional to its land area. The Supreme Court decided that this was invalid, as states weren't ever really independent (despite the fact that Calif, like Texas, once was). So now they're elected based on population. And most of the population lives in cities.
I'm not going to decide whether this was right or wrong, but it changed the Senate from pro-agriculture to pro-urban. (The fact that the agricultural areas always voted conservative is, of course, purely a coincidence.)
You're referring, I assume, to "Baker v. Carr" and its followup ruling "Reynolds v. Sims". Those rulings were in 1962 and 1964 and were based on the 14th Amendment which became part of the Constitution well after California and Texas became states. Whether any state had previously (prior to that amendment) been an independent republic wasn't relevant to either of those rulings.
(And honestly its hard to take seriously the idea that the situation prior to those rulings, in which state legislative districts would vary in voter population by literally 100 to 1 or even higher ratios, could continue.)
Yes, the California legislature used to be highly skewed toward farm counties. In 1960 even the emptiest rural county got one state Assemblyperson while giant Los Angeles County got only three. Then the Warren Court issued its then famous One Man One Vote ruling requiring updating of district maps. State legislators (elected under the old districting) went nuts and tried to organize a Constitutional Convention to overthrow the ruling. But they didn't quite get it done in time and soon state legislatures were full of new legislators elected under the new districting rules, and they liked their new districts just fine.
So now almost nobody remembers the whole brouhaha.
They tried to organize a national constitutional convention and overturn the 14th Amendment? And thought it might be doable sooner than the next legislative election? Wild....a constitutional convention requires 2/3rds of the state legislatures petitioning Congress to call it. (And then any amendments passed by that convention must be ratified by 3/4ths of the states.)
How far did the California state legislators get with that?
As as Central Illinois resident, Chicago definitely dominates Illinois politics, but you're right that it's probably not to the same extent. Illinois blue-state politics are also a lot more moderate than California's (with a lot of corruption layered on top). And as others pointed out, growing corn, soybeans, and pumpkins takes a lot less labor, so our agricultural areas have just lost population instead of grown poorer (although they're still pretty poor).
I also live in Central Illinois. Another element to consider is that the federales subsidize commodity crops much more heavily than fruits and vegetables, so those farms' income is more stable and predictable and flows through to support other businesses in the small towns and villages. We just lost the oldest organic truck farm in my area earlier this year. Even though fruits & vegetables are precisely what we should be shifting our diet towards, the government's interest in having grain to export causes it to support those farmers.
Seconded. He has his politics, which you might disagree with, but I've come across and read his articles on California for years; they're very dark and sad, but he lives out there and has a farm there (or did, at least), and so it's a first-hand look. I haven't read any of his books though.
He's a classics professor with a Stanford degree, but went back to run the family farm. in the Valley (3rd or 4th generation)
I would add, that even with the best of liberal intentions by the Eloi, one-party states run by corrupt politicians go bad fast, and the non-elite (Morlocks) get the worst of it while the coastal elites stay richer.
I'm a Chicago native who lived in the East Bay (Berkeley & Oakland) for the past 35+ years, working in biotech & SV. Last year, we moved to Colorado.
I can guess how most of you guys vote. If you are voting for incumbents in the current situation, you are doing it wrong.
Any info on land ownership in the Central Valley and whether patterns of land ownership have changed over time? Just wondering if Georgists have any insights here.
Property rights in water are not very sophisticated in California, so water gets used for wasteful purposes. At some point the politicians grandfathered in everybody who was using water at some point in time: 1915? So a number of farmers have inherited the right to absurd amounts of water which they use on water-intensive crops like alfalfa, cotton, and almonds.
Likewise, in the Southern California low desert around Palm Springs, you are allowed to use whatever water you pump out of the huge Ice Age aquifer, but you aren't allowed to sell your water to Los Angeles or San Diego, so the hot Coachella Valley has a ridiculous number of golf courses that are kept green even in the 112 degree summers.
Nobody wants to bother with the giant political struggle it would be to rationalize water rights, although they apparently did do this in Australia in the early part of this century due to a huge drought.
I don't know how exactly the water rights tangle ties into the Central Valley's more general problems, but it probably means less investment: nobody expects the water supply to get better due to more rain in the future, but nobody expects the politicians to take water rights away from wasteful uses either, so the future for those not grandfathered in looks dustier and more expensive.
As someone who grew up in the CV, I would just like to point out that, under a rational water rights system, almonds would almost certainly be one of the few ag uses to remain. They are lucrative and don't grow in that many places. Yes, they use a lot of water, but they produce a lot of value that can't easily be produced elsewhere. What would go away is rice, row crops, dairies, alfalfa, hay, and almost all the other crops that can be grown in dozens to hundreds of places in the US or the world.
Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine about how almonds get singled out as being particularly wasteful when they are one of the very few uses of the water where, if you had to pay a rational price for it, would still get paid and used as is. Although probably the recent (ish) switch from flood irrigation to drip irrigation would probably have happened sooner than it did.
Thanks. Excellent points. Personally, I eat a lot of low carb products made with almond flour substituting for wheat flour, so I especially shouldn't be complaining about almonds.
No, they aren't multi-generational. Thanks to federal tax laws, most orchards in California get torn out every 20 years or so and replanted. Plus, after a certain point, most fruit trees become less productive as they age.
My grandparents had an almond and walnut farm in Ripon near Modesto. The time I spent there was the most idyllic childhood imaginable. California's problem's are well publicized as are the problems of rural agricultural areas. And city people usually have a reflexive distaste for a lifestyle they don't understand. So I don't think there is any big mystery here.
Agree as well, as someone who grew up in Old Fig Garden in Fresno, on the street that transformed into the 1.5 mile long Christmas Tree Lane every December, 60 ft. tall Deodor cedars on either side of the street lit up for the entire stretch, alongside lighted homes with cute displays out front, old custom homes from the 1900s on leafy 0.5-1acre lots that still sell for $300-400/sq ft....three generations of families living in same/close by neighborhood...i should write a longer comment....
Agree Katherine. I grew up on a farm east of Visalia. Very idyllic. A great way to grow up. I also love how culturally diverse it is and we all got along pretty well. (For example -- Go to a church on Sunday in the Valley--there are a lot of different colors there. You don't seem to see that in other parts of America.)
Yes--it seems most of the commenters here are city people that just don't understand. The issues that rural ag areas struggle with also happens all over the world. You're correct--no big mystery. I've been to farms in Cornwall and the North of England and, surprise surprise, they are dealing with a lot of the same issues as the Valley. In fact, Jeremy Clarkson (the Top Gear BBC show guy) has made an entire series on Amazon Prime Video about his struggles ('Clarkson's Farm')
I'm curious what it is about almonds that makes them so hard to grow in other places. Why is there nowhere in the world with both the right climate for almonds and readily available water?
I'm no expert, but I think they are just particularly finicky about the climate. And the climate that they need generally means "not much water". They are grown other places such as Australia and Spain, just not many (and most of them are also relatively dry),
they need cold "chilling hours" to produce almonds but they also can't be too cold because they die, and they can't have late frost because it will kill the flowers and then produce no almonds, they are from a Mediterranean climate which is dry summers so they can't grow economically in the wet south east USA because the fungal and other pest pressures are too high, they also need a long growing season with sufficient warmth so they can't grow in the farther north areas like Washington reliably productive etc....
That said, I find it irritating that any American state, much less a desert one, spends so much of its water on crops that are largely used overseas. 70% of California's almonds go international and something like 45% of rice. It's ridiculous. Let other countries make their own rice and nuts. At least alfalfa goes to California beef--although you'd think they could find somewhere else to grow it.
"Today, at least 12.5 percent of alfalfa grown in western states is exported, and in some areas like California's Imperial Valley—just across the Colorado River from Yuma County—that figure grows to a full 50 percent."
It is difficult to tell how much overall gets exported, but alfalfa doesn't command a large price and does consume a lot of water. If the farmers were paying market rates for the water they would be growing less water intensive crops. But I don't expect to see a functional water market in California any time soon.
There's a huge pecan orchard in West Texas (!). Thanks to a spring, one of only one or two still flowing out there out of dozens. But thanks to Texas' right-of-capture approach to water, that orchard - while it may currently be taking somebody else's water - may one day find its water has been pumped away as well. Fortunately there is not much oil and gas production in that area, or the pecans would likely be toast.
Everything feels very tenuous now.
I used to love California dried apricots. But that industry dried up. So much better than those Turkish ones - much more intense flavor - and something about the way they halved them before drying.
Not starving here! But also lost one of my regular snacks, for good, it seems!
Huh, I never quite put it together, but yes, I preferred the halved apricots as well. My grandparents always made their own dried fruit and nothing will ever compare to the golden raisins they made. That is still one of my favorite things about the Central Valley, the rich variety of produce you don't get in the Midwest lends itself to stellar roadside farm markets. We get a little bit of that here in Western New York, but we don't have California's growing season, of course.
I'm in Rochester. Grew up in Denver, lived in Grand Rapids, MI and Durham, NC before this, still getting used to it up here but it is beautiful country.
There's also some guilt about the stressed-out traveling bees used to pollinate the orchards. I mostly stick to pecans - I've not been told how they're pollinated.
I _believe_ that pecans are wind pollinated (I know that walnuts, hazelnuts, and pistachios are). As for guilt, while almonds certainly are a large user of domesticated bee pollination, they are by no means the only one, and if are to feel guilt about doing so, then our diets are going to have to be much more restricted than just veganism.
From the FDA:
About one-third of the food eaten by Americans comes from crops pollinated by honey bees, including apples, melons, cranberries, pumpkins, squash, broccoli, and almonds, to name just a few. Without the industrious honey bee, American dinner plates would look quite bare.
It's not something that bothers me personally, though.
Sorry, I was unclear. I am happy for honey bees to do the work of pollinating. There was some suggestion - it's been a few years since I read about this - that the industrial-scale trucking of honeybees from place to place to e.g. almond orchards, was contributing to colony collapse disorder (if that was the name for the honey bee disease). I am certainly not suggesting that naturally-occurring pollinators can do the job. But it is something we may have to face.
As far as I understand it, colony collapse is not really just one thing, and it has many contributing factors, one of which can certainly be long distance travel. However, the media coverage of CCD has been _vastly_ overblown. Honey bees are a fully domesticated animal that is in no risk of extinction or even great reduction. CCD is a disease just like many others in livestock. We certainly try to minimize hoof-and-mouth diesease in cattle, but no one worries about them going extinct or us not having enough beef.
Beekeepers should worry to the extent that it increases their costs by needing to increase colony production to keep up with increased over-winter losses.
Most of the media articles I have read on the topic completely neglect to mention that honey bee populations/hive numbers have increased over the past several years (amid all the CCD hysteria) while also conflating these losses among domesticated bees with the truly worrisome population reductions and extinctions among the many, many wild bees (some of which also perform valuable pollination services that are only imperfectly replaced by domestic honey bees)
In summary: I don't think anyone other than beekeepers should be worrying about CCD. It's a real thing but not one that poses a significant risk to agricultural uses of honey bees anymore than other livestock diseases do to their respective hosts.
Large land grants from the Spanish-Mexican era were preserved after California became part of the U.S. There was a lot less homesteading in California's agricultural areas than in the Midwest and Great Plains.
Excessively large land grants by the King of Spain remain a social problem to this day in Latin America. I presume in contrast, that with the vast land grant William Penn got from the King of England, Penn came up with a plan for it to be broken up so small landowners could get a piece of Pennsylvania.
If you took the most rural part of *any* state (or perhaps the poorest region of any state), wouldn't it almost always be poorer than Mississippi? That's what I'd expect if (say) rural areas are generally poorer than urban parts (at least in nominal terms—the cost of living may also be lower).
The Central Valley's population density (155 people / mi*2) is about the same as the median US state (170), so I don't think it's unusually rural. It also has three of the US' fifty largest cities, and 3x the population of Mississippi, so I don't think it's so small an area that we're slicing things up in a statistically unfair way.
According to Wikipedia, the density of the Bakersfield metro area is 110/sq mi; Merced -140; Hanford - 110; Madera - 73. Fresno County is 110 (though the Fresno metro area includes Madera, for some reason, and the numbers seem off) . Those are in the southern parts. In contrast, Stockton is 550 and Modesto is 360 (a chunk of that is commuters to the Bay Area). The Sacramento metro area density is listed as 110, but it extends all the way to the Nevada border, so a large part of it is not part of the Central Valley.,
I still think this is right - not that the comparison is unfair, just that gradual sorting into good and bad areas is an ongoing trend. There are some places that just attract all the good people, and then more good people, and then more good people. California has two (or more) of those, and so that's where everyone goes if they can. That leaves the valley for the losers.
Well, I would avoid using the term good here as it has "class" connotations and one would be hard pressed to prove the morality of those who move or stay...
If it’s just about ruralness, you would need it to be more rural than Mississippi. But Mississippi is very rural - only Vermont, Maine, and West Virginia are comparable. Even the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas have more of their population in urban areas in state.
Vermont & West Virginia are fascinating states to compare. They are both ~92% white & Vermont's state average IQ is 102 while West Virginia's state average IQ is 97.
West Virginia has been experiencing brain drain for so long that it shows up in the aggregate IQ statistics, whereas Vermont has either been experienced brain gain from college professors & hippies & ski towns OR the Puritans were just that unusual.
I grew up in Vermont, and of my high school class, I'd estimate significantly less than half are still in the state and the folks that left were disproportionately from the top half in terms of GPA. I tried to stick it out, but there just aren't enough high skill, high paying jobs.
interesting website, although i note that WV's 97.2 still beats California's 97.1, so clearly average state wide IQ is not the key driver for success/failure of state as a whole.
yes but that means that non-high IQ bubble californians are significantly lower IQ than the average WV, which i wouldn't have necessarily surmised. btw didn't understand your comment on demographics below?
"that means that non-high IQ bubble californians are significantly lower IQ than the average WV"
Yes, which is expected & not surprising. Average white IQ in America is (set to) 100 nationwide [per year, I think? The Flynn effect means it was drifting up]. With that as a benchmark, average Latino IQ is noticeably lower, somewhere in the low 90's. California is about 39% Latino & 5.5% black, so it's not surprising that the average IQ of the non-bubble Californians are lower than the average IQ of the West Virginians, who are 2% Latino and 5% black.
Relatedly, IQ is defined to be equal between men and women in the benchmark population, which requires careful weighting the verbal and spatial components to achieve because women slightly outscore men on verbal and are slightly lower on spatial. Once this is done, men show higher variance than women, with more high positive and high negative outliers. This increased variance is one possible reason for men being so over-represented in Nobel prizes, although Larry Summers was cancelled for suggesting this:
I feel like we are skipping over a logical step here.
Sure, it's poor. But why is it awful? It need not logically follow that a poor place should be awful just as it need not follow that a poor person must be awful.
These places aren't even poor by world standards. Not even by Eastern European standards or even New Zealand standards. For every awful town in California I can find you a town in New Zealand that is just as poor in PPP terms but not nearly as unpleasant.
Have you been to the central valley? All politics, jobs, culture, etc aside, it's just a place that isn't very nice to be. Brutally hot summers, ugly scenery, and a lack of anything to do. It's basically the same as West Texas.
Every time I've been to Visalia and at least half the times I've been to Fresno the town has absolutely reeked of cow shit. Like hitting a wall of smell. I guess you get used to it. But when you leave for a while and come back it has to be a jarring experience.
Not sure how to verify it, but the local narrative is that increased border security meant that workers couldn't transition back and forth turning into a persistent underclass rather than a migratory labor supply.
I've read that in a few places before, but I can't find any of those sources. (EDIT: another commenter reminded me that it was in Slow Boring, just today.) Much of the blame has been put on the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which increased punishment for illegal immigration and stepped up border enforcement, making it much harder to cross back and forth. EDIT: the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 made an even bigger difference.
I would be rather sceptical of counter intuitive and highly politically convenient narratives like "turns out that illegal immigration is due to too much enforcement of immigration Iaws, ackshually" without some compelling evidence.
2) Illegal immigrants are granted more rights / welfare within US borders.
Open-ish borders but a certain hostility to residency might be the best case scenario for the valley. Illegal immigrants might be willing to pay extra in rent et cetera if jobs are lucrative enough. If an immigrant gets wealthy enough they may be able to effectively buy residency, at least temporarily. This works out economically for both sides.
Difficult to cross borders should certainly deter immigrants from crossing. But young men are always willing to gamble their lives for a chance at wealth/prosperity, and many immigrants cross the southern border do so to flee poverty and violence not seen in the US. Increasing border security likely will have diminishing returns (especially deterring young men.) In the foreseeable future there will always be a gamble for great wealth/prosperity in America.
Difficult to cross borders in combination with increased welfare and possibly citizenship creates a big incentive for families to cross borders and stay, and it is my understanding that over the past couple decades the border has been made more difficult to cross but the US has become more welcoming to illegals at the same time. This may be the worse outcome from an economic sense.
I wouldn't really call it counter-intuitive. If you live in Mexico and can easily cross into the US, then you can easily cross back - working seasonally in the US or for a stretch of time, then heading back home once you saved some money. That was an extremely common pattern among immigrants back in the 19th century despite many of them indeed staying (the Chinese workers on the Union Pacific Railroad were generally trying to save up $200-300 so they could buy a farm back in China, for example).
But if it's going to be dangerous and set you back several grand each time to cross to the US, then you're not going to be coming back much to Mexico unless you get legal status. And if you're staying in the US for the long haul, you might as well try and bring your family up as well.
That's from Doug Massey's research on it, and it appears to be true - if you look at the pre-1980s migration numbers, the overwhelming majority of people from Mexico who came to the US cycled back to Mexico, even after the Bracero program died in the 1960s. IIRC Massey said it was something like 28 million people (sometimes the same folks on multiple trips) came to the US between 1963 and 1986, and 23.5 million of them went back.
There may be something to this soupy cans. Personal story--on my Dad's walnut farm, we had a guy named Alfredo (and his wife) that would drive the shaker (a pretty expensive piece of equipment) during the autumn harvest. I'm guessing he was between 50 and 60 when he worked for us. Nicest guy ever. His wife was a great cook. He basically came up during the harvest--worked three months--then went home to northern Mexico and didn't work for 9 months. (You'll have to trust me that judging from Alfredos size, he was not going hungry LOL.) 3 months on/9 months off is a pretty nice life.
So, just to clarify, we're talking about the "southern" central valley. Sacramento, Tracy, Merced, they're all a different animal, lots of tech commuters n' such.
The story I've always heard is that a lot of farmland in the Central valley should never have been settled. It's scrubland, prairie dog country. And you can actually see this, drive down the I-5 from SF to LA and there's the invisible line south of Coalinga where the farmland stops and it's just dry grass and a couple shrubs. Now there are some areas, like the Salinas valley, which are just naturally great, but most of the Central valley isn't naturally farmland and required tons of water to make into halfway passable farmland. And now that water is tight, you've got a lot of local agriculture fighting to survive.
I suspect the California Water Project of the sixties provided a whole lot of water for irrigation because urban areas didn't need it yet, so a bunch of really marginal land in the southwest of the Valley got planted. Those areas have been slowly getting choked off.
The southwest valley is oil country, like a little slice of west Texas. If you're into slightly cheesy niche history museums, the West Kern Oil Museum is a nice pit stop when driving up or down I-5.
The annual outflow of the St. Lawrence River is about 530 km^3.
America should invest in a terascale water engineering project to double the amount of water sent to California by diverting 1% of the flow of the St. Lawrence West up and over the Rockies -- or maybe through the world's most impressive tunnel, IDK which would be cheaper.
(No clue what this would cost, would only even possibly be feasible with a completely different American planning scheme that was more like the highly functional 1930s/1940s and not the dysfunctional present).
In the hypothetical world where the US was better at planning things, it could probably offer Canada an amount of money that Canada would accept, since the value of that 1% of the St. Lawrence to the St. Lawrence is low and the value of that 1% of the St. Lawrence to California is very high.
Alternatively, the outflow of the Mississippi is also similar to the outflow of the St. Lawrence.
That means that the water California receives from the Colorado River (4.4 million acre-feet per year) would cost $8.8 billion per year to produce through desalination. A large-scale water transfer project could potentially be cheaper than that over a 30 year time frame.
You can do it, if you don't care about costs. (Don't forget to include maintenance.) You can even pump the water at nearly sea level, if you do it in a tube within the Sacramento river. But you'll need to build up the levees.
If you want a separate right of way, though, you'll need to either drive a tunnel through an earthquake fault, or pay an interesting amount for land to build your canal on.
But I was presuming you were serious. Perhaps that was a joke.
Given it was in reply to ideas for piping water from the Great Lakes, which sounds expensive and risky, desalinization of Pacific Ocean water seemed no crazier than that. No, I haven't done the engineering analysis, but given the alternatives, I'm surprised nobody has put that on the table. It's a better use of state funds than the bullet train, which has wasted billions. Perhaps there's too little opportunity for graft.
I mean, I'm no farmer or agricultural scientist, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see terrific farmland outside of the Salinas valley. I see a lot of farmland, and I think when people talk about agricultural production they're talking about volume.
What makes the farmland, say, between Fresno and LA more valuable than Nevada scrubland, say everything between Reno and Winnemuca? Like, it grows because they pour water on it but when I drive through the undeveloped parts the central valley looks as barren or worse than northern Nevada. Is there anything that makes this good farmland?
(2) Is that scrubland as climatically stable as the Central Valley? My impression was that the Central Valley is so productive thanks to the combination of a year-round growing season AND lots of sunlight AND a lack of the sort of storms / temperature swings that might destroy crops.
IIRC, Nevada is very high in Selenium. Enough so to make sheep sick, or perhaps it was cattle. This isn't true of California scrubland.
OTOH, (and extrapolating from a very small sample) California land isn't inherently great. It doesn't have a whole bunch of humus. Until you build up the land you want to raise crops that need excellent drainage. (That's if there's no hardpan underneath your acres. If there is, use it for pasture, because you can't do much irrigation.) If you handle it well, and rotate your crops properly, you can build it up within a few decades to something quite decent. But you WILL need water. And the water tables have been dropping rapidly.
We ended up here in Sacramento 13 years ago when my wife started her PhD at Davis. First two years were a bit of a drag but we fell in love with the city and decided to stay. The smog half of the year can be a drag but spring in Sacramento is absolutely gorgeous.
I am also reminded of season 3 of Goliath, which dealt with water rights in the Central Valley and the almond farms hoarding all the water. Not sure how accurate a reflection of the actual situation it was, but I do feel guilty now whenever I drink almond milk.
A problem seems serious if you're torturing trees to solve it.
The nonpareil almond used to be thought of as drought-tolerant, but not by enough to be sustainable. I don't know how much almond farmers, specifically, contribute to groundwater depletion causing the Central Valley to sink:
But some almond farmers are letting their orchards flood with winter stormwater, while their trees are dormant, in hopes of recharging some groundwater:
Due to the Grapes of Wrath-era Scots-Irish migration, Bakersfield, CA used to be one of the capitals of country music, home to the rock-influenced Bakersfield Sound of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Bakersfield in the 1960s was much like Austin in the 1970s, home to a harder edged alternative to Nashville.
Here's a Rolling Stones country song about Bakersfield, The Girl with the Faraway Eyes.
Mom's side was a part of this great migration from Arkansas. Scot-Irish to the core. All settled in the central valley. All of them still there and depressed about what has become of that great part of America.
Keep in mind that some of the commuting from CV>BA is not going all the way to SF. People live in Stockton and commute to Concord, or live in Tracy and commute to Livermore. You're still saving 300k on a house.
Yep. And the people living in Concord are likely to actually work in SF, themselves also saving 300k+ on a house compared to buying in the city. The pattern radiates outward from the economic engine of the region in SF/Silicon Valley. Enormously inefficient; hopefully the YIMBYs continue to make progress.
> This is a weird article. It seems to confirm that things used to be better - nobody would call the Central Valley “the good life” now. But its concerns are smog, sprawl, and decreasing share of agriculture. These seem like the problems of somewhere that’s growing - local NIMBYs complaining that too many people want to move in. Today the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave.
> Sometimes well-off residents of California coastal cities get houses in the Central Valley and commute. It’s about 2 hours from LA to Bakersfield, or 1.5 from Stockton to San Francisco, so it’s not worth it for most people. But Central Valley houses cost between 25% and 50% the cost of coastal houses, so I guess it’s worth it for some. I don’t know whether this is good (because these people bring money in and create jobs) or bad (because these people bid up land values).
Your two assumptions here- that it's the rich buying second houses and commuting, and that this isn't a significant number of people- are wrong.
Anecdotally, I live in the South Bay and have spoken with multiple random workers who have multiple hour commutes from the Central Valley. I can't find statistics on this, but this more-or-less matches what I'd expect- the people getting pushed out of the Bay Area due to housing prices are the poorest, not the richest.
The article calculates that ~130,000 workers commute from the Central Valley into the Bay Area. If the average family has 4 people, one of whom commutes to the Bay Area, that's 500,000 people who have been pushed out the Bay Area. The Central Valley has a population of 6.5 million; if you exclude the 2 million who live around Sacramento (the state capital, an exception as you discuss in the article), over 10% of the Central Valley's families have somebody commuting to the Bay Area. I know much less about LA, and couldn't find good stats from google, but if it's similar then that's ~20% of the entire population of the Central Valley who live there in large part because lack of housing pushed them out of the coastal cities.
When I lived in San Jose, almost every construction worker, gardener or cleaner I spoke to commuted in from Lodi or Tracy or Stockton or Modesto etc because they couldn't afford to live in the Bay Area.
When I first got there people used to move to Fremont or Pleasanton. Even those places are no longer affordable.
If random people say it uses to be better when they were young, but the data says it was always bad, isn't the obvious answer that people have rose colored glasses?
Also, as an aside, crime is down there from the 90s just like it's down everywhere else in the country from the 90s.
Bakersfield and Fresno have sizable gang problems (and lousy police departments).
I presume that as Los Angeles got expensive, a lot of gang members got squeezed out and relocated to places like Bakersfield.
You can think of NIMBYs in LA and the Bay Area successfully squeezing out a lot of their problem people over the last few decades and offloading them on the Central Valley.
The other obvious explanation is that things have got worse in ways that are not captured by whatever data you're looking at.
Per capita GDP is not a metric that captures things like "is there a homeless encampment in your local park" or "how often are you woken up by a screaming methhead"
>I always think of Mississippi as bad because of a history of racial violence, racial segregation, and getting burned down during the Civil War.
This sounds disingenuous, but perhaps our host is merely the victim of a California public education.
Agriculture isn't a great business in a developed country. Why fertile Mississippi isn't doing better than the relatively dry Central Valley seems a better question, but no surprise neither are thriving. Ag ain't the future and never was.
Still another way to frame this might be: Why Is The Central Valley So Successful? People *migrate* there for work and find better lives. Not so for the Midwest or Mississippi.
It is true that urban places do a lot better than rural places, but that can't be the full story. Midwestern rural states like Nebraska seem to be doing lot better than either Mississippi or the Central Valley.
Nebraska is substantially less rural than Mississippi. Jackson, MS isn’t as big as Lincoln or Omaha. Mississippi is 50% rural while Nebraska is only 21% rural.
Your list actually lists Nebraska as 27% rural. Moreover it lists California's rural population as 1,880,350. Even if all of them live in the Central Valley that's make the Central Valley 26% rural (going by wikipedia's popultion figures). The Central Valley therfore is not more rural than Nebraska, at least if you go by the muesure your source uses.
Of course both muesures considers people involved in the agricultural industry that live in cities non-rural.
Sorry about misremembering the digit for Nebraska! But yes, the Central Valley has bigger cities than any of these states. So it doesn’t explain why the Central Valley is as poor as it is.
One thing the OP doesn't mention is that, if I understand correctly, the federal government heavily subsidizes corn and soy (grown in the Midwest) but not fruits and vegetables (grown in CV). I wonder how much difference this makes? Would CV be better off with government subsidies for fruit and vegetables?
I grew up in the valley from birth until I left for college in 2009. A couple of things that I remember looking back at that time:
1. The 2009 housing bust hit HARD. Like, really hard. Housing prices skyrocketed in the couple years before and then in what seemed like overnight prices tanked and everyone lost their jobs. I recall hearing about cities like Stockton pushing a 25%+ unemployment rate. There were already crime and drug problems in cities like Stockton, Modesto, and Fresno, and that made everything worse.
2. There's very little to do, and you have to drive a long ways to do it. Outside of Sacramento and perhaps a couple of pockets elsewhere if I'm being generous, there's nowhere in the valley where you can, say, walk around and enjoy a day in the city and do things. I remember that parts of downtown Modesto and Fresno, at least back in ~2008, were literally shut down after dusk because of crime. Even then those fairly large cities are built like massive suburbs.
3. Water. I think this is the big one. The valley is only agricultural because of a large canal network. And for a long time (not sure how it is now), farmers got incredible water subsidies, partially rationed, which they were not allowed to sell. When I was growing up, one of the most common ways of irrigation I'd see was literally flooding orchards because farmers had so much water that if they didn't use, they lost. So they'd use it on the least efficient method of irrigation possible. I think that's changed a bit in the last decade, but only in response to very severe drought. I believe to some extent some farmers are now being subsidized not to grow crops at all to save on water. When that's the backbone of your economy you're in trouble. (Growing up I heard that I lived in the "breadbasket of America" frequently. I wonder what they're telling kids now.)
Also, your categorization of the region as being a strategic location by which you can escape is spot on. People would talk about how great it is that you can reach SF, Monterey, Yosemite, or Tahoe for a day trip quite frequently.
„ Also, your categorization of the region as being a strategic location by which you can escape is spot on. “
To be honest, as a non American, that actually makes Sacramento appealing enough. San Francisco I’d prefer visit than live in anyway. Don’t get me wrong it’s a great place to visit. And Tahoe is wonderful.
Yeah, Sacramento, last time I was there, was alright. Particularly some of the surrounding areas. But that's the northern tip of the valley and not necessarily representative.
Sacramento is the mid-point of the Central Valley. I suppose its fair to call it the northern tip of the San Joaquin Valley, but there's no obvious split, except the Sacramento River. And there are several bridges.
Note that towards the beginning of the thread some people were talking about how bad Red Bluff was. (I didn't see Redding or Chico mentioned.)
A couple of thoughts courtesy of someone who's never been there and should probably go to sleep instead of typing this:
You mention how people want to leave, but also the problems are problems of growth. I wonder if what this is, is replacing farming with being exurbs of the big cities; and the people who want to leave are the old farm people (and people who grow up there but don't want to stay), more than made up for by the people moving there chasing cheap housing and because they're immigrating to the US.
Matt Yglesias had a thing on his blog today that said this:
"The unintended legacy of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was that illicit seasonal labor migration was largely replaced by one-off permanent migration, while the three- and 10-year bans made it harder than ever for permanent unauthorized residents to regularize their status without meaningfully deterring illegal entry. "
So maybe this means fewer migrant farm workers leaving in the offseason, more staying in the central valley full-time.
Also since Matt Yglesias is always going on about how underrated an issue air pollution is - I wonder if that is causing a lot of the issues (and I'm guessing caused by a combo of population growth, and geography that's conducive to the air pollution hanging around).
Also the water situation seems fucked up in a way that more population must exacerbate.
Also Kansas is 12.7% Hispanic, compared to 17% nationwide. Dodge City is 57% Hispanic.
You mention progressive legislation as a potential issue, so in the interest of defending my tribe while being too tired/lazy to write anything more thought out, I'll also mention federal rules that make it harder to employ people who are immigrants or homeless or whatever (like those IRS forms you have to fill out when you start a job with your ID and all that). Also everything I hear always makes it sound like these farms are really exploitative towards the workers. The recent (wrongly decided) Supreme Court case about how a law letting union organizers onto farms is an unconstitutional taking comes to mind.
Regarding the plot at the beginning of IV (Per Capita Income Compared to California) you write:
> Here it looks like things got worse from 1975 - 1985, then have been basically stable since.
In 1985, the range is approx 65%-80%. Today the range is approx 60%-72%. The decline since 1975 almost as large as the initial drop.
If by ”stable” you mean a slow steady decline, you should say that explicitly, because in context ”stable” sounds like ”stopped getting worse.” If, on the other hand, by ”stable” you do mean ”stopped getting worse” then this is objectively wrong.
This is an intriguing article for someone like me, who lives in Central Europe. A few years ago, I went to an academic conference in L.A., and afterwards flew to SF for some sightseeing. Rented a car there, and drove back to L.A. for the plane home. The intent of driving back was to see some touristy places on the way which are only car-reachable, like Sequoia.
This obviously took us along parts of Central Valley, which was a fairly unsettling experience. To Europeans, U.S. cities are somewhat disconcerting to begin with, what with the large numbers of visible homeless, and the acutely mentally ill who roam the streets, apparently untreated (these demographics of course overlap). But Central Valley was even worse: the entire region radiated an aura of poverty, neglect and despair that you don't even find in the really bad parts of Eastern Europe.
For years, I put down the impression I got back then down to bad sampling: I figured we must just have had the bad luck to stumble into the bad parts, and missed the good ones. Seems like I was wrong about that.
I’m from the U.K. and have been to California for rock climbing trips, so I’ve driven through the CV several times. Last visit I stayed in Merced which felt super sketchy and unsafe, then driving from Yosemite to Joshua Tree even the highway rest stops felt risky. I have worked in places like Afghanistan and South Sudan so I’m fairly used to dealing with difficult places but even so this part of the US was unsettling to me too. It really wasn’t very nice!
Haha no those places are way worse! But I would certainly feel safer in a city like Delhi. CV felt more like South Africa - quite developed but also a bit dangerous (SA still worse tho). It’s very different to anywhere I’ve been to in Western Europe.
You can probably blame the size of the United States and the cultural tendency to move for jobs. It's great for economic productivity, but it leaves behind any area that no longer meets the immediate needs of industry or commerce. You can find lots of places that were booming within living memory that are terrible now. Detroit is famous for this, of course, but so are many parts of Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and others. I'm not including places that were never very rich, like Alabama or Kentucky.
European countries are much smaller, and I think culturally the people are far less likely to move around chasing new economic booms.
1) Americans move for jobs less now than at any other point in history.
2) The classic dying town is itself a creature of economic migration: once upon a time it was a cost effective place to put an industrial plant and the town grew up around it, etc. It seems to me that if we are willing to create towns for contingent economic reasons, we should also be willing to destroy them for the same reasons. Otherwise we’ll have and endless accumulation of places with no reason to exist and dependent on huge subsidies.
That said, the sense of loss from a formerly prosperous community falling apart, and the attendant rapid expansion that leaves a new area feeling overwhelmed, are both costs and I don't think we as a society truly consider those costs very often. It's a choice we make, rather than an inevitable effect of economics.
I happen to live in a small town, of my own choice, because I prefer the environment and believe it's better for my family. I have a good job, but could probably be making 2-3X the cash salary with similar or better benefits in a city. Especially with the higher cost of living, I don't consider that a worthwhile tradeoff, but understand that many people do, and that the economy as a whole benefits from it.
Everyone who lives in a growing city considers it every time they pay their NIMBY inflated rent. Real estate is like the number one topic of conversation. We don’t neglect these things at all, policies intended to address them are far and away most prominent and consequential exercises of government power in our lives.
What do you think is the biggest factor in the absence of visible poverty and neglect in places like Bulgaria and Romania, which are substantially poorer than anywhere in the US? Are the people who live in the countryside generally prosperous, and the less successful folks are vacuumed up into the cities where they can't leave car parts laying around in their yards, because they live in an apartment building?
I would suggest that behaviour is about class, not economics. A middle class Bulgarian is as poor as a lower class American but behaves like a middle class person.
Presumably they're busy lousing up the bits of Bulgaria where they live. And you're right, they're probably apartment blocks so they're less visible... with the exception of gypsy encampments which presumably have all the problems of Modesto only worse. (I've never actually been to Bulgaria so I'm guessing.)
I do think there's an issue where the lower class in the US is either larger or worse behaved than in many comparable countries.
Comments like these are always so strange to me, because in all my travels to Europe I've never noticed the cities there having less homeless or mentally unstable people than the average US cities. Rome has huge homeless camps, there's people huffing paint on the streets of Amsterdam, Athens feels basically like Fresno with culture, etc, etc.
I always wonder if it's just people become blind to the homeless in their home cities, but notice it more when they travel.
I suspect (note that this is largely uninformed speculation on my part) that there are two largely unrelated issues going on here that shouldn't really be lumped together. The Central Valley's population consists of:
1.) Predominantly immigrant communities centered around the agriculture industry.
2.) Generic, predominantly white, suburban communities that aren't especially different from other suburbs you'd find in, say, the Midwest.
The immigrant communities are largely poor, but as far as I'm aware they have always been poor (see Cesar Chavez, etc.) and given the economic data presented I don't see much of a reason to imagine that things have gotten dramatically worse in the past 10 years or so. Meanwhile the suburbs are declining and dealing with issues like downward mobility, brain drain, drugs, etc., but these issues are hardly unique to the Central Valley.
These two groups are largely segregated from each other and their problems are very different--the discrepancy between the narratives of decline and the economic data come from the fact that the immigrant group forms the majority of the Central Valley's population and are thus primarily what the statistics reflect, while the suburban group is the one that produces most of the accounts about the region's decline that most of readers of this blog would hear about. In reality there are two populations there are two populations that are not very alike outside of sharing a space, one of which is growing as normal (but which has always been very poor) and one of which was wealthier and is declining is declining (but forms a minority of the region's population). The growing sense of something being wrong in the Central Valley is a combination of typical declinism from the suburban group and increasing media attention towards the poverty of an immigrant group that was previously less visible due to marginalization.
I do think it leaves out the growth of exurban supercommuting. It would be interesting to compare to northeastern pennsylvania that way (a region where a growing number of people commute multiple hours into New York).
I wonder which of those two groups if either demanded the new Cesar Chavez National Park to go along with the Cesar Chavez National Monument we already have.
Kids, let's go have a fun day exploring Cesar Chavez's old office!
Victor Davis Hanson has written many times about this, from the perspective of someone whose family has farmed in the Central Valley for generations.
In a general way, my vague feeling is that it's probably the dark side of the explosion of huge tech money in the Bay Area in the 90s, which utterly changed the Bay Area itself[1], and led to substantial revision in the priorities of the California Legislature -- which have been since reflected in all kinds of infrastructure neglect that strongly affects Central Valley business -- water and power distribution being most obvious, but also including transportation -- as well as state-level priority setting that gets approving nods from $400k/year Google engineers and is utterly flabbergasting for schmos growing raisins in Fresno[2], like it's a broadcast from Mars. It's a shame the Bay Area can't be split off into a sort of Hong Kong, it's own little city-state, and then the Central Valley could pursue its own best interests. Doesn't mean the two areas can't do mutually profitable business with each other, but they should not be making rules for each other, the cultural and lifestyle gulf is too large.
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[1] I lived in Oakland in the 80s, and the contrast between then and now is staggering.
[2] I mean, only electric cars can be sold in 2035? This is frankly delusional with respect to Central Valley denizens, and to the extent actually implemented will screw them over economically.
If the Central Valley's issues were a reflection of poor economic management of the region then we would expect agricultural productivity there to be falling, which as far as I'm aware does not seem to be the case.
Productivity in steel-making has steadily increased for decades but Gary is still a pit, a pale shadow of what it was when steel was king. You are overlooking the fact that rising productivity does not directly translate to rising economic well-being. I mean, if nothing else, productivity goes way up when wages crash, right?
For that matter, *economic* management is only a small part of what I suspect has gone wrong.
American steel production has been falling from the Rust Belt’s glory days though, while California agricultural production and employment is holding steady (or at least was before the droughts, I’m unsure what the current state). The rest of California’s interest in the Central Valley is that the agriculture industry remain robust, which it is (in fact arguably too much, given how the state’s agribusinesses are contributing to the water problems)—the initial post is claiming that the state government is harming Central Valley businesses through mismanagement and poor prioritization, but the businesses themselves are fine.
The remaining issues are less that the state government is mismanaging the economy and more that it is simply more sensitive to the preferences of the coastal areas who form a majority of the state’s population and economy than it is to the Central Valley (or rather to the preferences of the predominantly white farmowners within the Valley who dob’t actually even form a majority of the region’s population), which is… fine? There are many states where the political preferences of a large urban area go ignored because of the dominance of rural and exurban interests in the state government (Charlotte and Austin being prominent examples off the top of my head) and people generally don’t suggest that these areas should be allowed to split off and fork their own states—why should it be any different when the Central Valley suffers from the reverse problem. Especially since, unlike Charlotte or Austin, the Central Valley is a drag on the overall state economy that likely takes in more spending than it gives and benefits from being part of California for things like water negotiations with other states.
I'd be more sympathetic to demands from conservative agrarian regions to secede from liberal states *if they were consistent* and a reflection of the broader principle that all regions should have a representative government rather than one dictated by the accidents of state boundaries, which they currently clearly are not.
You know, if your position is "Who cares?" it's fine, you can just say that, there's no real added value in appending a few paragraphs of rationalization.
(Fresno born and raised, family grew and packed raisins til 2002...victim of massive oversupply, decreased consumption in the decade of the Fruit Rollup)
The weather isn't that bad by most standards. Notice the graphs there showing how it's never muggy. I think "often reach 110°F (43°C) in the summer" is clearly an exaggeration, perhaps influenced by the recent heat wave.
Also, some areas are rather nice. Yuba City, Chico. There are nice neighborhoods and sometimes fantastic natural areas within a reasonable drive.
Redding is hot as hell, I think it's the hottest of them all for some reason (edit: ok Bakersfield apparently's a bit worse.) But even still that's probably just in the deep summer and the nights are still coolish. And again, it probably compares reasonably ok to the South.
I once motorcycled through there in the summer and yes it was a wall of heat. But "it was a dry heat". I suspect a lot of us only ever have reason to drive through these in summer.
I completely disagree. There is nothing worse than the oven feeling of being in a desert. I'd take swampland over it any day of the week. I've lived in Chicago, Redding, and New Orleans, and Redding by far had the worst weather of the three.
Houston July 7 the dotted line "perceived temperature" hit 112 degrees. And was still 93 at midnight.
In Redding on September 6 it reached 115F, which was an extreme weather event, but the chart claims a "perceived temperature" under 110, and dropped to 80F at midnight.
I'd still prefer the Redding weather in summer, just on this basis at least. I'd probably try to escape to the mountains though.
The weather is nice, and it does "often reach 110°F in the summer". Those statements are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it occasionally reaches 120°F.
Why is an agricultural region so polluted? And when did it start to be bad? Imho it could be an important part of the story; at least in my country, middle class people are moving away from most polluted region
I think basically the only industries more polluting than agriculture are ones that involve coal. The fact that these areas are also downwind of cities with a lot of cars doesn’t help. But I think airborne dust and cow manure are the main atmospheric pollutants.
You mean the air? Two reasons: first, and obviously, for the same reason the weather is so placid. The region lies between the Sierra Nevada to the east, and the coastal ranges to the west, so the air circulation is limited. (Death Valley is this phenomenon greatly intensified by much higher mountains and a smaller space.) Along the coast all your car smog gets blown out to sea, or blown inland by the sea breeze, usually both.
Second, a lot of cows plus cars. It turns out NOx emission from cars plus methane from the cows plus sunlight is one of the main drivers of so-called "photochemical smog," which is the brown fug you often see over the LA basin (in the case of LA the cows are in Riverside County and the cars are in LA County, but the emission from the two happily mix 5000 feet up). An exceedingly complex chain of photochemical reactions causes NOx radicals to turn the methane (and similar small hydrocarbons) into large fluffy soot-like particulates, which is what turns the air a funny color and is also rather bad to breathe.
I dunno man, it sounds like the conservative realtor was pretty much correct? Other than the air pollution angle this article seems to be just confirming what he was saying with data and more historical tidbits. I'm from and live very far from California, but to re-cap the story both data+news+realtor are saying:
- In the old days the central valley was rural but nice enough.
- Mexican workers came, worked temporarily, went home again.
- At some point in the 80s/early 90s, some party (presumably the left?) got in and decided to give lots of those people citizenship and thus welfare rights without thinking about how anyone would pay for that. Probably on the belief that Mexican immigrants would then become reliable voters for the party that most supported welfare.
- Combination of events+tech change led to reduced employment needs, simultaneous with increased unskilled workforce size. This would also create a massive influx of a foreign culture that reduces demand for production of local culture. Result: suppressed wages, subsequent poverty, and not much culture.
- Newly minted citizens do indeed vote reliably for the left, flipping the state permanently and ensuring the government can now pass lots of policies hostile to agriculture, which they see as "devastating the environment" and not food production, making the poverty situation worse.
Seems that the root cause here is being painted quite consistently: once the left took control of California they did a series of things that shored up their own power but sacrificed the Central Valley along the way?
Yeah most of the central valley and also the northern bits near Oregon are red state country overall. Maybe not Sacramento proper.
Although in theory they benefit from rich coastal cities, I suspect that in a bigger picture long-term sense they'd actually be better off being an independent state (or set of states, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Californias).
A bit dated. By current partisanship, the CV is pretty balanced. Sacramento and Yolo Counties are enough to flip it D. All counties but those 2 voted for George W. Bush, but some other big ones voted for Biden as the state overall has moved left since the mid-2000s.
The timeline is a bit jumbled in my head so this may be off, but Reagan era immigration reform 1. Had (one off) amnesty making staying in the US more attractive, and 2. Increased border enforcement so rather than seasonally migrate every year between the US and Mexico people moved their families to the US permanently.
OK. If it was Reagan who did that, then the outline above doesn't really work, unless I guess he was 'forced' to include the amnesty to get his laws passed in order to improve border enforcement. Also - I had taken from the above article that the seasonal worker system was legal and there were temp agri worker visas. Sounds like you're saying the whole Mexicans-come-for-the-season system was actually illegal, but nobody got prosecuted over it?
I don't remember it myself, but I've heard a lot of people saying that the 1986 amnesty was supposed to be part of a larger immigration reform that made it significantly harder to get into the US in the first place.
For many conservatives who have been watching the discussion lately, they are very unwilling to compromise now because they felt like they cooperated and the other side defected back then.
So, the politics of immigration have kind of flipped, where conservatives were pro immigration (cheap labor for businesses, beat the soviets, America as a shiny city on a hill), and Democrats were more anti immigration (the populist labor being a more important part of the coalition). Immigration wasn’t as sorted politically back then, but you can find debates where Reagan and HW are fighting over who is the most pro immigration candidate.
Yes, this is to a first approximation correct. In the 80s is when it started. Bad (really bad) urban planning in Fresno didn't help. Born (1980) and raised, before I decamped to the Bay for college.
I have said for the last 15 years that I think the fine particulate matter air pollution that builds up due to immovable air, diesel trucks, ag dust, etc. etc. is a big hidden factor...as someone who went back and forth a lot in my young adulthood, I felt I lost a measurable chunk of IQ points every time I came home when the air was really bad.
Combined with a population in poor metabolic health, and decades in the mid 20th century of who-knows-what-effects ag chemical exposure by farmers, workers, farmers families, water supply....the biological factors are probably significant...
California has a $14 (for small businesses) minimum wage whereas Mississippi just has the federal minimum wage of $7.25. It's hard to imagine that agriculture is twice as productive in California's central valley with it's relatively dry climate. I think this is enough to explain the poverty? People just aren't allowed to work? If there were no minimum wage, then a dollar would naturally be worth more in a rural town than in a high-productivity region like San Francisco. Wages are naturally lower in rural areas because they're not as productive but it's okay because everything else is cheaper as well. The minimum wage totally disrupts this. Employers are forbidden from paying the natural wage so everything involving service gets artificially expensive and people get unemployed because many jobs are just not allowed to exist.
I believe that "your labor is only worth $7.25/hr" must imply "the opportunity cost of taking that job is < $7.25/hr". Consider the contrary of the implied predicate. If the opportunity cost were greater than $7.25/hr, then that opportunity must be worth more than $7.25/hr, which means someone is willing to pay you to work more than $7.25/hr, which means your labor is worth more than $7.25/hr, which contradicts the implying predicate.
It does not imply that, because opportunity cost can be expressed in terms of utility, and not just in terms of money.
Working for $7.25 an hour only makes sense if the utility you derive from it exceeds the utility you would derive from doing something else (hanging out with your kids, fishing, watching TV, whatever). Nobody has to pay you to do that ‘something else’ to make it a more attractive proposition than working.
If your labor is only worth $7.25 then who in their right mind would be willing to pay you $14 for it, and why would the absence of such a person not result in you making $0? Without a rational explanation for why minimum wage should not cause unemployment, the only remaining explanation for empirical evidence contrariwise, is an error of some sort in the empiricism.
Actually it's time to examine how the facts are being created.
When studying economics in primarily the empirical manner, a great many degrees of freedom are left to the person who collects the data and to the statistician who analyzes it. Establishing cause and effect is notoriously difficult. There is never a control-group like there is in a clinical trial - confounders can happen any time with any magnitude. There is rarely even a passable understanding of each individual's reality - if there were, then true communism would function well for nations whose populations are bigger than Dunbar's number, and Effective Altriusm would not suffer from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-anti-politics .
This is why treating economics as an empirical discipline of aggregates has been producing poor results, in contrast to a deductive discipline of how individuals engage in purposeful behavior and how those behaviors might add up to some consequences.
IIUC, every test of whether minimum wage increases unemployment has numerous flaws that invalidate the result as a general statement, and reduce it to "This result is correct if the following conditions are present....", where the conditions are different for different studies.
When I think about it, it's probably nearly impossible to come up with a test that doesn't have that problem. You'd need to run the exact same test in multiple environments, and in each case you'd need to guard against boundary effects. This would be at minimum extremely expensive, and is probably impossible. Which may be why there's continued disagreement over that point (and several other generally related points).
I want to believe that minimum wage has no adverse effects, but I don't think you can really whow that.
I don't believe you. There are countries which have had different minimum wages for different ages and there's a sharp discontinuity in employment rates right at the legal cutoff.
The rate has risen from AUS$772.60 to $812.44 per week.
So that’s a minimum wage increase of 5% and it’s a yearly minimum wage of $42,246.88
Unemployment in Australia is 3.5% which seems low given how high that minimum wage is already. Maybe people should try predict the rate of unemployment. Has to be higher right?
Maybe someone can do the mathematics of this over the last decade and:
1) work out the rate of unemployment in 2002 or 2012
2) work out the increase in the minimum wage in the last 10-20 years.
3) apply the economic formula (must be a formula) that will work out how high the unemployment rate should be.
You're ignoring all the possible confounders to this, and also, this is an arbitary level of minimum wage, and yet you're making a general statement. It's literally impossible that a minumum wage of $8000 a week wouldn't cause unemployment, because its literally impossible for businesses to pay that much money and continue operating.
What is the difference between "reduced employment" and "unemployment"?
There would not be a simple formula where you plug in a minimum wage and get out an unemployment rate because there are so many factors which affect that rate.
Also in addition to the replies above Australian minimium wage is a complex topic and is actually a well designed system that helps mitigate some of the more pernicious effects of minimum wage laws. That you didnt mention this shows either A) You dont know what you're talking about or B) You do know what you're talking about and are being deliberately dishonest, I don't know which is worst.
Why say this if you aren't going to provide evidence?
And you need to be much more precise. I assume you mean "the minimum wage that currently exists", not the very concept of wage controls in general. Unless you wish to claim that a $50 dollar minimum wage (in 2022 dollars) would not cause any job losses.
By "technically", I assume you mean the *legal* definition of poverty, in which case the answer to your question is probably "yes but why should we care". The legal definition does not take into account that its single income threshold provides very different standards of living in different places. Our goal should not be to reduce the incidence of legally-defined poverty, but rather to reduce "actual" poverty (as manifested in things including but not limited to food insecurity and homelessness); this is harder to define but much more important. It's entirely possible that people making $13.99 in a given location would be "actually" poor instead of just legally poor (I don't claim to know anything about what living in the Central Valley with that wage would actually be like), but this is something that takes evidence and arguments to establish, not a simple appeal to the word "technically".
Basically don't Goodhart yourself - legal poverty is perhaps a useful measure in some situations, but don't ever let it blind you to the real goal for which it is a very imperfect proxy.
The median home in Mississippi is $134,000, verses about $900,000 in California.
I've heard that $18/hour in SF is about $11 in the Deep South. $7.25 in the rural South (and just because that's the federal minimum doesn't mean many places actually pay that low) will get you further than $14.00 in most of California, but the Central Valley is not as expensive as the rest of the state. If SF and LA price the rural parts of the state out through a collective minimum wage or strict regulations, then that could be a big problem.
"The median home in Mississippi is $134,000, verses about $900,000 in California."
For purposes of this conversation I think we probably want median home in the California central valley rather than California as a whole. We might want to use rural Mississippi home prices, too.
Random Googling gets around $325K for the median central valley house.
I don't know how to get rural Mississippi home prices.
I agree, though I think my point still stands that the central valley houses are approaching 3X the cost of MS houses as a whole, not just rural. Rural houses are almost certainly cheaper.
"It's hard to imagine that agriculture is twice as productive in California's central valley with its relatively dry climate." Seriously? California agriculture is certainly the most productive in the US and is among the highest in the world. Dry weather with irrigation from mountain runoff is much better for agriculture than humid (pest-inducing) weather with unpredictable rainfall. Also, the crops grown in California are very valuable: wine grapes (!), fruit, greens, nuts, compared to those grown in Mississippi.
All that aside: do you really believe illegal migrant workers are being paid minimum wage?
Back in 1969 the federal minimum wage was $1.60 - about $12.80 in current dollars. That didn't seem to cripple employment then. With a much richer and more productive economy now it seems unlikely $14/hour would be so crippling.
When making that comparison it is important to remember who wasn't included in the minimum wage pool. That doesn't invalidate your point, but it does complicate it.
If you want a framework to think about this problem, and similar ones, I can recommend the book "How The World Became Rich" by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin.
This book is a survey of current thinking about economic growth and how it happened. There are several major strands of thought: geography, politics/institutions, culture, demography, and colonialism. We could apply these lenses to the Central Valley:-
Geography: the Central Valley doesn't have a major navigable river running through it, so it's never going to benefit from trade. It's also close to major trading centres, for which it will act as a hinterland, a source of workers and resources. It would always have struggled to develop as a major centre of activity in its own right. It's pretty much stuck with agriculture.
Culture: people in the valley come from low trust cultures (both the Latin cultures, and the Anglo Western USA culture). This means that they would not naturally band together to try to improve their lot (by political agitation directed at the state and federal governments, or directly, by building things themselves). If things get bad, they can't cooperate to fix them.
Demography: Throughout its history since Anglos got there, California has depended on working age immigrants to a greater degree than almost anywhere else in the world. This means it could get away with being woefully undersupplied with the capital needed to bring up families and integrate young people into the work force. It is.
(You probably disagree. But do a thought experiment: what would need to change to successfully, continuously, integrate the children of the Central Valley fully into the economies of L. A. or S. F. from now on?)
Politics/Institutions: These are dominated by socioeconomic elites. In highly unequal societies institutions are set up in ways to disadvantage the already poor, for example by having few, inaccessible, and badly resourced offices. Low trust societies tend to have corrupt governments (that operate on personal connections), which further disadvantages those not politically connected, who don't believe that government would mitigate their problems anyway.
Colonialism: seasonal migrants were merely a resource to be exploited, not part of local society. Cultural attitudes like this take multiple generations to change, once established.
Not hard to *get to* major trading centers, hard to *have your own* major markets without water transport.
Land freight is orders of magnitude more costly than water-borne. The cost is borne by the supplying side, because they are price takers in the markets. Coastal California has large ports (and therefore market centers) and ships.
The existence of the bright lights of nearby cities will draw talent and entrepreneurs away from rural areas nearby. Cities also keep the immigrants. The rural areas don't develop their own businesses as a result.
The other factors do apply to some extent. However the higher productivity of specialized large business in cities means they can pat their workers more; competition means they have to; higher pay provides more agency (choices, basically) and contact with/observation of other people from a variety of cultures, who have made a variety of educational, lifestyle, and occupational choices, better informs families when making their own choices.
These effects offset institutional and political weaknesses and dilute cultural factors.
Generally, rural places in America where the farmers are of Germanic descent tend to be a little less depressing than where the farmers are of Anglo descent. I don't think there are many German farmers in the Central Valley, although some of the grape growers are Italian like Gallo and Mondavi.
As far as rivers go, the San Joaquin once upon a time was navigable, but now isn't. Also the Sacramento River was navigable from the Bay all the way past Red Bluff. Dams and farms destroyed these river systems and lots of lakes (famously Tulare Lake).
I don't know; I wasn't there. But: gated housing developments with guards on the gates, a reputation for corruption in government, (consequent?) distrust of big government and underinvestment in public capital, and winner-take-all economics (e.g. fixed property taxes) all seem to be features these days.
"Median income" can mean different things that often get confused. When you see figure in the $25-40k range in the US, it typically means median personal income for everyone over the age of 16. This includes students, retirees, homemakers, people on disability, part-time workers, etc., so the value is typically about 2/3 of the median earnings for full-time workers, and half of the median household income, and should not be (but very frequently is) confused with either of these.
Note that this is not median household income divided by the number of adults in the median household. It's based on asking people over the age of 16 how much money they personally make, as individuals.
Per capita income, on the other hand, is total personal income divided by population. So if people have a lot of children, that's going to drag the average down.
"Immigrants don't lower wages", we brought in 100,000 immigrants and while the current 100,000 residents make half as much money as before, the 5 CEOs now all make twice as much so on net it is the same! Wages haven't changed!
How has the total population of the region has evolved over years? If I understand the post and comments correctly, it seems like any Central Valley resident with any ambition and means leaves for the big cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, but those urban regions are so sprawling that they grow into the Central Valley itself (which could mean that those counties get the costs of serving suburbanites without any of economic activity, and thus tax revenue, of those residents). Also, the Central Valley does have some decent and not declining urban centers like Sacramento or Davis, but they are generally concentrated in the North, which is doing better generally than the South.
1. "There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed." RFK
The idea that some 40 year old has any objective notion of actual history is laughable. Would you rather your child be born in the 1900, 1930, 1960, 1990, 2020? The objective answer is 2020.
2. Read the first 2 pages of Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879). It is the same question: why amidst technological advances is there still poverty?
Every few years it's time to pull out Candide, ou l'Optimisme for a reread.
>I’m a bit sad that I don’t have time to play everything I’m interested in due to adult responsibilities and would love to be a kid again so that I could…
Kids probably had more fun playing video games in the 90s than kids do today
This obession you have with video games is weird, but the reality is that 'playing a lot of video games' is NOT a strong predictor of mean happiness or lifestime satisfaction.
If your view of the world were correct, American should be happier now than at any point in history. This is absolutely not the case. But hey, I'm sure if everyone just sat down and experienced more solitary electronic amusement, they would be positively joyous!
"there’s much more stigma against bullying-type behavior today that was the bane of my childhood"
It's all fake. I grew up in that climate, and I would much rather have been told "just hit them and make them stop". The schools wouldn't do a damn thing about bullying; their hands are tied by bureaucracy. I was constantly bullied for being a racial minority at my school. When I went to the teachers because of all that bluster in the afterschool specials, nothing got done. I made my parents go and the result was being taken out of class as the victim and feeling more isolated.
Thinking that having "better" ways to be amused on your own is the main determinent of how good a time period is is very sad indeed.
>I doubt kids care about churches and civic institutions
The point is not who has a better childhood - the point is who has a better life (given a particular birth-date starting point). And children back then had more friends, spent more time with friends (instead of playing video games as much - and when they did later on it was more of a social activity at arcades etc).
>How many of those childhood friends last though? For instance, OP said as a kid he did 4H, FFA, and church group, but now has no friends as an adult. I don’t think those childhood activities add much value in terms of adult friendships.
And how do you not see how you're moving the goal posts? You said churches and civic institutions are irrelvant for children, but are now criticizing having a superior social life as a child as irrelevant for adults!
And sure it adds value. If you didn't have many friends as a kid, you almost certainly have a worse social life and worse social skills as an adult. What possible benefit does sitting on your ass playing video games as a kid bring you in adulthood (for the 99.99% of people who will never have any career related to it)?
>And if you want to talk about who has a better life and not just childhood, the advantage in technology of being born today is again overwhelming. It’s not just video games and entertainment, but pervasive.
And yet people are substantially less happy today - all this wonderful technology has certainly not made up for profound decline in friendships, community, religion, civic life, more prevelant/earlier/larger family formation and so on. Oh, but we have video games now!
You can point to anything in the world you want, but none of it is irrelevant if it simply hasn't made people happier. What else could possibly matter?
And you sound like the kind of person who would at least try to fight the tide of helicopter parenting and overuse of screen time. My dad was also lower-middle class income and mom stayed at home with us.
Our slightly depressed neighborhood of mostly rental houses was great. Trick or treating was safe. People came over for Christmas parties. If you were walking down the street too late at night, the cops would stop and try to figure what was going on and you would be deeply embarrassed. They weren't wearing external level III body armor with an M-16 in the patrol car.
For me it was the whole alimony thing; fundamentally I didn't have enough 'game' to attract a woman of equal earning power, which meant if I marry one of less she basically has a 'put' option on the marriage at my expense indefinitely. Sure there are prenups but then they increase the spousal support to get around the prenup.
I plan to leave the excess funds to the Prostate Cancer Foundation. ;)
My apologies; no shade intended at women who work hard to make marriage work, support a husband or family through difficult times, or negotiate their free-living lifestyle ahead of time. ;) What I don't like is the whole "sure you're a nice guy, but I'm leaving to go find myself, and now you have to pay me a third of your salary in perpetuity." (See Honor Jones in the Atlantic for example.) I don't mind if you pursue your freedom; I've done the same. But don't expect me to pay for it.
(You also said "lack of women" in your post about these areas--wouldn't you be more concerned about the onslaught of creepy guys who won't take no for answer? Serious question.)
"I am female and am the higher earner. (My partner is actually a househusband). I'm just ambivalent on kids. He's more solidly on 'no kids' than I was which was the leading factor."
Things have drifted a bit (or more than a bit) from California's central valley...
Let me make a small pitch for not being quite as negative about the current child rearing situation.
I've got a now 21-year old and he was raised in deep blue Silicon Valley. YOU don't have to helicopter parent your children and you don't have to monitor them 24x7. And if you are upper middle class you can even turn them loose with very little chance of a bad (or child welfare department) police interaction. Even if you DO get unlucky and have that bad interaction you will most likely get a warning before anything bad happens.
My child was walking alone the 1-mile from hour house to the local downtown starting when he was about 9. He'd walk to the library, spend an hour or so reading, wander over to a favorite restaurant and have lunch and then walk home. He was never harassed. He was taking light rail, again alone, by the time he was about 11. Again, never an issue ... police never called.
If your spouse is stay-at-home then homeschooling is an option.
The "trick" is finding *other* kids whose parents let them be outside and unsupervised. We mostly missed on this ( :-( ) but I'm pretty sure that those other kids do exist!
So don't assume that you have to raise kids helicoptered. You don't!
I'll admit that most of my concerns would be around the difference in medicine, just considering that I'd have a terminal disease if I were in '50-'70, and my children would have not small odds of inheriting it. I'd definitely rather be alive for another 60 years in the modern era than another 10 in the mid 1900s. Your kid is also going to get drafted, whereas I honestly would be surprised if we had another draft in my lifetime considering that the US seems to have mastered the art of proxy wars
Not sure how that is the "objective" answer. I was born in Southern California in 1971 and my childhood/high school years and into the 90s was the most idyllic period I could imagine in my wildest dreams. My children, all born in the 2000's are not going to have anything like that. The America I grew up in is gone forever.
We used to drive several times a year from LA up through the central valley to visit family right in the middle of it (Turlock/Modesto/Oakdale). It was heaven. Farms, green everywhere, etc. I would not trade those memories to born in the era of "smart" phones and whatever else people think is so great about being born now.
The gains in workplace safety have been because of market forces via workers insurance laws, and because of past union demands.
OSHA standards and regulations are pretty minimal.
When someone gets hurt, they can't work and it reduces efficiency and productivity and increases costs. Man, machine, milieu, methods - Ishikawa. The man part includes increasing safety. Injury is loss!
Right but those are just preferences of focus. I would rather live 71 years with no seatbelt laws and cops who don't look like soldiers in Afghanistan than 79 years like we live today. It's not "objective."
Even if there is no excuse for the militarization of them in the last few decades.
We see how they act now with body-cams, how do you think they acted when there was basically no public oversight? The police of the 70s actively resisted reform attempts like for example having college education requirements.
And why would anyone expect it to improve their character on the beat? Reduce incidences of unnecessary force, for example, or abuse of authority?
I suppose if you assume that learning calculus, pulling all-nighters, drinking too much, and writing papers analyzing "Native Son" makes you an all-around better person, more humane and insightful, you could come to that conclusion.
Again, some of these are trade offs (and the others debateable). The cops were not "worse" where I grew up. And how can you know what would have happened with Covid in the 70s?
We had a year of lawlessness on behalf of leftist causes, but one group of idiots at the capital who had zero chance of overthrowing anything is cause of widespread panic about an insurrection.
I know. I didn't grow up in Watts, where the police did what they had to do maintain order.
What does that have to do with me? I didn't ask to be born in a country that was more or less culturally and ethnically homogenous and then turned into a refugee camp for the entire world during my lifetime.
Our experiment in "civic nationalism" has failed because it doesn't work with large groups of people who barbeque live guinea pigs in central park and wonder why the police get called.
There's a great deal of truth in that. I've watched my own kids get started as young adults (my oldest just turned 30) and there's no question in my mind it's significantly harder than it was for me and my brothers 45 years ago. It's harder to build a decent middle-class career and life, it often seems to be a harsh choice between being a fanatic and trying to squeeze into the upper class by 80-hour work weeks, huge piles of student loans, kissing every ass you can and making zero social mistakes, or ending up dependent in some way or another. You can definitely still succeed, don't get me wrong, but the effort and wits required seems more, and in particular the room for error seems much smaller. That whole generation seems on the whole less happy, more stressed, feels less free and more hemmed in, pushed around. It's no wonder they're not having as much sex or babies as we did ha ha.
This feels different. When I was just getting started, I had opportunities my father and uncles didn't, and both they and I knew that, and looked at it as a good thing -- it meant genuine progress, that the world was slowly getting better for everyone. It seemed much easier for my generation to break out of birth circumstances, to do things our dads and grandfathers never dreamed about -- to be an engineer where they had been mere mechanics, say, or be a physician where they had been just schmos in a warehouse. Going to college was much more possible than it had ever been, class barriers were much reduced, and it was reasonably affordable, there were places where you could still work your way through on your own.
Why this is happening is a God-damned mystery to me, although of course I have my pet theories like anybody else might. But it definitely seems to be going on, a very slow gradual grinding multi-decadal impoverishment of opportunity for the young.
No, it's not, certainly. My response was directed at the part of your comment that constituted new data, which is the experience of yourself and your friends. It is of course anecdotal, but so is my observation, and in both cases it's still data.
By itself this establishes nothing about general truths, but both are interesting stories that demonstrate the variety of experiences out there. If you are persuaded that your (and your friends) had no more difficulty "getting started" in life than any other generation, then that's great news. It isn't exactly what I've seen, but I don't pretend to have seen everything.
I'm baffled by what bearing you see the BLS data having on the question. A priori the point you've established is that 1/3 of the jobs in the US pay above $100k, which is a fair distance above the mean wage ($34,000). But...what else would you expect? There are jobs above the average, there are jobs below the average. That 1/3 of the jobs are above average doesn't seem by itself to say much about the typical experience of a young job-seeker. (Indeed, about all we *can* say is that 2/3 of people starting off in careers will *not* end up in those high-paying careers.)
If I sort that BLS list by income, I find I need to go all the way to #21before finding any career that doesn't requires a graduate degree as an entrance credential. #21 itself is "CEO" and I think that doesn't quite qualify as a starter job. The entire list of 142 above $100k has 54 (38%) that require advanced degrees.
Was it also true in 1975 that ~40% of the jobs paying $18,000 or more (the equivalent of $100,000 or more in 2022) required graduate degrees? Maybe. Feels a little dubious to me, though. It might be a salary to which you had to work your way up, over some years, proving yourself. But that the gate might be permanently closed unless you could afford college *and* graduate school seems much less likely to me, although I have only my memories on which to base this.
I love this. It encapsulates exactly what my experience has been. I have a PhD. Neither of my parents graduated HS. I am a member of the "striver" class, and I can handle it, but my kids are not going to have the trajectory I did.
<i>The idea that some 40 year old has any objective notion of actual history is laughable. Would you rather your child be born in the 1900, 1930, 1960, 1990, 2020? The objective answer is 2020.</i>
The mental illness and suicide statistics say otherwise.
There are way too many suicides. (I think globally since 1990 more suicide deaths than deaths by war. WHO reports. )
But maybe all those who make up today's mental illness and suicides, were previously victims of war, drunk driving, unsafe automobiles and workplaces, and poor medicine.
<i>But maybe all those who make up today's mental illness and suicides, were previously victims of war, drunk driving, unsafe automobiles and workplaces, and poor medicine.</i>
Firstly, do you have any reason to think that's actually the case?
Secondly, I'd rather live a non-suicidally-depressed life and die from a workplace accident, than be so miserable I end up topping myself, even if my life is equally long in both scenarios.
I am not sure what to make of the trade you propose in point 2. You mention work place accidents (ok since I did) but what if going to war and unsafe automobile travel (drunk and reckless driving in unsafe cars were really hidden methods of "topping")
As to point 1, it is or has been (I am pretty sure) by an large safer to be a teenager/young adult than it was before, notwithstanding tragically increasing suicide rates. I suppose we'd test the hypothesis by comparing survival rates of 14 to 30 year olds (i.e. chances of 14 year old making it to 31) historically.
Another topic for a different thread, but its not really a case of "so miserable that one ends up topping oneself". (Or so I would propose.) There aren't I don't think more "so miserable people" per 100K. What there is are less "suicide-averse thinking people" per 100K. The removal of the taboo on suicide seems to be part of the root problem. Once it is normalized that there is allegedly legitimate auto-euthanasia, then the step to saying end of life (terminal illness) misery might be the same non-terminal misery gets unfortunately easier. Of course, the second root is again not increased miserableness but increased access to instrumentalities (the ubiquity of guns and opioids.)
What is the obvious explanation? I am not sure anymore what we are "explaining". (Increased access to instrumentalities of suicide has increased suicides. Sounds like an obvious explanation.)
Those are extremely tiny changes, amounting to 1% of the total range. The best description of that plot is "no matter what happens, people on average are equally happy".
LOL. For goodness sakes, 2.212 ~= 2.2, 2.178 ~2.2, The precision (3 decimal places) is amazing for a scale of 1 to 3! Having an ice cream cone surely increases happiness at least by .5
What is the standard deviation? Probably 1.414.
I would take slightly less "happiness" in exchange for some more "statistical thinking".
I lived in Davis for about 6 years when I did my phd, and loved it. I think you can get to Tahoe in closer to 90 minutes. You have nothing but sun for 9 months of the year. Summers are too hot, but it's at least low humidity heat, and it often cools down substantially at night and in the mornings -- unlike in the midwest. Winters are mild, and by March 15th you have sunny, 60-70 degree weather. Wine country is right there. Also 90 minutes to San Francisco. Seemingly lots of things to see and do. I remember reading how polluted the air is, but I mostly didn't notice it myself.
That said, Davis is an oasis b/c of the UC there. I remember driving through nearby small towns with visible signs of poverty that looked approximately 100% hispanic. I have never been to Merced but I've also heard bad things.
I was in high school from 1990-1993 in the area and it was bad back then. I was in small towns -- Reedley, Hanford, Lemoore. We only lived in Hanford for a few weeks before moving; the town water smelled like rotten eggs and we couldn't handle it.
We never went to Fresno even though everyone had cars because we were all scared of being shot there. The only people with "good" jobs were stationed at the Lemoore Naval Air Station. Which was the destination when the US shut down bases in the Philippines, so Lemoore High had the weird demographic of being like 30% Filipino; I was the only non-Filipino on the high school tennis team my senior year.
It was hot back then. I remember a 30 day stretch of over 100. We checked the PBS station in the mornings to see if school was going to be delayed due to fog or not. Driving outside of the town meant among the farms and ranches you hit so many bugs you had to hose off your windshield once a week or so.
There wasn't a movie theatre in Lemoore, in retrospect I don't remember any of us ever going to see a movie, which would have required driving to the next town over. Even though we all had cars, we never really left town because outside was just giant farms for miles in every direction.
Even though my school had honors classes and plenty of smart kids there was also just a general lack of vision about what to do in life. The school valedictorian went on to attend community college.
So I'm not really buying any real golden age there.
Your one line about immigrants not lowering wages unless agriculture is the only industry really cleared up why my personal experience never matched the data on immigration. I grew up in an area where everyone was in either agriculture or construction, and it seemed clear that immigrants were lowering the wages of both. I'm glad there's an explanation that doesn't conflict with the data.
I don't really think the data on immigrants not lowering wages is really believable. Immigrants are good for employers and especially big business. They absolutely drive down wages, you see this in construction, bank tellers, programming, frankly everywhere they are common, and the stories about how this all somehow nets out in the end don't really make any sense.
Oh I am aware of the general story. Immigrants are great for Coke, so economists love immigrants (because economics as a discipline is mostly in the thrall of big business). But generally the people being scolded that "actually the immigrants are good for everyone even you" are exactly the people most hurt/displaced by them.
And the fact that Coke makes 3% more profit this year and their beverages cost $0.005 less is a benefit that really does not accrue to a very large slice of the population, and is little solace to the dude who saw his job lost or his income cut 20%.
Immigrants are AMAZING when you have a labor shortage (say the 17-1800s US which had a poor balance of people to land/resources). That is not the state of affairs in most of the world.
The stubbornly tight labor market of the last year or two following a massive immigration crackdown has led me to come around to the belief that immigrants can depress wages as well.
California has regulated itself into oblivion, has an unfunded pension mandate that is going to break the state and has done really weird things with water and other resource management that has destroyed it. The rich people who live in the bay area and LA look out over the vast wasteland of the central valley and are dumbfounded by what's wrong with it. California is a microcosm of what the entire US will look like in 50 years. Like a south American country with super rich gated communities with box cities surrounding them.
Quote: “California is a microcosm of what the entire US will look like in 50 years. Like a south American country with super rich gated communities with box cities surrounding them.”
This is a good prediction of the general trajectory of very large countries, in particular if they are (relatively speaking) sparsely populated, and if they share a common language. Large Latin American countries would be examples. But the US could drift that way as well. It is also an American country, albeit in the Northern part, and with a common language across regions.
..if a country is very large & the language is shared, people can easily move with their feet if they dislike where they grow up, or dislike their present surroundings. That creates geographical selection effects. You get sorting into gated communities (micro-welfare states), pseudo-gated communities (local high housing prices & locally funded police serves as a pseudo-barrier to outsiders), and 3rd world areas beyond that. Being big also means that it is difficult to coordinate politics across the whole country/polity, to solve common problems (made worse by federalism and formal & informal checks and balances on getting anything done). Generalized trust-building also becomes more difficult when a country is very large.
Small countries have other problems - for example, they need to smooch up to some larger country to be protected against other large countries. (Thankfully, they can often count on big countries having an interest in having small countries as allies.) But small countries can more easily overcome the above type of collective action problems.
As the then-ruler of fairly newly minted Montenegro remarked, when a journalist asked if it was really a wise decision to set up a state as small of Montenegro: “Have you ever seen a small European country that is poor”?
...so the puzzle that needs explaining, is perhaps why the US is not more similar to Argentina and Brazil already. What slows down the process?
Montenegro became independent in 2006. All the poorer, smaller countries you list are in Eastern Europe. Poverty may have something to do with the history of Eastern Europe, to put it that way. That said, the statement was meant as a bit of dry humour, food for thought-ish. You could see what he meant, at the time.
On balance national size is probably a benefit for per capita incomes because of economies of scale, so long as the nation is a coherent economic entity and not a failed state. Economies of scale are probably why the US is richer than Canada, which has both more natural resources per capita, and, one would think, more favorable demographics.
Singapore and Liechtenstein are rich, but that's because they serve specialized, non-scalable functions in the global economy. If Malaysia were broken up into Singapore-sized entities or Germany into Liechtenstein-sized ones, they would both be poorer.
The mechanisms I suggest are not primarily related to average GDP per capita; they are more related to the regional and social distribution of whatever wealth that is produced.
For reasons given, I believe these mechanisms are more likely to be at play in large countries than small countries. Including in the three largest American countries: the US, Brazil and Argentina. (But quite possibly also in Canada.)
That said, these mechanisms are obviously just some among many that are at play, and they may be overrun by others. Many small, Central American countries are poor and uneven. So are many small, East European countries over here. And so on.
Bad historical luck, degree of ethnic homogeneity , landlocked or not, differences in settler culture etc. etc. all play their parts. (My landlord a year I lived in Berkeley claimed that "while our settlers came to find God, Latin American settlers came to find gold" - and why not; it is also a possible mechanism - I am agnostic when it comes to the sum total of potential mechanisms influencing the trajectory of a country.)
That said, and as an outsider looking at the American continent from Europe, I think it is more fruitful to ask why it takes so long for the US to become more like Brazil and Argentina, rather than to ask why it takes the US so long to become more like other "western" (read: European) countries. It makes sense to assume that large settler-countries in the Americas should - across time - look more similar to each other, as the influence of their different colonial pasts gradually wanes.
>Economies of scale are probably why the US is richer than Canada, which has both more natural resources per capita, and, one would think, more favorable demographics.
On average, yes, though at the top, the best (most intelilgent/competent) people are mostly in the US. Both because they have a larger population (and threfore higher absolute number of elites) and because they have historically been where some of the smartest and most capable people in the world have been drawn to.
Yes, and you could call this one of the benefits of economies of scale. All things equal, more ambitious people are not going to be content to be "big fish in a small pond." They are going to be drawn towards the biggest, most competitive, most cutting-edge playing field. Though my sense is this particular dynamic is winner-take-all; there's very few points for second place (which, in the West, I suppose would be Germany).
This whole post is driving me crazy. "The vast wasteland of the central valley" comprises 1% of US farmland and produces 25% of the country's food, including 40% of the best stuff. Without that largesse, we and much of the world would be hungry. The rich people who live in the Bay Area and LA should be down on their knees honoring the people who grow their food, not turning their noses up at them.
OH I am with you. THEY perceive it as a vast wasteland. Not me. Any "wasteland" properties it has now is the fault of the coastal elites and politicians.
Gotcha--I guess it's time for me to take a deep breath! The original post was just too much for me. The idea that someone living in SAN FRANCISCO would drive through the Central Valley and find the CV to be the irredeemable, poverty-stricken hellhole is nuts. And I was in complete agreement with your first sentence.
Yes this. One of the big reason we left Oakland & CA, despite being successful laptop class, & having a really nice old house, was realizing how our clueless neighbors' politics were preventing any hope for change.
The timing makes perfect sense to me if wages were dropping between the 70s and 80s and the place crashed in the 90s.
Think about it in terms of generations and generational wealth. If a middle-class family in the early 1980s already had a house and some established wealth (not a lot, necessarily), they can better weather changes in wages and front line economic conditions. Also, when an economy starts to hurt, it's usually the lowest paid and least skilled workers who take the initial hit. In this case, my guess would be that far fewer young people were hired, rather than large scale layoffs of existing workers.
Either way, those people already living there and doing okay continued to be mostly okay, but it drained the prospects of future generations. People at the top of their earning potential in the 1980s will be retiring in the 90s, but because of the change in economic conditions, fewer people are moving up to fill their places. This hurts the overall economy, as there is less money available to buy things from local stores or whatever. The chain effect becomes a spiral and will continue to get worse unless/until something big comes to the Valley to reverse the trend. With tough state regulations and very little incentive to pick the Valley over other parts of California, that seems pretty unlikely.
This is the same pattern that's played out in many parts of the Northeast and the Rust Belt. Old industries shut down, and as the existing money-holders die or move away, the economy sinks over time. Towns don't usually die right after a big manufacturing plant shuts down (unless it's the only major employer or something similar), but a plant shutting down can spell long term doom due to the knock-on effects later.
Sarah Mock’s book “Farm and other F words” on agricultural business practices feels relevant here. Inefficiency abounds with high capital costs preventing new entries in the market. Everything relies on artificially low labor price, which keeps the farm workers poor. Farming in the USA is generally myopic and pessimal, and I don’t think the Central Valley is worse than most other places. It’s just closer.
This is really a side issue, but it's the only thing in this post I'm qualified to talk about.
The 1999 LA Times article said, "First-rate culture is scarce. The state capital doesn’t even have a symphony."
That was true then. The Sacramento Symphony had crashed financially and disbanded. But it soon reformed as the Sacramento Philharmonic (new organization, most of the same musicians) and still exists, despite their beloved music director dying unexpectedly a couple years ago. First concert of the season is a month from now: they're playing a violin concerto by Wynton Marsalis, isn't that an interesting notion.
But the same thing - orchestra disbands, later reformed - has happened in Oakland, in San Jose, and in San Diego, as well as in a lot of other cities around the country (Denver, New Orleans ...)
Also I should add that Stockton, Modesto, and Fresno all have professional symphony orchestras which prosper fairly well. Maybe other cities in the Central Valley do as well (I know there's one that splits its season between Redding and Chico), but I mention those because I've been to concerts by all three some time in the last decade (they were playing programs so interesting I couldn't resist taking the drive out), and they all did credit to themselves.
I think there's a story here the data aren't telling. Give me Fresno over San Francisco any day.
[Me: I'm an environmental consultant (in a niche part of the field) who lived in Davis, then SF for 12 years until 2016. I still work exclusively with clients in California, including a lot of work in Fresno.]
Here's a story that will seem silly to anyone from outside SF but I can't forget it. In 2019 a Fresno client took me to lunch at a strip mall restaurant, and HE LEFT HIS LAPTOP BAG ON THE FRONT SEAT OF THE CAR. It was there when we got back. San Franciscans: Can you imagine such a thing? (In SF, the 4th time my car got broken into the only thing left worth stealing was the jack. So that was taken.)
That same day, the client drove me to see what he considered desperate poverty: a neighborhood in the shadows of an agricultural feed mill. It was smelly and industrial, the houses were small and older, BUT THE PEOPLE WERE LIVING IN HOUSES. I kept waiting for the kind of brutal conditions you see on every street in San Francisco--there is some of that in Fresno, but nothing like CA's coastal cities.
Then we went to a school where we were doing a project. Across the street from the school, a house was for sale. It was small, probably 1000 sq ft, on about 1/8 acre. But it, and its street mates, were well-maintained--lawns were mowed, houses painted. The price? $78,000.
Compare the opioid overdose rate between SF and Fresno Counties: 44 vs 7.
Possibly, what seems like poverty that is "humbling and a little scary" to rich coastal front-rowers, is a relatively pleasant middle class lifestyle to a Mexican immigrant earning 10x the median household of his home country?
Actually, I didn't realize that I was looking at a weird statistic called "Household Income per Capita," which you have to multiply by some number of "people in the household" for the numbers to match up. Thanks for calling my attention to that.
But at the same time, the richest states in Mexico have incomes about 4x higher than those in the poorest states, which are probably more representative of the situation of those coming to the US to work picking fruit in 115 degree weather in the Central Valley.
This is not relevant to your point, but might be worth keeping in mind for future reference:
1) Mexico is a middle-of-the-road country for per-capita wealth. Not wealthy like the US or Denmark or Ireland or South Korea, but wealthier than many other countries (think sub-saharan Africa, Laos, Bangladesh, Pakistan ....)
2) Mexico's per-capita income is roughly comparable to Russia. Really.
3) Both Russia and Mexico have fairly skewed income distributions (not claiming the US doesn't ...) so you have to be careful about averages.
You’re putting a lot of weight on two or three testimonials that said “things are getting worse since the days I was a kid”. You should see if there are *more* of those testimonials now than there were in the 1990s or 1970s, or if they are at the same frequency, before believing that the 1990s were a relevant change.
Mark Arax's work is helpful in detailing some of the bad choices that have had toxic effects on the CV, but many of the underlying issues have been there for a long, long time—way before the 1990s.
In parallel, there is an area of Hawaii that was impoverished and unscenic. I remember reading that Bette Midler(actress) grew up in such an area. Still, there are degrees of unscenic!
I'm going to guess the brain drain is a central problem. And it is the same across much of the USA. Smart people go to college, get good jobs and leave. I kept thinking of "Coming Apart" by C. Murray, if I was any good at writing I would enter it in next years book review.
Santa Cruz County has had effectively zero population growth, is rapidly turning into a (Feudal) retirement village due to hollowed out middle-to upper-middle-class, middle-age demos, of course housing is the main contributor; right now I'm watching the Planning Commission review/edit the final drafts of the years long General Plan / Code update for the County...(lots of "Santa Cruz" urbanized "metro" area is in fact in the unincorporated County)...they just spent the last 40 minutes debating whether a temporary produce sales area should be limited to 3600 (as planning proposed) or 1800sq ft. (Commissioners edit)....proceed by induction
Conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson has written extensively about the Central Valley. His farming family has lived there at least two generations and he gives very good insights about what has happened in the culture of the place.
Wow, there are a lot of comments here. But the story sounds similar to another valley, the one I grew up in: the Ohio River Valley. It also crashed in the late 1990s. The cause there was the litigation against Big Tobacco. Tobacco was a labour intensive crop that also generated a lot of money per acre. My small town of 2000 people had three auction warehouses. A family with a small amount of land 20 acres or so could easily make a nice little supplement to their factory income off the tobacco crop. big tobacco gets sued, the lawyers get rich and the small town Ohio Valley farmers never recovered. This brings up an issue that might be relevant to California: Tobacco, like milk and chicken in Canada was a supply side regulated industry. The farmer had a quota, which created scarcity artificially, but this then boosted price and profits for the farmer. I suspect that supply side quota systems are not in place in the central valley for their crops. This ensures big farms with slim margins. Similar to the central valley, the Ohio Valley also suffers from smog and pollution at higher levels. Coal gets shipped down from West Virginia to countless coal power plants along the river. What would be worth exploring since the date of decline in California central valley seems to be a few years after the political shift from Red State to Blue State is what policy changes took place during that time?
Graphing per capita income relative to California seems a bit off -- California as a whole has grown significantly wealthier in the past few decades, so the change "relative" would be a weird combination of central valley getting worse off vs. e.g. the Bay Area getting richer.
More generally, I would be curious how much this is a central valley problem and how much the same would be true if you took the agricultural parts of any state -- is it just that the poorest parts of every state are worse off than Mississippi? That would point to very different explanations than "what specifically is bad about the Central Valley?"
Alternative theory: The cost of doing business in California is very high, the parts of California that have low labor/capital intensive businesses can absorb this overhead in ways that the poorer high labor/capital intensive areas cannot.
All kinds of interesting observations in that data set:
"More than 80 percent of hired crop farmworkers are not migrant workers but are considered settled, meaning that they work at a single location within 75 miles of their home. This share is up from 41 percent in 1996-98, reflecting a profound change in the nature of the crop farm workforce."
Hmm...I was about to say that, while I liked this essay, the whole "poor region in a rich state" thing is hardly unique to California. Which I think is still true, but eyeballing that list of metropolitan areas by per capita income, my test case - Upstate New York - doesn't come off as badly as the Central Valley. The lowest-ranked city, Rochester, is 156th; NYC is 14th. Still a big difference, but not as big as the difference between, say the Bay Area and Bakersfield.
(Might also be worth mentioning that those figures are from 2010, and LA ranks 86th. Also somehow Chicago isn't even on there? That seems weird.)
Also, Upstate New York, while bitterly cold in winter, is a pretty pleasant region otherwise. I'd rather live there than in the Central Valley. But it is quite poor, especially compared to the NYC area. Maybe the difference between LA/the Bay (especially the latter) and the Central Valley is just the most extreme example of a thing that exists throughout the country. Which would be very on-brand for California.
One interesting comparison...opioid death rate (annual per 100,000)
Fresno County CA: 7
Monroe County NY: 31
I think my argument here is that there are multiple poverties. The poverty of the Central Valley is, (broadly speaking), the poverty of migrant workers greatly outearning their countrymen back home. The poverty of some other parts of the US, like Upstate NY, is the poverty of unemployed white people in despair.
Reading this article is how I imagine it feels to live in a "less-developed" part of the world and read poverty-porn articles from American media outlets. The author "drives through as fast as possible" but feels comfortable making sweeping claims on the "misery" of the Central Valley based on a couple of newspaper articles and a few time-series plots.
"Temperatures often reach 110 F." Maybe going forward we'll see more of that, but by most accounts any day over 100 F is exceptional heat. A typical summer day? Balmy morning, a few hours of dry heat in the late afternoon, and warm, breezy evenings.
"Most people in the central Valley are conservative." The Central Valley is certainly more conservative than CA coastal cities. By area, I have no doubt that the Central Valley is majority conservative. But, since the author is already lumping the entire Central Valley under a single umbrella, I would be curious if "most" actually bears out in the distribution of political affiliations among Central Valley-ites. Lump in Sacramento and Stockton, and, since the author says "most people" and not "most voters," all of the non-citizen farm workers (documented or not).
"Sacramento is the sixth smoggiest area in the country." Based on an article from 1999. I would be curious how Sacramento air quality compares to standards today. "The smell." The author drove by a freeway-adjacent dairy on his way to LA and now knows what a four-hundred-mile swath of the country smells.
"Depressing tule fog." A morning mist that burns off by 8 am most days?
"Severe drought... partly [from] California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities." Coastal urban water demand has almost nothing to do with agricultural water shortages. Going to self-cite on this one (laziness; PhD in water resources engineering; married to a UC Berkeley water resources economist). Lack of winter rain/snow and associated land fallowing in the Central Valley almost definitely impacts agricultural labor demand.
"Everyone who can get out of the Central Valley does." Uh. Yes, most Californians are just dying to move to the Bay to try to eek out a semblance of life where a 2BR house costs $1.5M. If this doesn't reek of coastal elite naivety, I don't know what does. Disclaimer: By most definitions, I am a "coastal elite" (am reading this stack, after all) and, over the last 13 years lived in the Bay for a combined five years (and liked it).
"Drugs and crime have gotten worse." Like everywhere in the country.
The poverty and challenges of the Central Valley are super real. And it's no doubt great to see Bay-Area Californians peering outside of their bubble (walk around SF and survey strangers on what "the Delta" is to get a sense of the magnitude of that bubble). But this article amounts to the kind of naïve, drive-by opinion peddling that undermines nuance and so classically characterizes the self-assured attitudes that drive (similarly stupid) caricatures of "coastal elites."
Yes, yes, yes! Thank you. I am a big fan of our fine author here, but this post drove me mad. Imagine looking out at some of the most productive farmland in the world from the hellhole of San Francisco (former decade-long SF resident here!) and asking what's wrong with them!
And the irony (and, I would smugly argue, the case in point) is a comments section that is now populating with a bunch of people pontificating on problems that they became "informed" on based on an uninformed hack piece.
All good though; better to keep the riff raff out of my happy hamlet of normal humans.
I don't love or hate either SF or the Central Valley. Balls should be called balls and strikes should be called strikes (sort of the ethos here, right?), but make sure you're watching the game if you want to ump it, Scott!
While most of your comment is solid, the heat remark is just wrong. I lived in Chico for two years and it was over 100 degrees -- *signficantly* over 100 degrees -- for most of the summer. I remember walking down the street the week before Thanksgiving and it was 93 degrees. It's effing hot in the Valley.
Fair enough. We benefit from the Delta breeze in Sac. Typical summer day here is 60s in the morning, 90 by mid afternoon (but dry and manageable in the shade; did I mention the trees in this town?), and beautiful, breezy, dry 80s by 6:30/7. Totally underrated. The recent heatwave not withstanding (which was brutal and makes me concerned for the future here).
> But this article amounts to the kind of naïve, drive-by opinion peddling that undermines nuance and so classically characterizes the self-assured attitudes that drive (similarly stupid) caricatures of "coastal elites."
This is the correct take! I like Scott's writing but sometimes they make it so easy...
Scroll up and you'll see plenty of comments from your fellow Central Valley-ites that make it seem even worse than what Scott depicts. You criticize Scott for relying on "a couple of newspaper articles and a few time-series plots", but you don't even have that much to back your own comment.
That would be valid criticism if my point was: "the Central Valley is greatest." But my point was: This is a poor characterization that draws on limited information to make some sweeping conclusions. That kind of thinking, I think, is the opposite of what we're going for in this forum. The Central Valley certainly has issues that deserve attention, but this was a simplistic, heavy-handed hack job.
The main things you write about just make me think the answer is pretty simple. It is a place with a poor economy that attracted a disproportionate amount of poor people. You see this in a lot of rust belt areas too.
You have some former sawmill town, or railroad town that is the regional hub with ~15,000 people. It was while things were thriving 50-80 years ago the richest place with the nicest houses and best people for 50 miles in any direction. Then as the economy falls apart the well off people move out to lakes and maybe a neighboring bedroom community, and what you are left with is a hollowed out core that has the central business district, the cheapest housing in 50 miles in any direction, and not enough jobs for all the low skilled people who move in. unemployment ends up being horrific, and the misery is a lot more concentrated than if it was spread out across 3 counties like it was 50 year before. Plus there aren't the remaining doctors/lawyers still living in town to counterbalance those forces.
Basically the central valley is SF/LA but without all the rich and upper middle class people to balance out the poverty. So even if there is in aggregate fewer destitute people, the average is overall much worse.
A community with 100 HHs, 1 rich HH, 9 upper middle class HH, 30 middle class HH 30 working class HH and 30 indigent HH is MUCH more pleasant to live in than one with 20 HHs 1 upper middle class HH, 5 middle class HH, 8 working class HH and 6 indigent HH, even though the ratio of poor people is the same and the total number of them is lower.
Yglesias recently wrote this about immigration policy:
> The unintended legacy of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was that illicit seasonal labor migration was largely replaced by one-off permanent migration, while the three- and 10-year bans made it harder than ever for permanent unauthorized residents to regularize their status without meaningfully deterring illegal entry.
I'm making no claims at all here, because I don't understand the bigger picture of immigration trends in the Central Valley. But if you think that immigration is part of the story, it's worth noting that there were some policy shocks during this time period.
> This is a weird article. It seems to confirm that things used to be better - nobody would call the Central Valley “the good life” now. But its concerns are smog, sprawl, and decreasing share of agriculture. These seem like the problems of somewhere that’s growing - local NIMBYs complaining that too many people want to move in.
I think these are indicative of a growth in *sprawling suburbs*, not in economic productivity. That is, people build houses to live there. But they commute into the city for work (or did pre-covid), and probably also spend a lot of their time and money there, and suburbs are notorious for costing more than they can ever collect in tax revenue to maintain. It also means a decrease in jobs available for anyone can't drive into the city, because these places tend not to build a lot of transit.
Also the Albion's seed question, are they the same Mexicans as in LA or Arizona, my vague impression is that farm labourers are from the poorer more Indigenous South.
Victor David Hanson, who has written frequently and vividly about the social decay of the valley over the years, had a moving book published in the 1990s, "Fields Without Dreams," about the decline of family farms and the consolidation of agriculture into what are effectively absentee plantations. (The Resnicks are the most famous farmers who live in Beverly Hills, but there are others.) I don't quite recall his specific diagnosis of the cause then, but farming has always been very hard work that kids look for ways to avoid.
As an aside, almost a decade ago there was a ballot measure proposed to split California into six states. Never actually got enough signatures, but there was an interesting analysis by the Legislative Analyst's Office.
If the plan passed, the state that he designated "Silicon Valley" would have been the richest of U.S. states, while "Central California" (mostly the San Joaquin Valley) would have been the poorest. And they are right next to each other, so the economic gradient feels especially steep.
I remember watching VDH talk about it on a youtube video. One thing he talked about was the water being redirected due to the plight of some endangered fish (I think its the 3 spined spickle back). It's the aggregate of polices like that that really hurt normal farmers.
The inability to keep reliable Central Valley Project supplies flowing to farms in the San Joaquin Valley is a real problem, but I think that is mostly more recent than his book, which was already very gloomy 25 years ago!
Like a lot of my friends, we left the Central Valley but we still have friends and family who live there. Always a trip to go back on holidays, because it often reinforces why we left. The CV has some sparkles of industry (Gallo Wine probably is #1), but the drug problems, poverty, crime, politics, lack of attractions, and want of industry are hard to justify staying there in any permanent capacity. That being said, I wish my people the best!
grew up in bako and it was nice. Seems much safer than LA but IDK. It's conservativish though so we must spew hatred cloaked in analysis. "entire economy is based on devastating the environment in various ways", how kind of you! Much of the air pollution is run off from LA plus it's mostly based on wind patterns anyway.
Two scholars I know of have written about this problem eloquently. Joel Kotkin one of the foremost urbanists published: The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (2020). ISBN-13 : 978-1641770941 and has expounded on his thesis at https://www.newgeography.com/
Victor Davis Hanson is a scholar of the classics and warfare. He is also a central valley farmer. He wrote a book "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming" (2003) ISBN-13 : 978-1893554733. https://www.hoover.org/profiles/victor-davis-hanson
I think both of them would agree that policies, particularly "environmental" policies, imposed by the wealthy elites of the bay Area an LA have been enormously damaging to the working and poor classes of the Central Valley. Example: a large proportion of the fresh water coming out of the mountains is being directed to the Sacramento River delta to protect the Delta Smelt a sub species of bait fish, which is supposedly endangered and whose welfare trumps that of humans.
The way the urban elites treat the rural minorities in California (and New York) is a vivid demonstration of why the smaller states are protected by the two senators per state rule of the US constitution and the electoral college, and why they should never agree to give up those provisions.
I read something recently that they're kind of giving up on the delta smelt now. I read Victor Davis Hanson's California essays for years as a long-time reader of City Journal (until they ruined, I mean, revamped, their website you be hip and cool). Joel Kotkin writes for them too.
A disconnect about water. Leftwing/pro-city sources point out they the farmers are the main consumers of water percentage-wise, whereas VDH points put how the farmers don't get enough for, you know, farming.....
Both might be true but you have to really dig into facts.
I feel like this is where you could really get some benefit from high speed commuter rail. Put some high speed rail trains essentially running branch lines into San Francisco and (maybe) LA (the geography makes LA challenging in that regard), and build dense suburb development along the stops of the branch lines for people to commute into the coastal metro areas.
I do think there's a lot to the "plantation economy" aspect of it, especially as people started to stay longer and bring families with border restrictions tightening (much harder to cycle seasonally across the border with a crackdown and high costs for getting back into the US).
LA at least is a big, big place. There's no single point to which you could deliver 100,000 people a day via train and have them all walk to their jobs.
I personally think the Valley is underrated and its diversity under-appreciated. This applies both to its cities and to its rural, ag-based communities. The stories of exploited and impoverished farm labor are all too true—“Factories in the Field” as Carey McWilliams famously described the situation back in Great Depression days. Yet there also are stories of upward mobility and cultural dynamism, such as the celebrated Masumoto and Thao family farms outside Fresno and the vibrant community of Punjabi truck drivers.
There is a treasure trove of literature, music, and other art coming from the Valley and/or about the Valley which has been accumulating since at least the 19th century. I will pick something relatively recent to share, a great track by Cracker from 2014: King of Bakersfield. https://youtu.be/dkvmzJkHx6E
The song illustrates some of the themes you discuss above, Scott, and it captures how love of the Valley is largely a matter of taste. For some, it is a version of California paradise; for others it is a long and boring stretch of empty highway miles. And for all those who know the Valley only from road trips along I-5, know that State Route 99 is significantly less empty. Even better, get off the main highways and explore the back roads. You may be surprised by the beautiful landscapes and interesting people and places you encounter.
As an "urban" midwesterner (KC) engaged to an Iowan but somewhat familiar with Central Valley dynamics, my observation is that the comp to the Midwest is apples to oranges:
1) Yes, a lot of midwest farming is wheat and corn (along with soybean), which entails large corporate farming and all the requisite skill and know how required to do that effectively. Many workers (management on down) are typically college educated. The standard stereotype of midwest farmers being in this category doesn't stick. Many have stable incomes and fall into a normy lifestyle of family, faith and fandom for their alma maters football/basketball teams;
2) The Midwest farmers that are "independent" rely on a small group of local folks (sometimes family) who manage the land. This dynamic leads to leadership supporting them as best they can (you ain't going to let your cousin or daughter's friend she grew up with go hungry and shelterless).
Some do well, some dont. For the former, these are the millionaires youve never heard of ;
3) There are actually a large number of immigrants moving/living in midwest small towns, but they typically work in meatpacking, not ag. Again, these are large corporations with the related benefits. Couple that with the cheap cost of living, it's hard to "fall through the cracks";
4) A commenter stated that (surprisingly to most who have never lived or visited the Midwest) most actually live in cities and thus commuting from small rural enclaves to cities is rare. There's very little NIMBY dynamics there. Metro residents, aside from your occassional trip to a small town over the weekend or to go see family, stay in the metro, and visa versa.
Long and short, this article seems to hit the mark on the proper questions for "what's the matter with the central valley". It DOESN'T hit the mark on a comparison between 2 regions. The Midwest ag dynamic is much more stable (for the reasons mentioned above, plus some I'm sure I missed). Central Valley, not so much (for the reasons this article got right).
“The problem is not that government is doing too much or too little, but rather that it is utterly failing in those key tasks that must rightfully be its focus. For instance, in the Central Valley, the abstract culprit was “globalization”: disadvantageous trade with the European Union, the outsourcing of commodity production to Mexico and Latin America, floods of illegal immigration, and a rejection of the old melting pot creed of assimilation and integration.”
Look up Victor Davis Hanson. He owns a family farm in the valley and has written extensively about the changes to the region.
The standard California maladies of failing to police the underclass are made much worse when there isn't a giant prosperous industry like Tech throwing off lots of spillover wealth.
<i>A pluralist and cosmopolitan would not be ambivalent nor suspicious.</i>
Almost all the self-described pluralists and cosmopolitans I've come across have been ambivalent and suspicious about traditional western culture.
You could say that they're not real cosmopolitans, but the comes a point where this kind of argument just ends up as "But real communism's never been tried!"-type special pleading.
I know nothing really about the area, but something I heard from a Jefferson State activist has stayed with me:
His argument for wanting their own rural state in the northern 1/4 of the state is that California is ruled by the city people. They make laws that are great for city life, where nature is something pretty you want to preserve. Those laws then get applied to rural areas, where nature is something you make a living out of.
As a result, they live in a place very rich in resources, but they're not legally allowed to make a living of those riches, so poverty and misery abounds.
The Central Valley is different from the northern forests and mountains, but I assume some of the same dynamic is a factor.
Long live the great state of Jefferson! Long May the Double Cross wave!
My dad comes from Dunsmuir. I grew up in Lewis county Washington which has a similar dynamic: SeaTac rules the state, and the rest of the state just has to live with their crazy pronouncements. Our neighbor had some very nice hay farmland ruined when it was declared a wetlands by the greenies in Seattle.
I've been in the Central Valley for 25 years, four in Bakersfield and 21 in Modesto. Since I'm here, you might think I'm good with it, and you'd be right.
Weather: It's not as hot as Yuma or Phoenix or [list of other too-hot cities]. It's still too hot.
Air Quality: It's gotten better since I've been here -
Education: I don't really see Davis as genuinely a CV spot even if technically is, but there is a UC school - UC Merced. There are other colleges and universities in the Central Valley, but the area doesn't have high education levels overall.
Politics: "[M]ost people in the Valley are conservative." Relative to California, for sure, hard yes. Relative to everything, I don't think so.
If you look at the counties in the Central Valley, Sacramento's middle-blue, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, and Fresno are light blue, while Madera, Tulare, and Kern are light red. My district has usually been pretty purple, with centrist D's and R's winning, though districts that attach to the mountain areas are red and those that head west get bluer.
This isn't all that new, either - Obama won most of the CV counties vs. McCain.
The LA Times: Look, I still subscribe to the Times, but this story isn't persuasive to me. To their credit, they quoted the late Carol Whiteside, who was one of the people who moved things forward here - downtown Modesto's not downtown (pick Bay Area town), but it's nice. Plus that's 23 years ago.
Per capita income: Cost of living is still much less, but housing prices have really spiked once again. We were ground zero (OK, maybe some areas in Michigan, but...) in the 2007ish crash; we had a wild, obvious bubble. This feels less bubbly. Housing prices are a genuine issue.
Sorting by violent crime rate... yeah, not great. The top five counties include just one CV county, but the next five include three.
Brain Drain: I can only say what I've seen in dealing with really smart kids around here: Yeah, they're out. I helped coach some kids in middle school on a robotics team, and the four strongest kids are all the children of immigrants, all have done well (Stanfordx2, Cornell, MIT, and one of them is now at Yale Medical School, so... yeah, smart, high achieving kids.) They're not coming back, and I don't think there's a good argument that they should. That's a problems for lower education areas.
Commute: I commute eight minutes to work. I have done the long commute, and there are heavily commuter-based towns way far away from the Bay Area. This seems awful. Proposed solutions are outside this comment's scope.
Vibe: Look, I'm not going to form a Jonathan Coulton fan club that meets every Tuesday, and I'm pretty sure there will never be an active Modesto ACT group. I get it. But we've got some culture - even if some of the acts that come through are the elderly versions of long-ago bands, our county has the Gallo Center for the Arts, which is really nice; an arthouse theater; and places to walk and see a lot of birds.
Plus a ton of really cool cars. It's a thing.
The restaurant scene is pretty good. Is it Cambridge? It is not. But I like it here.
Caveat: I also have a job where I don't break a literal sweat and in the summer, we have air conditioning for the human-unfriendly weather. There is real poverty, which I am not oblivious to.
The smog sounds like a failure of government - lots of agricultural regions have bad air quality during harvesting season when farmers burn leftover biomass, but strong public coordination should be able to deal with it. Is the smog present year-round?
The jobs situation sounds like a classic case of cost disease - it's increasingly hard to justify working a low value-added job like being a farm laborer, when San Francisco has tons of tech jobs, or even service jobs like Uber driving.
A few years ago I lived on top of a huge hill looking east over the 580 freeway which connects the Central Valley to the East Bay and South Bay areas. I can still perfectly remember how depressing it was seeing the endless stream of headlights from what seemed like the millions of people making their daily 1.5 hour slog at 4:30 or 5:00 AM from their “affordable” Central Valley homes over the Altamont Pass on their way to what I’m guessing were their blue collar or lower level white collar jobs all over the Bay Area.
I read a book, The Dreamt Land, by someone who grew up in the Central Valley.
Two things that stuck with me:
- many of the farms were (still are?) owned by Armenians
- these owners were all fiercely individualistic. Which sounds great except it means they always refused to engage in any sorts of communal enterprises to popularize a new fruit, or brand a particular variety of fruit, or whatever. And so it was large companies like Pom that took in all the value from pomegranates becoming popular - because they were willing to do the co-ordination and groundwork that the small farmers were not willing to do.
1) Ongoing farmer economic repression by middleman/distributor monopsonies
2) Not just water diversion to the cities, but specific billionaire fuckery - look up the Sinclairs
3) They're still red...in a blue politics dominated state. Talking about red-headed stepchild...
4) Air quality is because of smog blowing in from the Bay Area into the bowl with a small opening. While car tailpipe emissions have reduced, wildfires have more than made up for it.
I’m sure California’s absurd system of senior and junior water rights doesn’t help. It distorts incentives, e.g. against efficient drip irrigation vs just flooding fields with water if you’re senior.
NAFTA happened in the 90s and it had an enormous impact on the lives of Mexican farmers. It drove millions of farmers off their land because they couldn't compete with American farms, which were subsidized and more modern.
Impoverished Mexican small farmers had less opportunity in Mexico, so migration was basically a required to survive, whereas before many had migrated seasonally to make some extra cash.
Tightening of immigration also made it difficult for migrants to return home at the end of the season, so many were forced to stay in the US.
"Farmers said that entire towns are emptying because thousands of small farms have gone out of business. As many as 2 million farm workers have lost their jobs — the vast majority headed north across the U.S. border looking for better pay."
I'd be curious to know: what % of the Central Valley's GDP is exported from the local economy in the form of remittances abroad? This would seem to be a phenomenon that took off around the time period in question. It's otherwise confounding how a huge, successful industry that employs incredibly productive and in-demand employees contribute to conditions that result in such poor communities.
Hay pueblos que saben a desdicha. Se les conoce con sorber un poco de su aire viejo y entumido, pobre y flaco como todo lo viejo.
Allá, de donde venimos ahora, al menos te entretenías mirando el nacimiento de las cosas: nubes y pájaros, el musgo, ¿te acuerdas? Aquí en cambio no sentirás sino ese olor amarillo y acedo que parece destilar por todas partes.
The more recent decline, which you mention in passing but don't expand on is regarding the impacts of climate change and its exacerbation of the mega drought and exacerbating the already existing issues with water resources, not just for the valley but CA as whole and its ability to grow crops in soils that increasingly are being denuded of nutrient and carrying capacity. These in turn impact the already high risk variability of crop production and reliance on monocrops. The Central Valley is being asked to fallow fields at a higher rate now to divert water towards the cities which in turn increases dust, which impacts air quality, which impacts out laborers abilities to work. All of these have knock-on effects towards make the CV progressively worse. More Angelinos and San Franciscans moving to the CV for cheaper housing only compounds the existing issues of an area that has operated at full-extraction levels for decades while kicking the can down the road.
I'm not from California, and I've never visited the Central Valley, but it seems to me that the situation is very similar to the situation in New York. In New York, half the population and most of the money are in New York City and its immediate environs. Upstate is smaller towns and cities, with a lot of farmland and decaying old industries. State policies are set to satisfy New York City residents, but these policies are profoundly unsuited to upstate, and upstate has become old, poor, and rundown. (I'm not from New York either, but Megan Mcardle wrote on these issues many times when she was at The Atlantic and Bloomberg).
Similarly, it seems to me that most of the population, and nearly all the money in California are in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and their immediate environs. Statewide policies are set based on the voting populations of these areas, and these policies have some serious costs. Specifically:
* Land use restrictions make building anything new extremely difficult. I know this is a huge problem in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and any coastal area - not sure whether there are similar problems in the Central Valley.
* Environmental rules have diverted water that used to be used for irrigation in the Central Valley to make rivers "more natural", putting strain in the Central Valley's agriculture.
* Water priorities have sent more of the available water to the cities, further straining agriculture.
* Climate change policies, particularly mandates for renewable energy, have made electricity expensive, making many industrial activities too expensive to operate. For highly educated tech workers or entertainment industry workers, this is a plus - it banishes dirty and noisy industries. But, workers in the Central Valley could really use industrial opportunities.
* California's legal system encourages anyone to become a freelance Attorney General, suing businesses for putative violations of laws pertaining to disability accommodation or consumer protection. This allows multiple people to sue public businesses, such as stores or restaurants, for huge awards unrelated to actual damages suffered by any person, which makes starting and operating a business riskier than it needs to be.
* California's unemployment insurance system seems to be designed to encourage and protect fraud. Warren Meyer (coyoteblog.com) has written about his experience with this system, but to cite one specific case: he had workers who left his seasonal business at the end of the work season, went to Mexico to spend the winter, but claimed to be actively seeking employment in California. When he called the state Unemployment Office to report obvious fraud, not only was the Office uninterested in pursuing the issue, but he was warned that he could be sued for maligning the employees in question.
* California led the nation in instituting a $15 per hour minimum wage. This may work well in the rich cities, but probably has contributed to mechanization in agriculture, while eliminating a potential lure for industrial businesses to move to the Central Valley.
All of these things are either desirable or tolerable to highly educated tech workers or highly paid entertainment workers in the rich coastal areas. They help to maintain the type of communities attractive to these voters, and allow them to signal their virtue by "looking out for the little guy." But, I suspect, the little guys in the Central Valley are deprived of opportunities to make a good life for themselves.
Edit to add: Errr - I hadn't quite read to the end of the post before I started my response. If I had, I would have noticed that Scott touched on several of my points near the end. I do think it's worthwhile to go into more specifics on the issues as I suspect them.
I disagree with the implied premise of "We would expect the Central Valley to be richer than Mississippi because it's in a rich state". There's plenty of evidence of very rich and very poor neighborhoods in the same city! (SF, LA, Chicago, etc.) Any benefit from being in a rich area is clearly worthless when the rich people just don't care about you. It would actually be more interesting and unusual if everybody in the state had their economic situation clearly linked together.
Its functionally not a rich state for majority of people who live in it, but yeah on paper its "rich". By the way Mississippi has the LOWEST homelessness rate of any state.
Typical of urban idiots who don't understand the world to call everybody else poor after glancing at a number on a piece of paper once. This type of ignorance is what has made the average city slicking tardo in the US to pull wieners out for every country which doesn't have a trillion dollar gee dee pee.
“Its functionally not a rich state for majority of people who live in it”
This isn’t even close to true. The median Californian household income is 80,440$, the 5th highest in the United States. The majority of Californians are rich and live in a rich state.
The majority of people who are in California are not rich. If you think otherwise you are brainy-deady. Regardless, $88k is Cali is like $30k anywhere in the midwest, because the average home price is some astronomical price for you tardos.
A state built by prostitutes and idiots who gave up their whole lives (not like they had any in the first place) because some moron somewhere caught a glimpse of gold in a stream. Enjoy living in a desert with no water, enjoy paying huge taxes, enjoy the homeless problem, enjoy paying $400K+ for a house that would cost $50K in the midwest. Literally bums stacking on top of each other.
California was and never has been part of the United States. Anything West of Texas is not the United States, just some freak weirdo manifest destiny Thomas Jefferson rape baby that genocidal federalists created using a black magic conconcotion of chinese slave labour, human scalps, fool's gold, and native american blood, sweat, and tears. One day we will evacuate the Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs out of the Western states then fire bomb the remaining drooling tards into ash just like we will do with Isntreal and Russia.
The idea the typical Western state rat calls them self American without shame, makes me sick.
- poor health, typically skinny fat; avoids exercise
- pale, balding, and low testosterone
- hates donating time/money to charity
- loves taxes
- has a "pet": neutered dog/ cat they trap in the house all day
- loves sodomy
- gay or gay for pay
- anxious and depressed
Having even one of those traits almost gurantees rat like behavior, but having the typical 3-4+ that the Cali -bali -fali -f slur has just proves these people are nothing but a parasite on true Americans. Mexicans are some of the greatest people who fight tooth and nail to come here and they actually produce a net positive for society. Maybe its time we welcomed in the Mexican true Americans and started purging these pale skin freaks over in the Cali lands or whatever gay little state you anal sex loving freaks live in. Atheists are so gross too, honestly they do not deserve a place in this country. Thomas Jefferson is remembered as a raping slave owning coward, just like all atheists will be once the Muslims and Christians unite and create the global religious caliphate, then proceed to burn every single secular book ever made, replacing them with the true history showing the true nature of the world and how its always been a fight between God (swt) and these little pagan jew atheist/ agnostic parasites who produce nothing with their soft homo hands.
Fuck California, I stomp on the skull of any Californian (besides the good christians, muslims, etc. of course).
Great piece. Bet the California Native Americans, East Coast intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson, and the better natures of the people themselves never imagined we could make such a mess of a previously beautiful place. Apply the same tactics to “Anywhere, USA” and we may be close to the root of the problem. Look around at your country in 2022. The destruction is epidemic and it is planetary.
I grew up in Fresno and yes, it gets very hot (there used to almost be a charm to that heat, a dry heat you’ll always hear). The air has definitely gotten worse, the valley traps smog and agriculture adds large particle pollutants. I left four years ago for Albuquerque. It’s still hot here but I’m always glad that we’re 90 something as my mom reports to me it’s 114 or something crazy hot like that. Fresno was a good place to grow up 60s through maybe 2000. Before I left I noticed the homeless were moving northeast. Lots of homeless here in ABQ too, can’t go out without seeing them. I remember the park I once lived across the street from. Eventually you couldn’t walk through it without seeing some discarded needles. Vinland Park and Vinland Elementary. It was a good place to grow up in. I hope it gets better.
I would say this article is not even close enough to the true bleakness that is the Central Valley. Contact Dr. Eric Hickey, a local and renowned criminologist and you will get a picture of the historical crime rates (especially murder), gang activity and prison population (higher than anywhere else on the planet).
Coupled with the other details of your article, a lack of fair government funding and a place of weather extremes, you only touching the surface. Most towns, including Fresno, have an extremely provincial mindset, cronyism, and corruption are laid out in local media.
Digging deeper will only get you an exponentially dark picture and there is no light at the bottom only more of the abyss.
I'm a coastal Californian, but have spent substantial time in Bakersfield and Fresno in the past. Both of those cities have enough economic activity (Bakersfield has a lot of oil & gas executives and big farming families, closely held whether or not corporate) to create some dynamism. Many square miles of north Fresno and Clovis are indistinguishable from Santa Clara or Orange Counties - disappointing in the usual American way - big box stores and chain restaurants, but nothing really lacks compared to the coastal counties. Fresno has a symphony if Sacramento doesn't; Bakersfield has active sister city exchanges with 5 cities around the world. Don't know about fine dining in Fresno, but Bakersfield has quite a few surprises. Just think these places are more dynamic and less monolithic than the article implies.
There are many reasons several of these crops should move to the mid south region along the Mississippi. The California regulatory system creates an added burden. But even without those regulations the natural water supply and climate in the mid south would likely increase net productivity. The decline in California is likely a comparative advantage issue.
This sounds like a generic farm country complaint. It's boring. There are farms all over the place, some with animals living on them and the ones without animals are full of plants which are even worse. You have to schlep into town to get anywhere interesting, and there isn't much in town. If you are young, educated or ambitious, you'll head into a city to see how far you can get. There's a dearth of human capital because of the aforementioned. It's right out of an 18th century novel or a medieval folk tale except without actual starvation.
Who buys all those houses?
I only knew of "Okie" in a Dust Bowl historical context - I didn't realize it was still around, even as a slur. What time period did you grow up in?
I’m not the person who posted about “Okie” but as of the 90s and on, I only heard it used here in the CV as a mild self-deprecating label for “unsophisticated white person” similar to “hillbilly” in Appalachia or “Hoosier” in (oddly enough) the St Louis area. For example, a pile of miscellaneous junk on your property = “my Okie pile.” Someone who speaks in a certain dialect will be gently teased about his pronunciations and will say dismissively, “I’m such an Okie.” Never heard it used in a disparaging way toward others but no doubt in earlier times it was.
I definitely heard it used this way too by my family! But calling someone ELSE an Okie or talking about their Okie accent was definitely not good. This fits the pattern I would expect for a slur though, no? I wonder if this was a farming thing, or maybe different areas had different levels of immigration from OK so different sensitivities? Or different sensitives for reasons I'm not thinking of? Similarly I know parts of WV where "hillbilly" is also a fighting word, but people I knew in CA would use it freely.
Central Valley for the last 25 years, here.
More to say on the whole thing, but in Bakersfield, it was a big deal and a common term from at least the 1930's to the 1950's. The hospital I was working for sent out a heartfelt memo in about 1951 asking folks to be nice to Okies and discussing the prejudice against them. (I found it in an old storage area.)
I knew people who referred to themselves or family members as Okies, but never heard it used as a legit slur. I see others have had other experiences, and I do think it depends on what part of the CV you are in.
> Hoosier
That means someone from Indiana. Nothing about it is self deprecating and St Louis idiots should seek inner happiness instead of outer bigotry.
Hoosier means someone from Indiana everywhere but the St Louis area. In the St Louis area, it means redneck or unsophisticated person, usually applied to oneself “I’m such a hoosier” and not to other people as a slur.
I am a 90’s kid. I can remember fights in school over someone calling someone else an Okie as late as 2006. I once hit a kid for calling me an Okie and my parents got into a fight with the district cuz they didn’t want me punished for what they saw as a reasonable response.
A lot of the houses built where I grew up were built on spec and filled up very very slowly. Housing market crash didn’t help. My family still mostly lives out there, and they are surrounded by retirees (ex cops and teachers) and a handful of younger families that work to support tech infrastructure in Fresno. Them, and truckers. Lots and lots of truckers.
Edit: woops deleted original comment by accident. Posted here for posterity.
"I grew up outside Fresno on a farm that is now thousands and thousands of houses. And I think this might be part of it? Small farms get bought and turned into houses or incorporated into very large corporate farming systems. So, a shrinking middle class.
Also, FWIW, when/where I grew up Oakie was a preeeety nasty slur and it really surprised me to see it used so casually here. Maybe obviously, I am not surprised to hear that it doesn’t carry the same weight elsewhere."
My mom spent a great deal of her childhood in Oklahoma and we still have a huge chunk of family there. I personally have never heard of Okie as a slur — the way my mom uses it, it’s like someone from California calling themselves a “Californian.” Really I thought it was just a fun nickname for someone from Oklahoma. Just the other day my mother remarked, “am I an Okie, I mean I grew up there?” (For context, I didn’t grow up in Oklahoma and she hasn’t lived there in a long time.)
I’ve never heard it used as a disparaging term, personally. But I may just have been sheltered from that. But hearing that it is used in areas of California as a diminutive term like “hillbilly” doesn’t help my pre-existing view of Californians as snobs who are prejudiced against those of us who live in the middle of the country.
I have a lot of family in Oklahoma, and they refer to themselves as Okies, and don't mean it as a slur.
I would also assume this is a California snobbishness thing.
On second thought, maybe calling it snobbishness isn't fair.
I'm an Alabaman (native), and calling someone a Yankee here is definitely a sign of I'll-intent/prejudice/etc.
But it is used somewhat innocently elsewhere.
I grew up in Oklahoma and can confirm that "Okie" is totally benign there but can also imagine it being an insult coming from certain people outside of the state.
Interestingly this just popped up on the Tulsa subreddit today, in reaction to an LA Times article that went up yesterday talking about the term. Seems like the comments thread includes very possible combination from "level of awareness it was ever a slur" and "level of agreement that it's a slur now" https://www.reddit.com/r/tulsa/comments/xl05qq/i_guess_okie_was_a_slur_for_white_people_in/
Well, WRT this thread, there's a Woody Guthrie song"
Hey, Okie, if you see Arkie,
Tell him Tex has got a job for him out in California
I found this interesting, as my mother was born in Arkansaw, and didn't want me to copy her "Okie speech patterns".
But outside of those contexts, I've never heard either used as an insult.
"Okie from Muskogee", by Merle Haggard, was his biggest hit when it came out in 1969. He's from near Bakersfield.
Well, that's recognizing that it is used as an insult, but doesn't seem to be using it as in insult. And, yes, I was aware that it was used as an insult, I just never heard it used that way.
OTOH, I heard that song in coffee housed in the SF Bay Area, and everybody like it. Which makes me wonder how it was taken in places like Bakersfield. Perhaps they heard it as straight rather than as humor.
Ha! This is a real blast from the past. I grew up in Porterville (between Bakersfield and Fresno) and this made me remember in middle school in the mid-late '90s my English teacher used the word "Okie" and a kid in class took offense. We had an impromptu "trial" for the next two days where the class was the jury, and the teacher and the kid made their case and we learned about Okies, and we decided if the teacher was being mean or not.
these days the kid would file a complaint and try to get the teacher fired?
"When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states." -Will Rogers
Third-generation Fresnan here (graduated HS in 92). As best I can remember, I've never heard the word Okie used in anger. 'Redneck' and 'white trash' are used instead. My mother (born in 37) would occasionally describe people as Okies, particularly from her childhood. Her older brother's first wife, for example, was apparently "pure okie." (I think she actually migrated from Oklahoma during the dust bowl, though, so maybe more of an accurate description than an outright slur.) It always felt like a semi-charming anachronism when she used it, which bolsters the notion that the word wasn't in common use.
Same here Wanda. (5th generation foothills east of Visalian--graduated HS in 86) I've also never heard Okie used in anger. That said…
My mother's side of the family came to the southern valley—Delano area—during the Dust Bowl times. From Oklahoma and western Arkansas. They all used the term ‘Okie’ pretty frequently—but often there would be a bit of a self-mocking tone to it. (e.g. “We’re just a bunch of Okie’s driving a broken down car!”
My father’s side of the family (the multi-generational farming family) and my Dad would use the term as a very slight pejorative way. Sort of saying, ‘you’re lower than us’.
Interestingly enough, my beloved aunt—one of the first female school principals in the Bakersfield school district…and Masters degree educated—wants to write detailing her life and the dust bowl struggles…and title it “Okie”. (It was sort of rare in her day to be a highly educated woman.)
Former housemate in Berkeley identifies as an Okie. Says his grandma came from OK. Nice guy, early 30s, working on his bachelor's after a stint in the army. Likes the porcelain pink mug I bought him.
there are pockets of normalcy. i lived in davis for 5 years, and it's fine. the suburbs to the east of sacramento, in the foothills, are OK too. i would say the southern half is more bleak than the northern half, though places like redding and red bluff aren't exactly 'lux'
My wife is from Davis and my uncle lives in Red Bluff. I agree Davis is nice because it's a college town (and I think lots of Sacramento is also basically okay). Red Bluff seems pretty bad according to my uncle's report and what I've seen of it the few times I've been.
I grew up in Red Bluff and can confirm it is bad, and has gotten worse since I left in 2007.
https://www.redbluffdailynews.com/2019/05/31/taking-a-look-at-us-without-rose-colored-glasses/
Any chance you knew the Palubeskis there?
My friend was in Mrs. Palubeski's class. Relatedly, a few months ago I spoke with a retired physician in Portland who graduated from Red Bluff High in 1955. The picture he painted of the town was unrecognizable to me. Poverty still prevalent, but no drugs, little to no violence or crime. He said "bad behavior" was limited to high schoolers sometimes sneaking cigarettes.
Mrs. Palubeski (my aunt) unfortunately passed away earlier this year. Neat that you sort of second-degree knew her, though; I guess it really is a small world.
I’m sorry to hear that. Small world indeed.
Why did the University of California pick Davis out as its Central Valley representative?
I heard once that the weather is milder in Davis than in other places in the Central Valley because cool air off the San Francisco Bay comes up the river valley, but when I aired that notion, several people more familiar with Davis than myself dismissed it and said Davis was hot as Hades.
Some interesting discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Davis#Founding
The site started as a university farm associated with UC Berkeley opening in 1908, evolved into their College of Agriculture, grew and then was designated as a standalone campus in 1959.
I don’t consider Sacramento /Davis in the same league at all -- way better, agreed. The Southern part is truly where the horror is.
I would not call a town with an R1 university normal. It is more the exception that proves the rule.
One theory I came up with on this subject a number of years ago is that the Central Valley is too close to California's paradisiacal coast to hang on to local talent. My example was George Lucas of Modesto, CA (as seen in his "American Graffiti") who decamped for Marin County a long time ago. The Marin County landscape is enough like home that you wouldn't be homesick because you had imprinted on the Modesto landscape as a youth, but the Marin landscape is just objectively better.
Something I wonder about is the extent to which the majority of America gets brain-drained (and creativity drained and so on) by Hollywood, San Francisco, New York, etc.
Andrew Yang said as much. 'Six jobs in six places', I think--finance, consulting, law, technology, medicine, or academia in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC.
Is academia even more concentrated in these cities?
I'd wager that a higher percentage of jobs in Columbus Ohio or Madison WI are higher education than in any of those cities except maybe Boston.
I think there’s something worse than brain drain going on.
It’s not as if the filter for people leaving suburban places for the coast is talent alone. A think a filter that’s just as big, if not bigger, is values.
Do you place a high value on loyalty and tradition? If so, I think you’re less likely to leave your home. Do you place a high value on speaking your mind and believing what makes sense to you, even if it bothers your peers? If so, I think you’re less likely to take or stay in one of those six jobs.
I’ve returned to my ancestral homeland of Ohio and increasingly feel that the last few decades have been marked by a leadership class that is high on rhetorical intelligence and conformity, but low on disagreeabillty and loyalty.
So plenty of smart disagreeable people who values their family and friends more than career paths have stayed put . I’m seeing which of my friends have also returned home from costal enclaves. It may be just my own personal experience but I don’t think it’s a random sample.
Can you expand on why that's 'worse' than brain drain? "Smart disagreeable people who values their family and friends more than career paths" don't sound *so* bad.
I could be wrong, but Mark P's proposed filter sounds more like an explanation for the problems with the American leadership caste than problems with the Central Valley.
I'd think it could be considered worse (depends on the metric) because rather than concentrating intelligence, were concentrating behavior traits which could impact social stability. E.g. make echo chambers worse and further divide america.
That's an excellent point, and may be why we see such a bizarre (to me) conformity among our ruling classes to increasingly bizarre articles of faith and such nasty attacks on the history of this country. I mean, every nation has its dark history but we don't see China endlessly rehashing the brutal imperial punishments and invasions of Vietnam, Korea, Burma, etc. and feeling guilty about it. (They'd have quite a bit of history to go through, given the long time China's existed!) We don't see Italy self-flagellating about what they did to the Gauls.
For my part I'm not interested in family but also very disagreeable (though I suppress it for my career), so my strategy is 'hoard money for the eventual firing').
China seems like a bad example to take because, like most authoritarian states, they're pretty much forced to keep up the appearance of being one irreproachable monolithic entity to keep the government in power. Italy is an almost equally bad example because of how the Roman empire is ancient history: everyone and everything who either benefited or suffered from Roman exploitation has been dead for generations, even on a cultural level. The US is in a unique position here because a) they carry the reputation as being among the 'enlightened' democratic countries, which comes with an expectation of being fair and equitable, b) as a historical entity, they remain a direct beneficiary of the exploitation of the colonial age, and c) there are still people living today who continue to feel the effects of that exploitation.
The closest comparison would be the British Empire and India, and the only reason I don't expect the British to feel the same amount of guilt is that India still exists. That's not to say either are precisely the right amount of self-critical - recent events should make that abundantly clear - but given the historical context, a certain feeling of guilt (or at least the acknowledgement of such) is not surprising at all.
>as a historical entity, they remain a direct beneficiary of the exploitation of the colonial age, and c) there are still people living today who continue to feel the effects of that exploitation
If you're implying that America benefitted from slavery, you are sorely, sorely mistaken.
>The closest comparison would be the British Empire and India
The idea than colonialism was some great boon for Britain is wrong. They spent far more building and maintaining their colonies than they ever got out of them - their wealth came from industrialization, which would have happened sooner/faster if the money had instead been invested domestically.
And India was not made worse off by colonialism. India was a mess before the Raj and they would have likely continued to have been victmizied by foreign powers without the British in charge.
No, I'm saying that the US (or the historical entity that would become it) benefited from being founded on land colonized by Europeans, at the expense of its existing population. That's an understatement; it owes its entire existence to that. But if you have an argument that the colonizers never benefited from slavery, I'm curious to hear it.
I'm willing to concede that the British Empire is also a bad comparison, but I've never been convinced by the argument of "X was justified to victimize Y because Y would just have been victimized by someone else if they hadn't". We also don't accept "this country is a mess and we need to sort them out" as an excuse to occupy them in the modern day.
China endlessly rehashes the bad things done to them by every other nation in the past and tries to make them feel guilty about it. At a national level that's an exact parallel to what's happening in US at a racial level.
Right, but China's in charge. They are acting on behalf of the Han Chinese people and working to further their interests (as they should).
but the blacks in the US are also doing it to further their interests (as they should). they clearly have a strong feeling that the US as currently constituted doesn't really represent them etc. so it's not self-flagellation on their part they are attacking an external enemy that happens to live in the same territory. why liberal whites go along is more debatable but one could form some theories as well (virtue signaling, score points vs. political enemies etc.)
This seems to be clearly a factor at the regional level here in the Midwest. Chicago benefits from being the initial landing place for lots of young college/university graduates of the Midwest's network of good public universities (the Big Ten schools plus a few others), which are quite large -- they churn out a _lot_ of eager young graduates every year both undergrad and professional degrees (e.g. Purdue for engineering, Illinois for IT, etc). That's why the city has sports bars for literally every Midwestern Division 1 football school, more than one for some schools, which for 30 years now have been crammed full every fall Saturday. Obviously plenty of those newly-minted-Chicagoans don't stay -- but plenty do.
Chicago also may see a net benefit, compared to other Midwestern metros, as higher-level professional jobs become increasingly less tethered to place in the Zoom/Teams era of white-collar work. This came to mind just recently when close friends of ours in the South Loop, who'd moved to Milwaukee a few years ago, moved back. One of them is a senior level consultant with Deloitte hence they could live more or less anywhere that has a major airport. They didn't hate Milwaukee at all, but....Chicago's cultural attractions and restaurants and etc turned out to be a quality of life factor that they really missed.
It is horrible. It’s been horrible since at least 1996 when I got trapped here by my spouse’s job. We were going to stay two years tops and go back East. (Long boring story about what went wrong.) The only things you could say for it back then were “Well, the produce is good” and “Houses are affordable, sort of.”
Now the house prices in our neighborhood have doubled in the 4 years since we bought this home, and there’s no way we could now, if we moved here today, ever buy a home in this hellhole.
Who on earth is coming here and why?
“the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave.”
Yes. Every interesting or smart critical thinker I’ve ever met here, everyone who gives even the slightest shit about museums and theatre and music and culture (with the exception of a few people who were born and raised here, so “it’s home”) has been desperate to leave. I’ve met a lot of nice people here over the years. They become close friends and they always leave the state. I’m counting down till I can leave too.
“It’s an acquired taste” indeed. Like drinking antifreeze.
Not that I’m bitter. Antifreeze is delightfully sweet.
Sorry to hear that. Have things other than the housing prices gotten noticeably worse since 1996? Which part of the Valley are you in?
The 559, aka F-No.
Sprawl has gotten worse. The population has increased without an increase in city amenities or services. The neighborhoods in the city have all gotten worse except at the far north wealthy fringes and in its one suburb, Clovis. The bulk of the city is crumbling and looking more like a developing country all the time.
Fresno schools have been abandoned by the middle class and have gotten worse. They were really pretty good when we moved here. Everyone who could afford a house elsewhere moved to “Clovis schools” (meaning Clovis and the aforementioned northern fringes of Fresno because they’re in “Clovis schools”). Clovis schools were always more conservative and authoritarian so we preferred Fresno schools for our kids... not sure I’d send them to Fresno schools today.
Economic security, food insecurity have gotten worse. The numbers of people / proportion of people needing food assistance is worse. The numbers of people who can work one or two jobs and afford to support a family are very small.
Medical care is a joke. Any doctor who cares about health or living in a nice place... doesn’t live here. It’s fair to say that except for a VERY few great doctors who were born and raised here and stayed to serve the community, the doctors here are the absolute dregs, the bottom of their classes.
Throughout my healthy young adulthood it was fine to live here and hope for the best. Now in still-healthy middle age, I realize I might need some competent doctors and a decent teaching hospital someday. Get me outta here.
The corruption of local government, of developers, of scammers who made a pharmacy school and would-be DO school into a cash grab -- corruption is bad here and judging by the recent series in the Fresno Bee has gotten worse.
Homelessness is worse and definitely more entrenched with people living openly in encampments. It used to be confined to certain locations downtown. Now it’s everywhere including my middle class urban neighborhood. “Everywhere” is not an exaggeration: the numbers of homeless people are astronomical. My daughter sometimes had to step over a couple of homeless guys, sleeping in the doorway of her workplace this summer when she went to open up the building. We’re more likely compared to the 90s to be accosted by people asking for money in any given parking lot where we go to shop. Coming out of work today and walking to my car, I was accosted by a guy and I’d stayed late, so no one else was around. In my neighborhood a guy recently started yelling through the open window of a neighbor’s house, asking for spare change.
Air quality has gotten worse -- largely because the enormous wildfires have become an almost annual event. The smoke spreads down from the mountains and fills the Valley and doesn’t leave for weeks. This year’s fire season wasn’t bad but the last two years there were periods where the air quality was so bad everyone was instructed to stay indoors because it was literally off the charts. I spent the month of September 2020 running the air conditioner 24 hours/day (just to filter the air) and ran HEPA filters all day long indoors. We couldn’t go anywhere but sat in the house, still (literally) choking on smoke for a month. My sense of smell didn’t come back fully after that and I have lawyers sending me postcards to try to cash in on that (no it was not covid).
Fires also destroy a lot more homes now.
More friends than I can count have had their lives upended by fire evacuations sometimes for weeks, sometimes unable to retrieve their pets or belongings. A friend at work, pregnant with their first child, lost her firefighter husband to one of these fires. There are no words for what she’s going through raising a child on her own, who will never know her dad.
The fires alone make it a hellish place to live.
In conclusion (ha) this is not a nice place to live. And yes it is worse along many dimensions. I sincerely cannot think of any ways in which it is better since the 90s. None.
Thank you for sharing, that really does sound horrendous.
Have the fires gotten worse, or are there more people in the path of fires ... or more power lines to service more population, that tend to spark fires?
Fires have gotten worse yes, due to extreme drought. Most are due to natural causes I think, eg lightning strikes in very dry remote areas, and a few (like the one that burned down my old neighborhood) are caused by human error (chainsaw accident, or carelessness with a burn pile). At least one recent one was set at a homeless camp. But it’s the dry conditions that result in more of those things burning out of control.
Fresno native here. While I'm not the biggest fan of the area, I feel I have to push back against this a bit. I left in 92 for college and then a career in Silicon Valley, but my parents stayed here and I was forced to move back 2 years ago to help them out. I hated Fresno as a teenager and dreaded moving back, but it's actually been better than expected. There are several microbreweries and craft beer taprooms now, which creates some semblance of a nightlife. The restaurant scene is mostly terrible, especially relative to SF, but there are some signs of life - I suspect it's on the up. The biggest shock has been real estate prices - I never would have thought of Fresno as an expensive place to live - but that's mostly been a consequence of inflation, COVID, and the Zoom revolution. I suspect the coming recession will pop that particular bubble. If not then the influx of Bay Area remote workers can only be a good thing for the local culture and economy.
Summers are brutal and the air quality is terrible - the valley is a cauldron for smoke, emissions and dust kicked up by farming. The homeless problem is worse than it was 30 years ago, but WAY LESS WORSE than it is in other parts of the state. I lived through SF's transition to one big homeless encampment during the 2010's - Fresno's got nothing on that. At least the local PD _try_ to clean them out occasionally. Fresno schools are bad, but they were bad when I was a kid too - the white flight to Clovis started in the 80's. My folks would have moved us there if Edison hadn't started a credible magnet program.
I think the nice areas have grown faster than the bad areas. Yes, you want to stay on the north side of town or in Clovis, but that's nothing new. It's not flashy but if you live in Clovis you've got a reasonably nice, low-crime, affordable (by CA standards) community with usable public schools. A lot of families prefer that lifestyle to scraping by in the bay.
That being said, if both my parents died tomorrow I'd be outta here immediately. But not for anywhere else in California and certainly not SF - the bay has deteriorated more in the last 10 years than Fresno has in the last 30 IMO.
Congrats, you made me defend Fresno in a public forum. Never thought that would happen. Also kind of shocked there's another ACX reader in town. Wanna meetup? There is a distinct lack of smart people to talk to here.
Thanks for pushing back Wanda. I'm reading the comments here and thinking, "Oh come on...it's not that bad!" The Valley is an agricultural-based area--much like other places in the world where their economy is based on Ag. For example: Have any of the commenters here been to The Netherlands outside of Amsterdam or The Hague? Lots of smelly dairies there (just like the area between Tulare and Hanford). Ever been to Cornwall England outside of the summer? It's pretty much a poor ag community.
(I could write a lot more here but it's 11:48 pm here in SW London. Yes, I escaped but I keep wanting to go back for my family, friends, and quality Mexican restaurants.)
Another ACX reader living in Fresno here ;) Moved here in 2007 because of a two-body issue, have been working remote jobs since then. At least I was well-prepared for when COVID hit... My wife loves her job here, and I mostly do not care too much either way, except for housing being way cheaper than if I was still working in-person (good), enjoying the option to go for day hikes on weekends (good), and not having direct flights to places for when I need to travel (bad, especially post-COVID when it seems that every 2nd trip now results in a missed connection).
We definitely need a local meet up then even if it’s just you, Wanda and me.
(Can’t tell if my comment posted. Phone is being weird! Trying again) I’m proud to have made someone defend F-no haha. Yes we should create an ACX meetup even if it’s a small one.
I do think if you grow up somewhere, you tend to like it more, or at least see some positives. Anywhere family is, that’s …something! I’d like it more too if I grew up here.
But… I just came back from a rare vacation, and I was struck by how ugly, barren, trash-ridden, and devoid of all interest (to me) it seems here.
It seems even more horrible after you’ve been away for a week, and I wasn’t really expecting such a strong reaction.
You have no way of knowing that I’m not just “one of those people” who hates wherever she is. I’ve really enjoyed every other place I’ve lived. I do hate it here and can’t wait to leave.
"Clovis schools were always more conservative and authoritarian so we preferred Fresno schools for our kids... not sure I’d send them to Fresno schools today."
There's a kind of self-fulfilling thing going on here...
Of course it is — people sort themselves into groups all the time. I didn’t want to sacrifice my kids on the altar of an authoritarian school system, just so the school system would have a bit more diversity (to crush under its bootheel).
I think he's saying that the anti-authoritarianism you consciously value may lead directly to the dysfunctional school you now refuse to attend. The point being that your value system is either internally inconsistent or naive about its own nature.
My view of it is that I consciously make the choice not to use my children as pawns in whatever political points I want to make.
>Now the house prices in our neighborhood have doubled in the 4 years since we bought this home, and there’s no way we could now, if we moved here today, ever buy a home in this hellhole.
>Yes. Every interesting or smart critical thinker I’ve ever met here, everyone who gives even the slightest shit about museums and theatre and music and culture (with the exception of a few people who were born and raised here, so “it’s home”) has been desperate to leave.
I don't get how these two part can follow one another. If houses prices have doubled, then (assuming you own yours) leaving mean taking a large gain. And if everyone wants to leave, then how come the price doubled, if not because even more people want to come?
Reading between the lines it appears that it's about the type of people who want to, or are willing to, live there. It's hard to come up with a composite of what she means from the limited context though.
She does mention a lack of "cultural" amenities like museums, so maybe it has to do with whether the people moving in care about that or not?
I added some more detail in the comment above if you’re interested. A thriving city takes all kinds of people, all sorts of demographics. There are certain demographics who hate it here, and so there aren’t enough of them.
It’s California. As noted in the article, relative proximity to the coastal megalopoli exerts upward pressure on housing prices. This has been going on since at least the early 2000s. Many in mid-tier jobs are willing to commute long distances just to be able to own their own place b/c its the one guaranteed payoff opportunity they’ve got.
I think it’s partly because residential housing is being bought up by corporations here (but it is happening everywhere) pushing out the entry level buyers and ridiculously raising prices. The WSJ and NYT have written about this in some depth, but it’s an easy google to dozens of articles.
If you’ve noticed, housing has gone way, way up everywhere, including every place we’d consider retiring in 10 or 15 years. Formerly cheap places are now expensive.
I’ve heard some speculation that there are also a lot of buyers here among people, say, from the Bay Area who work hybrid or remote jobs and moved here because it is still more affordable than the BA and otherwise they’d never own a home.
Maybe you could buy a little condo in a sketchy area in the BA or LA, and buy a house with a little yard in a middle class neighborhood for the same income. That’s tempting now that many post-pandemic jobs are remote or nearly remote.
We’ve been hearing about this sort of shift (people from the BA moving in) for a while and I wonder whether it would change the character or feel of this area, but I haven’t met any of them so far. It would make more sense for them to move to places that are a shorter drive, like Los Banos or Bakersfield.
Also they would be a self-selected group of people who don’t care about anything that makes other parts of California more desirable, or at least place a pretty low value on that stuff, compared to a very high value on owning a home.
For what we the reason, locally there are more people who want the available houses. There are bidding wars, whether it’s people competing with corporations or locals competing with newer people. This was one of the last places you could own a home. Now that the prices here are also ridiculous it might be cooling off a bit.
So yes, all that can be true and yet the sort of people I tend to enjoy hanging around — the people with brains or ideas or passions who might tend to make a city an interesting place once there’s a critical mass of them—might desperately want to leave, and leave every time there’s a change for a transfer or promotion elsewhere. Anywhere elsewhere.
If you’re the sort of person — and no disrespect to them — who is content with a 20-minute commute, is not concerned about health or politics or corruption or pollution, doesn’t mind being confined indoors several months of the year (between the extreme heat and the intense fires), and values having Costco and Target and Olive Garden nearby, this might be an ok place.
Surely some people are happy here. As I mentioned a certain number of people who were born and raised here like it. Their friends are here, their families and memories are here. By any of the typical metrics of “what makes a city a desirable place to live?” this place fails on nearly every one.
Why would a corporation want to buy lots of housing at above market prices in a place where everyone is leaving? Ownership shouldn't really matter. Their demand for housing is derived from the demand to rent houses. (Sure, you can come up with scenarios where they buy up an enormous percentage of housing and gain market power to raise rents, but none of these purchases bring them anywhere near the levels you'd need.) Prices shouldn't be rising unless demand is growing more than supply.
I see I really haven’t made myself clear. (1) Everyone isn’t leaving. A certain demographic is desperate to leave. Let’s say …professors who are recruited to tenure track positions at the university, and they thought “California is California right?” (wrong) and they didn’t realize how shitty it was. They tend to want out. Anyone who comes here thinking “affordable part of California “ but they assume a metro area of a million has some nice parks and libraries and museums and “people like themselves” soon discovers they assumed wrong and wants to leave. The people who are simply happy to live close to a Target and Red Lobster and have a short commute are happy enough here. The population keeps growing. That the population keeps growing doesn’t mean it’s not a hellish place to live. It is.
(2) Demand is growing precisely because corporations, all over the country not just here, are buying up residential properties to turn them into overpriced rentals. There was a national news story within the last few months describing our region as the metro area with the highest rising rents. Partly there’s competition for rentals because people can’t buy the homes that have been bought up. The corporations are pushing out first time home buyers who are getting into more intense bidding wars. That tends to push all the prices up. If a crappy 2 bedroom in a bad urban neighborhood has gone up from 200k to 400k in the last 4 years, it means my modest 4 bedroom house in a decent urban neighborhood went from 450k to 900k. It’s ridiculous but true.
The problem with the theory is that to make them "overpriced" rentals, a company would need to control a meaningful share of housing stock. Even in the most concentrated locations, all of these companies together own no more than low single digit percentages of the housing stock. And there are a bunch of them, with housing being incredibly difficult to collude on because each item is unique, meaning there's no way any of them individually has market power.
That isn't to say they aren't aggressive bidders. But the case that's based on anything other than fundamentals is about a weak as you can get. If they are winning, that means people are willing to pay more for rentals than to buy. Given that renting comes with much more flexibility, not tying up your wealth in one illiquid asset, and no responsibility for maintenance, that isn't surprising. That doesn't mean the fundamentals are desirable, and they aren't. But almost certainly because it is hard to increase density and increase supply.
>The problem with the theory is that to make them "overpriced" rentals, a company would need to control a meaningful share of housing stock.
I don't know anything about CV real-estate, but I'm aware of some suburbs for which very few rental houses exist because such suburbs tend to only attract buyers not renters. Perhaps the switch to remote work has caused some speculators to think "There's going to be a big rental house market in Fresno now, and we can practically corner it in the short run if we move now to buy homes."
But I am speculating myself.
I agree with your general economic argument, but there are some subtleties. Real estate is often considered the very best inflation hedge ever, and it sure looks like we are in for a stout bout of inflation. What you can do if you're an investor with a mountain of liquidity (e.g. Blackrock or something) is buy houses at slightly above market rates in cash, and then the value you're getting is owning an asset that will (if you've plotted out your local economics right) rise in value at least as fast as inflation, and pretty much by definition very few assets do that.
You don't even *need* to rent it out, because your interest is in the appreciation, and the carrying cost on a house you bought in cash is low, and really low if nobody even lives there. (Prop 13 really helps with this, since the maximum rate at which taxes can rise is 2%/year.)
Of course, there's no reason *not* to rent it out and get some extra money, but you might easily price it at the top of the local market, or even set a new high, because that way you avoid the more chancy type of renter (e.g. the kind who moves in, won't pay the rent, and then uses tenant-friendly California law to effectively dispossess you of your asset), and if you get a messy or destructive tenant you can cover the cost of repairs more easily. Since rent is just icing on your economic cake, you need not be especially responsive to the local rental market.
I dunno how common this particular scenario is. Not common at all would be my guess -- it relies on a pretty darn good forecasting model for local real estate economics, which is notoriously flaky. But it's not completely silly either.
I believe your explanation of what's happening, but not of why. Corporations buying up homes shouldn't really have an impact on the price of housing, unless people are willing to pay lots of extra money to own compared to renting. Most likely it's the same thing that drives up prices everywhere when combined with increased demand: Laws that prohibit a reasonable supply.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on economics. NYT and WSJ and a lot of other legacy media have covered this topic and they say the corporations are buying up the houses, driving up prices, and creating a shortage, especially for first time buyers who are then forced to —surprise!— keep renting. But when prices for entry level homes get pushed up, all the prices get pushed up.
It seems to me that essentially what you are saying is
- people “like me” hate it here
- plenty of other people like it here (at least enough to pay high housing prices) but they don’t count because they’re not “like me”
Basically just a different version of the not very interesting “the suburbs suck” lament.
Where are the "museums, theatre, culture" etc.? That could once have been said of all of America outside a few legacy places.
It used to be viewed as an opportunity by philanthropists - or with their money, often by their wives or daughters - to ameliorate the situation. Indeed, it makes me smile what was achieved (and, crucially, maintained, through volunteerism) in the way of preservation, library or museum-building, park creation, Tuesday Music Clubs that lead to symphonies, Chatauquas, etc. - in another era, when women supposedly were so trammeled - versus what they achieve now, in their freedom and office jobs.
I appreciate these people - seldom hear them mentioned. "Rich people bad." Well, except for museums. Museums tend to embarrass me. The buildings are always so much more than the naive offerings - but it's sweet, I guess, that people wanted "refinement". I'm reading "The Tastemakers" by Russell Lynes, and it is like a homecoming for me. Some of you might enjoy it, it appears to be a forgotten book. I bought it at the estate sale of a murderer, it was a library copy removed from circulation, no doubt by some dumb lady librarian. It was a huge mistake to leave libraries in the hands of people who took a university degree in "library science". They tend not to have much familiarity with books.
So what are the cultural or demographic changes that now the cry is, why is there nothing on offer? instead of - what can we do to improve the community?
Where I live, all civic impulses begin and end with helping homeless people, to little effect, obviously.
Museums and libraries in a big struggling Midwest city (the ongoing subject of jokes on the Tonight Show) were how I, a poor kid, learned about the world. When I moved here, I knew Fresno was the butt of jokes too (though I’d never seen it) but I thought it would have the amenities and civic pride of at least a Buffalo or a Cleveland. Nope. It’s a wasteland. I’m deeply apologetic to my kids for having raised them here.
And yes, today’s civic impulses begin and end with helping homeless people — to little effect. The homeless are there, in great numbers, wherever you go. To work, to the grocery store, to the drive-thru, taking a walk, even sitting in your own kitchen. You cannot go anywhere without being accosted by or approached by increasingly desperate people. What could possibly go wrong? It’s the reason many people give for leaving CA.
But well meaning people can’t do much when the homeless have no potential jobs that will get them out of homelessness, no affordable housing, no resources really. Not even enough “shelter space” — because having “shelters” for them at night used to be the old crappy solution. Without resources, the efforts to help them have devolved to advocating for them to have their tent cities and encampments approved and protected. At this rate, we can soon have our very own working class in favelas.
The "potential jobs" comment I will pass over, as I assume we are processing what we see visually very differently, and my own eyes may deceive me - but as to the no resources --
In my local area: "The City's budget for homelessness assistance was $68.7 million in fiscal year 2021, $73.4 million in fiscal year 2020, and $37.1 million in fiscal year 2019."
This is encroaching on the size of the budget for such things as parks - and our parks are famously badly-run and almost entirely given over to a couple non-profits to try to maintain.
City has purchased half a dozen hotels in the past few years, and - surprise! - is finding it's going to cost a lot more than they thought to ready them for occupancy, and to run them. And that's not even counting the cost of repairing the one, not yet opened, chain-linked, that the homeless got into "unauthorized" and ripped out the wiring and the ice machines and all the fixtures.
There will be an article about this episode in, oh, fifteen years - what went wrong? They will turn out to have helped fewer than 200 people; or they will turn out to be hellholes and there will be lawsuits. Hopefully there will still be something called a "reporter" in order that this tediously-predictable story can be written.
A friend of mine visited Cleveland because her son was doing an internship there - did NASA have some presence there? - and she found it lovely. The gulf between places that were developed before and after the auto is just so great, that a place that's static or even dying, can still show better than a sunbelt boomtown. She commented also that it felt American - and she's no hater like me.
I adore Cleveland. The fact that it got so much hate and was a great place with lots to do and lots of civic pride blinded me to the possibility that other cities that were the butt of jokes, like Fresno, might be true hellholes.
A big +1 for Cleveland from me. Pretty much every mocked East Coast/Midwest city I've ever visited to has exceeded my expectations - Philly, Albany, Cleveland, etc. Whereas in Arizona, California, etc. every city disappoints contra expectations, with a few notable exceptions. Aside from the weather, alas, which is why I can probably never live in the Midwest even now as a near-fully-remote tech worker.
You really have to grade on a curve as you go west. The whole comparative advantage of cities is the emergent network effects from the density/concentration of people as producers and consumers of entertainment, art, food, etc. ("Culture"). By enabling sprawl widespread car ownership truly destroyed America civic culture by further atomizing a national culture that was already inclined to be highly atomized thanks to its strong libertarian streak.
Yes! And don’t forget Pittsburgh. Another good one that everyone disses.
The weather is the problem yes. Imagine some great Midwestern style cities plunked down into CA. That’d be the stuff.
Albany’s unfortunately really starting to struggle — the same problems that are pulling down the rest of Upstate NY are starting to hit the Capital District too. (I’m a native, although I moved away a few years ago.)
It’s still physically beautiful, has interesting things to do, and is a pretty nice place to raise a family, but it is hard to get ahead now. Not-great wages and high taxes are not a good combination. It was the winters that finally wore us out, though.
I live on the west side of cleveland, and yeah, it punches way above its weight.
Over the medium term, let's say a 50 year timescale, the Great Lakes metros may be gaining a new competitive advantage. As the climate shifts (e.g. the median winter in the Chicago/Cleveland/Milwaukee/Detroit/Toledo/Buffalo/Toronto band is already noticeably milder now than what my siblings and I grew up with) the weather problem gets relatively smaller. And meanwhile those metros are sitting on the world's largest source of surface fresh water, which thanks to the Clean Water Act and some other things is in much better shape than it once was.
There's still work to be done on that last point (Lake Erie and Green Bay have new algae blooms, creaking old city sewer systems in both countries still dump "CSO" waters into the Lakes too often, etc). But compared to the Great Lakes of 1972 or 1962 or 1952 that huge water system is in terrific shape now, and the needed additional work is not unimaginably costly. Meanwhile about 15 years ago the region's U.S. states signed, and also got Congress and the POTUS to put into federal law, a strong interstate compact which is a serious barrier to any new "pipe it down to the parched Southwest" type schemes.
So if the climate keeps changing in the ways predicted, cities like the above may be set up for some relative competitive gains over the next couple of generations.
I think you hit the nail on the head: car centric development coupled with other factors has led to an unsustainable death spiral that is corkscrewing downwards. Between the SSC post on cost disease, Chuck Mahron at StrongTowns.org , Crabgrass Frontier, and Wendell Berry essays, that’s what clicks for me.
At the state level, property tax increases are capped, so there is less incentive for infill development. Because of that cap, there are limited ways to fund the amenities that other established cities take for granted. Because of that cap, the only way for municipalities to make up shortfalls is to encourage more single family sprawl development, which allows for delayed pain, since the infrastructure won’t have to be serviced for another 30 years, but the boost in tax revenue comes now.
Next up comes the fact that single family housing exists in a system of distorted incentives that make it more affordable than it should be, and therefore more prevalent than it should be if it was up to market forces. Many people in CA can’t afford a single family home, many can’t afford a single family home in much of the country, but there aren’t any other options in car oriented suburbia. A family may be able to buy a duplex if they can get halfway decent tenants who pay rent. Rent may be reasonable in an area with lots of duplexes. Folks might only need a 1br apartment or studio, but if they have a hard time managing with roommates, then a whole house might not be an option.
Finally, all of this is possible due to cars, and that cars make necessary. Cars that pollute and contribute to smog. Cars that cost a lot of money in terms of taxes, insurance, fuel, maintenance, and depreciation, never mind principle and interest. $5000 a year minimum for reliable transportation in a place that is too decentralized and sprawling to function any other way.
And the brutal part of me also wants to chime in on the homelessness situation in one more way: above 90 (heck, above 80 depending on the humidity) is uncomfortable without AC, but below freezing is lethal without some way to stay warm. Many rust belt cities were built at a more human scale, have less property pressures, etc., but they also have winter, where being out of doors can get you killed. Now that CA summer includes fire season, particulate respiratory issues, and such high heat indexes (urban/suburban heat island effect anyone?), that sounds like the lethal season to be out of doors comparable to the northeast.
> learned about the world
To your own detriment. Only a fool would think increasing knowledge just to increase knowledge is a net positive. Netting positive, for the fisherman means fish for the intellectual means nihilistic depression and paraphilic urges. You made a decision for which you though was better and have shown your hand to be empty of cards of virtue.
What an interesting point of view, ha
>I bought it at the estate sale of a murderer, it was a library copy removed from circulation, no doubt by some dumb lady librarian.
What is the point of this phrase other than to signal hostility to women?
From long years of work experience, hostility to women librarians - by Jove, you've got it!
Banned for this comment.
How can you be unable to leave if housing prices have doubled? Sell the house at a 100% profit and live off that.
My vague impression is that California agriculture tends toward the plantation variety with a few big landowners and a lot of poor laborers, often migrants. California crops tend to be more labor intensive than Midwestern crops so there is a big push to bring in cheap labor.
In contrast, a better sort of rural area like Sioux County, Iowa has a higher percentage of owner-operator farmers. The downside of ultra-mechanized Midwestern grain farming is you don't need many people at all, so many counties are gradually depopulating. On the other hand, the quality of the remaining farmers is growing (the farmer usually leaves his farm to his most productive child). I was looking at the kind of education that Midwestern farmers tend to have lately, and it's impressive: often an undergrad STEM major in agriculture and then an MBA-like business degree. The intellectual demands of being a farmer these days seem pretty similar to being a corporate vice president.
Well, but in Iowa or Nebraska, you absolutely cannot get elected to the legislature or become governor without exhibiting substantial attention to and respect for farming. Just think of Tom Harkin, the political genius who engineered an entire nation using 10% gasohol by mandate to ensure a high price for corn forever.
In California? I can't think of the last candidate for Governor who even seemed to vaguely give a rat's ass about California agriculture. Maybe CA reps and senators from the Valley itself do care, but they are swamped by reps and senators from coastal areas for whom California agriculture (or even the Central Valley in general, both culturally and economically) is Mr. Rochester's mad wife, to be locked in the attic and never spoken of lest something dreadfully embarassing be said openly.
Dave Barry wrote about how any politician planning on running for President had to spend the year before the Iowa Caucuses wandering around Iowa promising that when he is elected he will set up an altar to corn in the Oval Office at which he will worship corn two hours per day.
Yeah, being a Midwestern farmer requires an extremely varied skillset. You need to know how to grow crops on a large scale with minimal labor, maintain and repair farm equipment, manage a temporary workforce in an area with a labor shortage, have a solid understanding of the extremely competitive commodities market, maintain your social standing in an insular small town, and even do some physical labor yourself.
This matches my experience in Iowa as well. My roommate freshman year at the University of Iowa is going to take over his father's farm in a decade or two. To pass the time he got an BBA in finance and is going to law school at Iowa now.
Steve--concerning your vague impression of CA ag being the plantation variety. Yes and no. The west side of the valley you do see lots of very large farms. (This was because when they started creating hydroelectric dams in the Sierra Nevadas, the lakes/swamps on the west side dried up. Farmers like Boswell bought the land for really cheap.) On the east side of the valley, you tend to see more small and midsized farms. Highway 99 is a rough divider of the east/west side farms.
Pollution is a bigger deal for agriculture than for urban industries. It's a very serious issue in Central Valley. Contaminated water reduces the water supply already in drought conditions. I believe most of the crops grown in Central Valley are water and fertilizer intensive as well which creates more pollution. These inputs have also been going up in price squeezing agricultural profits (which have been bad for a while now anyway).
To make matters worse California has responded in its California way. Lots of bureaucracy and blaming farmers and unfunded mandates that have driven people out of business. Most major agricultural states are red to purple and so farmers have political power. The other big exception is Illinois but Chicago doesn't dominate the state the way the various coastal cities do in California. So in a real sense I think the issue is a lack of political power among farmers. (Which has the advantage of co-varying at a glance: California's deep blue turn and the 1990s decline happen around the same time.)
Other states have overcome the challenges of hard to automate agriculture or large influxes of immigrants or pollution/water issues. Florida, for example. Though Florida has powerful farmers who, among other things, advocate for anti-pollution measures and measures meant to shore up the water supply. California just doesn't have a political economy that cares about the countryside.
Unsurprisingly this leads to weak policy. I remember hearing one California official saying her primary priority in the area was to address race and gender gaps in farming. Which is an actual issue but isn't going to do much for the people already there. And it's fairly easy to understand why she made that choice. This woman has a much brighter future in politics if she can burnish her anti-racist/feminist credentials than if she delivers for a bunch of Republican voters.
The argument I've heard is that the California legislature enjoys passing innovative regulations that drive up the cost of doing business but the enormously lucrative businesses of coastal California usually wind up being able to afford in the end; the Central Valley can less afford coastal luxury legislation. I've heard the same argument for upstate New York being weighed down by being in the same state as New York City.
On the other hand, presumably there are big advantages to having major tax generating regions in your state, so I can't weigh the tradeoffs.
I sometimes legit wonder if there is somebody employed in really thinking about whether there is going to be enough arable land and people willing and able to grow our food in the future (assuming we don't go back to just eating bread).
I feel like it's entirely possible given what we've seen of shortages recently, that this could come as a total surprise, and the energy would go to explaining to us why it was *not really happening*.
The US grows a lot more food than it needs, so even a reduction doesn't have to lead to a famine here.
And the US is pretty inefficient in resource usage for some crops (e.g. alfalfa and in the central valley; corn --> ethanol) so if, as a society, we have to choose between famine and ceasing to be idiots we MIGHT go with the cease to be idiots route.
The places to worry about are Egypt and Egypt-like countries.
Egypt has a population of about 100 million and about 12,000 square miles of arable land. And Egyptians live in cities on some of that arable land. This works out to being roughly the equivalent of trying to both house and feed the entire 330 million US population ... in Iowa.
If you care, I have a (very) slightly longer write-up here: http://mistybeach.com/mark/#Egypt_Designed_for_Famine
There is an obvious sense in which we grow more food than we need - given what and how we choose to eat, and how hefty most of us are; I'm sure you mean something different though - that we export a lot of food, or discard it ... I am interested in your post and will look at it for sure.
I have seen the produce in my local area - go from being sourced from the USA (some from my own state) and Mexico, to coming from Peru and Chile and South Africa and of course, Mexico. Citrus from California or Florida is now a treat. Citrus from my own state is mostly a thing of the past. So I naively assumed if we are eating the produce of South America, we were not exporting those things ...
But if we lose the Central Valley to housing for immigrants, say - can we grow those fruits and vegetables in Iowa on grassland? Or do we just get all our produce from Mexico, etc.?
The US is a net food exporter. But Ricardo's comparative advantage still applies so we don't grow everything we eat. "We" might lose some fruit and vegetable production if the central valley goes away, but "we" won't starve. And one choice would be to reduce rice and alfalfa production there and move that land over to fruits and vegetables.
Does this reliance on produce from two thousand miles away, make our transition to renewable energy harder at all?
Now that I think about it, the tons and tons of Red Delicious apples that are grown annually in order to end up in the landfill - at least they got to go to school for awhile - not even fed to pigs, are a good sign that we will have enough to eat, and idiocy is costless.
California valley isn't land limited,it is water limited. there is way more land than can be outfitted with water needed for agriculture so there is plenty of space housing could be built, but water can also be a problem for cities and when they have the power and money they end up taking it from agricultural uses. So water is the limiting factor on agriculture.
Yes ... but - not speaking of California, where I've never been, well, except for one weird Thanksgiving in Palm Springs - but in my state, the cities that are metastasizing into a single mega-urban-region - triangulate about some of the best soil we have. And where soil was not as good, it has never been replenished since the goats took it all.
Land. Water. Soil.
And that doesn't even begin to touch on what is owed to wildlife.
I guess Egyptians are a resource the world particularly values, above other animals.
"I guess Egyptians are a resource the world particularly values, above other animals."
Revealed preference for the win!
I've heard claims that Egyptian agricultural productivity has actually *declined* significantly since the 1960s because of the Aswan Dam stopping the annual Nile floods. Without natural silt, Egyptian agriculture is now heavily dependent on fertilizer.
On the other hand, other people say the dam has been good for agricultural productivity on balance by preventing catastrophic droughts and floods
Wait until China - I mean, Ethiopia - finishes that dam they're building on the Blue Nile.
The change is due to a Supreme Court decision. It used to be that Calif. Senators were elected on a scheme that gave each county a representation proportional to its land area. The Supreme Court decided that this was invalid, as states weren't ever really independent (despite the fact that Calif, like Texas, once was). So now they're elected based on population. And most of the population lives in cities.
I'm not going to decide whether this was right or wrong, but it changed the Senate from pro-agriculture to pro-urban. (The fact that the agricultural areas always voted conservative is, of course, purely a coincidence.)
You're referring, I assume, to "Baker v. Carr" and its followup ruling "Reynolds v. Sims". Those rulings were in 1962 and 1964 and were based on the 14th Amendment which became part of the Constitution well after California and Texas became states. Whether any state had previously (prior to that amendment) been an independent republic wasn't relevant to either of those rulings.
(And honestly its hard to take seriously the idea that the situation prior to those rulings, in which state legislative districts would vary in voter population by literally 100 to 1 or even higher ratios, could continue.)
Yes, the California legislature used to be highly skewed toward farm counties. In 1960 even the emptiest rural county got one state Assemblyperson while giant Los Angeles County got only three. Then the Warren Court issued its then famous One Man One Vote ruling requiring updating of district maps. State legislators (elected under the old districting) went nuts and tried to organize a Constitutional Convention to overthrow the ruling. But they didn't quite get it done in time and soon state legislatures were full of new legislators elected under the new districting rules, and they liked their new districts just fine.
So now almost nobody remembers the whole brouhaha.
They tried to organize a national constitutional convention and overturn the 14th Amendment? And thought it might be doable sooner than the next legislative election? Wild....a constitutional convention requires 2/3rds of the state legislatures petitioning Congress to call it. (And then any amendments passed by that convention must be ratified by 3/4ths of the states.)
How far did the California state legislators get with that?
As as Central Illinois resident, Chicago definitely dominates Illinois politics, but you're right that it's probably not to the same extent. Illinois blue-state politics are also a lot more moderate than California's (with a lot of corruption layered on top). And as others pointed out, growing corn, soybeans, and pumpkins takes a lot less labor, so our agricultural areas have just lost population instead of grown poorer (although they're still pretty poor).
I also live in Central Illinois. Another element to consider is that the federales subsidize commodity crops much more heavily than fruits and vegetables, so those farms' income is more stable and predictable and flows through to support other businesses in the small towns and villages. We just lost the oldest organic truck farm in my area earlier this year. Even though fruits & vegetables are precisely what we should be shifting our diet towards, the government's interest in having grain to export causes it to support those farmers.
I highly recommend reading Victor Davis Hanson's books for more on this topic!
Seconded. He has his politics, which you might disagree with, but I've come across and read his articles on California for years; they're very dark and sad, but he lives out there and has a farm there (or did, at least), and so it's a first-hand look. I haven't read any of his books though.
Here's a short version of his analysis https://www.westernjournal.com/victor-davis-hanson-california-voters-make-major-decision-stake/
He's a classics professor with a Stanford degree, but went back to run the family farm. in the Valley (3rd or 4th generation)
I would add, that even with the best of liberal intentions by the Eloi, one-party states run by corrupt politicians go bad fast, and the non-elite (Morlocks) get the worst of it while the coastal elites stay richer.
I'm a Chicago native who lived in the East Bay (Berkeley & Oakland) for the past 35+ years, working in biotech & SV. Last year, we moved to Colorado.
I can guess how most of you guys vote. If you are voting for incumbents in the current situation, you are doing it wrong.
This is the correct take.
(-Fresno Native)
Excellent recommendation!
Any info on land ownership in the Central Valley and whether patterns of land ownership have changed over time? Just wondering if Georgists have any insights here.
Property rights in water are not very sophisticated in California, so water gets used for wasteful purposes. At some point the politicians grandfathered in everybody who was using water at some point in time: 1915? So a number of farmers have inherited the right to absurd amounts of water which they use on water-intensive crops like alfalfa, cotton, and almonds.
Likewise, in the Southern California low desert around Palm Springs, you are allowed to use whatever water you pump out of the huge Ice Age aquifer, but you aren't allowed to sell your water to Los Angeles or San Diego, so the hot Coachella Valley has a ridiculous number of golf courses that are kept green even in the 112 degree summers.
Nobody wants to bother with the giant political struggle it would be to rationalize water rights, although they apparently did do this in Australia in the early part of this century due to a huge drought.
I don't know how exactly the water rights tangle ties into the Central Valley's more general problems, but it probably means less investment: nobody expects the water supply to get better due to more rain in the future, but nobody expects the politicians to take water rights away from wasteful uses either, so the future for those not grandfathered in looks dustier and more expensive.
As someone who grew up in the CV, I would just like to point out that, under a rational water rights system, almonds would almost certainly be one of the few ag uses to remain. They are lucrative and don't grow in that many places. Yes, they use a lot of water, but they produce a lot of value that can't easily be produced elsewhere. What would go away is rice, row crops, dairies, alfalfa, hay, and almost all the other crops that can be grown in dozens to hundreds of places in the US or the world.
Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine about how almonds get singled out as being particularly wasteful when they are one of the very few uses of the water where, if you had to pay a rational price for it, would still get paid and used as is. Although probably the recent (ish) switch from flood irrigation to drip irrigation would probably have happened sooner than it did.
Thanks. Excellent points. Personally, I eat a lot of low carb products made with almond flour substituting for wheat flour, so I especially shouldn't be complaining about almonds.
It's such a shame to read about those groves being torn out. Fruit and nut bearing trees are multi-generational investments.
No, they aren't multi-generational. Thanks to federal tax laws, most orchards in California get torn out every 20 years or so and replanted. Plus, after a certain point, most fruit trees become less productive as they age.
My grandparents had an almond and walnut farm in Ripon near Modesto. The time I spent there was the most idyllic childhood imaginable. California's problem's are well publicized as are the problems of rural agricultural areas. And city people usually have a reflexive distaste for a lifestyle they don't understand. So I don't think there is any big mystery here.
This x 100, as most of the comments show.
Agree as well, as someone who grew up in Old Fig Garden in Fresno, on the street that transformed into the 1.5 mile long Christmas Tree Lane every December, 60 ft. tall Deodor cedars on either side of the street lit up for the entire stretch, alongside lighted homes with cute displays out front, old custom homes from the 1900s on leafy 0.5-1acre lots that still sell for $300-400/sq ft....three generations of families living in same/close by neighborhood...i should write a longer comment....
Agree Katherine. I grew up on a farm east of Visalia. Very idyllic. A great way to grow up. I also love how culturally diverse it is and we all got along pretty well. (For example -- Go to a church on Sunday in the Valley--there are a lot of different colors there. You don't seem to see that in other parts of America.)
Yes--it seems most of the commenters here are city people that just don't understand. The issues that rural ag areas struggle with also happens all over the world. You're correct--no big mystery. I've been to farms in Cornwall and the North of England and, surprise surprise, they are dealing with a lot of the same issues as the Valley. In fact, Jeremy Clarkson (the Top Gear BBC show guy) has made an entire series on Amazon Prime Video about his struggles ('Clarkson's Farm')
So skin color = culture?
I'm curious what it is about almonds that makes them so hard to grow in other places. Why is there nowhere in the world with both the right climate for almonds and readily available water?
I'm no expert, but I think they are just particularly finicky about the climate. And the climate that they need generally means "not much water". They are grown other places such as Australia and Spain, just not many (and most of them are also relatively dry),
Huh, nice. growing up as a kid I had grandparents in Perth, Australia. They sent us a tin of almonds every year.
they need cold "chilling hours" to produce almonds but they also can't be too cold because they die, and they can't have late frost because it will kill the flowers and then produce no almonds, they are from a Mediterranean climate which is dry summers so they can't grow economically in the wet south east USA because the fungal and other pest pressures are too high, they also need a long growing season with sufficient warmth so they can't grow in the farther north areas like Washington reliably productive etc....
pistachio's and olives are similar.
If it makes you feel better, my "go to" example for insane crop choice in the central valley is alfalfa rather than almonds :-)
Rice is always my goto.
That said, I find it irritating that any American state, much less a desert one, spends so much of its water on crops that are largely used overseas. 70% of California's almonds go international and something like 45% of rice. It's ridiculous. Let other countries make their own rice and nuts. At least alfalfa goes to California beef--although you'd think they could find somewhere else to grow it.
"At least alfalfa goes to California beef..."
From a 2014 National Geographic article:
"Today, at least 12.5 percent of alfalfa grown in western states is exported, and in some areas like California's Imperial Valley—just across the Colorado River from Yuma County—that figure grows to a full 50 percent."
It is difficult to tell how much overall gets exported, but alfalfa doesn't command a large price and does consume a lot of water. If the farmers were paying market rates for the water they would be growing less water intensive crops. But I don't expect to see a functional water market in California any time soon.
There's a huge pecan orchard in West Texas (!). Thanks to a spring, one of only one or two still flowing out there out of dozens. But thanks to Texas' right-of-capture approach to water, that orchard - while it may currently be taking somebody else's water - may one day find its water has been pumped away as well. Fortunately there is not much oil and gas production in that area, or the pecans would likely be toast.
Everything feels very tenuous now.
I used to love California dried apricots. But that industry dried up. So much better than those Turkish ones - much more intense flavor - and something about the way they halved them before drying.
Not starving here! But also lost one of my regular snacks, for good, it seems!
Huh, I never quite put it together, but yes, I preferred the halved apricots as well. My grandparents always made their own dried fruit and nothing will ever compare to the golden raisins they made. That is still one of my favorite things about the Central Valley, the rich variety of produce you don't get in the Midwest lends itself to stellar roadside farm markets. We get a little bit of that here in Western New York, but we don't have California's growing season, of course.
Western NY? Talk to me. I live in Java Center. Hosted a few meet ups. The corn is great here.
I'm in Rochester. Grew up in Denver, lived in Grand Rapids, MI and Durham, NC before this, still getting used to it up here but it is beautiful country.
The same argument could possibly be made about clementine type Oranges which seem to be only grown (commercially) in the US in CA...
There's also some guilt about the stressed-out traveling bees used to pollinate the orchards. I mostly stick to pecans - I've not been told how they're pollinated.
I _believe_ that pecans are wind pollinated (I know that walnuts, hazelnuts, and pistachios are). As for guilt, while almonds certainly are a large user of domesticated bee pollination, they are by no means the only one, and if are to feel guilt about doing so, then our diets are going to have to be much more restricted than just veganism.
From the FDA:
About one-third of the food eaten by Americans comes from crops pollinated by honey bees, including apples, melons, cranberries, pumpkins, squash, broccoli, and almonds, to name just a few. Without the industrious honey bee, American dinner plates would look quite bare.
It's not something that bothers me personally, though.
Sorry, I was unclear. I am happy for honey bees to do the work of pollinating. There was some suggestion - it's been a few years since I read about this - that the industrial-scale trucking of honeybees from place to place to e.g. almond orchards, was contributing to colony collapse disorder (if that was the name for the honey bee disease). I am certainly not suggesting that naturally-occurring pollinators can do the job. But it is something we may have to face.
As far as I understand it, colony collapse is not really just one thing, and it has many contributing factors, one of which can certainly be long distance travel. However, the media coverage of CCD has been _vastly_ overblown. Honey bees are a fully domesticated animal that is in no risk of extinction or even great reduction. CCD is a disease just like many others in livestock. We certainly try to minimize hoof-and-mouth diesease in cattle, but no one worries about them going extinct or us not having enough beef.
Beekeepers should worry to the extent that it increases their costs by needing to increase colony production to keep up with increased over-winter losses.
Most of the media articles I have read on the topic completely neglect to mention that honey bee populations/hive numbers have increased over the past several years (amid all the CCD hysteria) while also conflating these losses among domesticated bees with the truly worrisome population reductions and extinctions among the many, many wild bees (some of which also perform valuable pollination services that are only imperfectly replaced by domestic honey bees)
In summary: I don't think anyone other than beekeepers should be worrying about CCD. It's a real thing but not one that poses a significant risk to agricultural uses of honey bees anymore than other livestock diseases do to their respective hosts.
Speaking of Australia, one of things we did was build some desal plants to meet water demands. Why can't Cali do that?
Large land grants from the Spanish-Mexican era were preserved after California became part of the U.S. There was a lot less homesteading in California's agricultural areas than in the Midwest and Great Plains.
Excessively large land grants by the King of Spain remain a social problem to this day in Latin America. I presume in contrast, that with the vast land grant William Penn got from the King of England, Penn came up with a plan for it to be broken up so small landowners could get a piece of Pennsylvania.
If you took the most rural part of *any* state (or perhaps the poorest region of any state), wouldn't it almost always be poorer than Mississippi? That's what I'd expect if (say) rural areas are generally poorer than urban parts (at least in nominal terms—the cost of living may also be lower).
The Central Valley's population density (155 people / mi*2) is about the same as the median US state (170), so I don't think it's unusually rural. It also has three of the US' fifty largest cities, and 3x the population of Mississippi, so I don't think it's so small an area that we're slicing things up in a statistically unfair way.
According to Wikipedia, the density of the Bakersfield metro area is 110/sq mi; Merced -140; Hanford - 110; Madera - 73. Fresno County is 110 (though the Fresno metro area includes Madera, for some reason, and the numbers seem off) . Those are in the southern parts. In contrast, Stockton is 550 and Modesto is 360 (a chunk of that is commuters to the Bay Area). The Sacramento metro area density is listed as 110, but it extends all the way to the Nevada border, so a large part of it is not part of the Central Valley.,
Eh you can't really compare "metro areas" since they seem to include the entire counties and e.g. a large part of Fresno county is the Sierras...
Fresno-Clovis "city" is basically a square 11x11 with a population of about 600k, so the density is around 5,000 people / sq. mile
I still think this is right - not that the comparison is unfair, just that gradual sorting into good and bad areas is an ongoing trend. There are some places that just attract all the good people, and then more good people, and then more good people. California has two (or more) of those, and so that's where everyone goes if they can. That leaves the valley for the losers.
Well, I would avoid using the term good here as it has "class" connotations and one would be hard pressed to prove the morality of those who move or stay...
If it’s just about ruralness, you would need it to be more rural than Mississippi. But Mississippi is very rural - only Vermont, Maine, and West Virginia are comparable. Even the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas have more of their population in urban areas in state.
Vermont & West Virginia are fascinating states to compare. They are both ~92% white & Vermont's state average IQ is 102 while West Virginia's state average IQ is 97.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-iq-by-state
West Virginia has been experiencing brain drain for so long that it shows up in the aggregate IQ statistics, whereas Vermont has either been experienced brain gain from college professors & hippies & ski towns OR the Puritans were just that unusual.
I grew up in Vermont, and of my high school class, I'd estimate significantly less than half are still in the state and the folks that left were disproportionately from the top half in terms of GPA. I tried to stick it out, but there just aren't enough high skill, high paying jobs.
interesting website, although i note that WV's 97.2 still beats California's 97.1, so clearly average state wide IQ is not the key driver for success/failure of state as a whole.
The Bay Area is a high-IQ bubble that funds half of the state by drawing in IQ outliers from across the country.
Hollywood is a high-attractiveness bubble that funds the other half of the state by drawing in attractiveness outliers from across the country.
Both pillars are strong enough to carry a lot of weight.
yes but that means that non-high IQ bubble californians are significantly lower IQ than the average WV, which i wouldn't have necessarily surmised. btw didn't understand your comment on demographics below?
"that means that non-high IQ bubble californians are significantly lower IQ than the average WV"
Yes, which is expected & not surprising. Average white IQ in America is (set to) 100 nationwide [per year, I think? The Flynn effect means it was drifting up]. With that as a benchmark, average Latino IQ is noticeably lower, somewhere in the low 90's. California is about 39% Latino & 5.5% black, so it's not surprising that the average IQ of the non-bubble Californians are lower than the average IQ of the West Virginians, who are 2% Latino and 5% black.
Relatedly, IQ is defined to be equal between men and women in the benchmark population, which requires careful weighting the verbal and spatial components to achieve because women slightly outscore men on verbal and are slightly lower on spatial. Once this is done, men show higher variance than women, with more high positive and high negative outliers. This increased variance is one possible reason for men being so over-represented in Nobel prizes, although Larry Summers was cancelled for suggesting this:
https://www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/archive/wp/january-2009_what-larry-summers-said-and-didnt-say.html
Also, demographics.
I feel like we are skipping over a logical step here.
Sure, it's poor. But why is it awful? It need not logically follow that a poor place should be awful just as it need not follow that a poor person must be awful.
These places aren't even poor by world standards. Not even by Eastern European standards or even New Zealand standards. For every awful town in California I can find you a town in New Zealand that is just as poor in PPP terms but not nearly as unpleasant.
Have you been to the central valley? All politics, jobs, culture, etc aside, it's just a place that isn't very nice to be. Brutally hot summers, ugly scenery, and a lack of anything to do. It's basically the same as West Texas.
Except that in West Texas, people don't bother taking the keys out of their cars; in Fresno, they won't leave so much as a quarter in their cars.
Every time I've been to Visalia and at least half the times I've been to Fresno the town has absolutely reeked of cow shit. Like hitting a wall of smell. I guess you get used to it. But when you leave for a while and come back it has to be a jarring experience.
And don’t forget: your throat burns!
And why don't the oh so enlightened elites in CA do something about the excess of intensive stock yards that are the primary source of the stink?
Not sure how to verify it, but the local narrative is that increased border security meant that workers couldn't transition back and forth turning into a persistent underclass rather than a migratory labor supply.
I've read that in a few places before, but I can't find any of those sources. (EDIT: another commenter reminded me that it was in Slow Boring, just today.) Much of the blame has been put on the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which increased punishment for illegal immigration and stepped up border enforcement, making it much harder to cross back and forth. EDIT: the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 made an even bigger difference.
I would be rather sceptical of counter intuitive and highly politically convenient narratives like "turns out that illegal immigration is due to too much enforcement of immigration Iaws, ackshually" without some compelling evidence.
I think this would be a two part system.
1) Borders are more difficult to cross
2) Illegal immigrants are granted more rights / welfare within US borders.
Open-ish borders but a certain hostility to residency might be the best case scenario for the valley. Illegal immigrants might be willing to pay extra in rent et cetera if jobs are lucrative enough. If an immigrant gets wealthy enough they may be able to effectively buy residency, at least temporarily. This works out economically for both sides.
Difficult to cross borders should certainly deter immigrants from crossing. But young men are always willing to gamble their lives for a chance at wealth/prosperity, and many immigrants cross the southern border do so to flee poverty and violence not seen in the US. Increasing border security likely will have diminishing returns (especially deterring young men.) In the foreseeable future there will always be a gamble for great wealth/prosperity in America.
Difficult to cross borders in combination with increased welfare and possibly citizenship creates a big incentive for families to cross borders and stay, and it is my understanding that over the past couple decades the border has been made more difficult to cross but the US has become more welcoming to illegals at the same time. This may be the worse outcome from an economic sense.
I wouldn't really call it counter-intuitive. If you live in Mexico and can easily cross into the US, then you can easily cross back - working seasonally in the US or for a stretch of time, then heading back home once you saved some money. That was an extremely common pattern among immigrants back in the 19th century despite many of them indeed staying (the Chinese workers on the Union Pacific Railroad were generally trying to save up $200-300 so they could buy a farm back in China, for example).
But if it's going to be dangerous and set you back several grand each time to cross to the US, then you're not going to be coming back much to Mexico unless you get legal status. And if you're staying in the US for the long haul, you might as well try and bring your family up as well.
That's from Doug Massey's research on it, and it appears to be true - if you look at the pre-1980s migration numbers, the overwhelming majority of people from Mexico who came to the US cycled back to Mexico, even after the Bracero program died in the 1960s. IIRC Massey said it was something like 28 million people (sometimes the same folks on multiple trips) came to the US between 1963 and 1986, and 23.5 million of them went back.
There may be something to this soupy cans. Personal story--on my Dad's walnut farm, we had a guy named Alfredo (and his wife) that would drive the shaker (a pretty expensive piece of equipment) during the autumn harvest. I'm guessing he was between 50 and 60 when he worked for us. Nicest guy ever. His wife was a great cook. He basically came up during the harvest--worked three months--then went home to northern Mexico and didn't work for 9 months. (You'll have to trust me that judging from Alfredos size, he was not going hungry LOL.) 3 months on/9 months off is a pretty nice life.
So, just to clarify, we're talking about the "southern" central valley. Sacramento, Tracy, Merced, they're all a different animal, lots of tech commuters n' such.
The story I've always heard is that a lot of farmland in the Central valley should never have been settled. It's scrubland, prairie dog country. And you can actually see this, drive down the I-5 from SF to LA and there's the invisible line south of Coalinga where the farmland stops and it's just dry grass and a couple shrubs. Now there are some areas, like the Salinas valley, which are just naturally great, but most of the Central valley isn't naturally farmland and required tons of water to make into halfway passable farmland. And now that water is tight, you've got a lot of local agriculture fighting to survive.
I suspect the California Water Project of the sixties provided a whole lot of water for irrigation because urban areas didn't need it yet, so a bunch of really marginal land in the southwest of the Valley got planted. Those areas have been slowly getting choked off.
The southwest valley is oil country, like a little slice of west Texas. If you're into slightly cheesy niche history museums, the West Kern Oil Museum is a nice pit stop when driving up or down I-5.
> but most of the Central valley isn't naturally farmland and required tons of water to make into halfway passable farmland.
It does require a lot of water, but to say it is "halfway passable" is incorrect. It is literally the most agriculturally productive region in the US.
https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/statistics/pdfs/2016report.pdf
California gets 4.4 million acre-feet from the Colorado River every year (https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/08/colorado-river-water-california/), which is 5.4 km^3.
The annual outflow of the St. Lawrence River is about 530 km^3.
America should invest in a terascale water engineering project to double the amount of water sent to California by diverting 1% of the flow of the St. Lawrence West up and over the Rockies -- or maybe through the world's most impressive tunnel, IDK which would be cheaper.
(No clue what this would cost, would only even possibly be feasible with a completely different American planning scheme that was more like the highly functional 1930s/1940s and not the dysfunctional present).
Directing water out of the Great Lakes basin would run into problems with treaties (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Waters_Treaty_of_1909) between the United States and Canada regulating the shared waterways.
In the hypothetical world where the US was better at planning things, it could probably offer Canada an amount of money that Canada would accept, since the value of that 1% of the St. Lawrence to the St. Lawrence is low and the value of that 1% of the St. Lawrence to California is very high.
Alternatively, the outflow of the Mississippi is also similar to the outflow of the St. Lawrence.
Why not just work on desalinization plants?
There's a large body of salt water immediately to the west of the coast.
The coast could be water independent and share with the Valley instead of importing so much water from other states.
I haven't penciled that out, but it sure sounds more practical that shipping water from the Great Lakes!
Desalinated water costs about $2,000 per acre-foot
https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/05/29/nations-largest-ocean-desalination-plant-goes-up-near-san-diego-future-of-the-california-coast/
That means that the water California receives from the Colorado River (4.4 million acre-feet per year) would cost $8.8 billion per year to produce through desalination. A large-scale water transfer project could potentially be cheaper than that over a 30 year time frame.
Much cheaper to divert water from the Columbia River, and only one or two other states to negotiate with.
https://oregoncatalyst.com/2885-columbia-river-water-next-export-to-california.html
The Columbia River has an annual discharge of 236 km^3, so yes, that's probably the most accessible sufficently-large source.
Right.
The mighty Columbia has lots of water. Good luck getting Oregon voters to agree to share with Californians, though!
.... up and over the Rockies ...
But for this improbable idea to work, people would really have to begin paying for water, no?
... the highly functional 1930s/1940s ...
Or we could have just given more than ten minutes' consideration to Major Powell's report on the "Arid Regions" from the 1870s.
Can't the geniuses in Silicon Valley engineer some desalinization plants (nuclear powered, of course)?
There's a rather large body of salt water immediately to the west.
You can do it, if you don't care about costs. (Don't forget to include maintenance.) You can even pump the water at nearly sea level, if you do it in a tube within the Sacramento river. But you'll need to build up the levees.
If you want a separate right of way, though, you'll need to either drive a tunnel through an earthquake fault, or pay an interesting amount for land to build your canal on.
But I was presuming you were serious. Perhaps that was a joke.
Given it was in reply to ideas for piping water from the Great Lakes, which sounds expensive and risky, desalinization of Pacific Ocean water seemed no crazier than that. No, I haven't done the engineering analysis, but given the alternatives, I'm surprised nobody has put that on the table. It's a better use of state funds than the bullet train, which has wasted billions. Perhaps there's too little opportunity for graft.
Is it?
I mean, I'm no farmer or agricultural scientist, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see terrific farmland outside of the Salinas valley. I see a lot of farmland, and I think when people talk about agricultural production they're talking about volume.
What makes the farmland, say, between Fresno and LA more valuable than Nevada scrubland, say everything between Reno and Winnemuca? Like, it grows because they pour water on it but when I drive through the undeveloped parts the central valley looks as barren or worse than northern Nevada. Is there anything that makes this good farmland?
(1) Is that Nevada scrubland accessible from our existing water infrastructure?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact
(2) Is that scrubland as climatically stable as the Central Valley? My impression was that the Central Valley is so productive thanks to the combination of a year-round growing season AND lots of sunlight AND a lack of the sort of storms / temperature swings that might destroy crops.
IIRC, Nevada is very high in Selenium. Enough so to make sheep sick, or perhaps it was cattle. This isn't true of California scrubland.
OTOH, (and extrapolating from a very small sample) California land isn't inherently great. It doesn't have a whole bunch of humus. Until you build up the land you want to raise crops that need excellent drainage. (That's if there's no hardpan underneath your acres. If there is, use it for pasture, because you can't do much irrigation.) If you handle it well, and rotate your crops properly, you can build it up within a few decades to something quite decent. But you WILL need water. And the water tables have been dropping rapidly.
Nevada between Reno and Winnemucca gets far too cold in the winter.
We ended up here in Sacramento 13 years ago when my wife started her PhD at Davis. First two years were a bit of a drag but we fell in love with the city and decided to stay. The smog half of the year can be a drag but spring in Sacramento is absolutely gorgeous.
I am also reminded of season 3 of Goliath, which dealt with water rights in the Central Valley and the almond farms hoarding all the water. Not sure how accurate a reflection of the actual situation it was, but I do feel guilty now whenever I drink almond milk.
UC Davis has a torture orchard to test more drought-tolerant almonds and pistachios:
https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/torture-orchard-can-science-transform-california-crops-cope-drought
A problem seems serious if you're torturing trees to solve it.
The nonpareil almond used to be thought of as drought-tolerant, but not by enough to be sustainable. I don't know how much almond farmers, specifically, contribute to groundwater depletion causing the Central Valley to sink:
https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2022/06/02/will-californiasley-stop-sinking/
But some almond farmers are letting their orchards flood with winter stormwater, while their trees are dormant, in hopes of recharging some groundwater:
https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/water/community/2018/10/16/almond-farms-keep-growing-and-keep-moving-on-water-conservation
"torture orchard" -> "tortchard"?
...although written out it looks like a litigious leafy vegetable.
Due to the Grapes of Wrath-era Scots-Irish migration, Bakersfield, CA used to be one of the capitals of country music, home to the rock-influenced Bakersfield Sound of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Bakersfield in the 1960s was much like Austin in the 1970s, home to a harder edged alternative to Nashville.
Here's a Rolling Stones country song about Bakersfield, The Girl with the Faraway Eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyK1bZZ7E-s
"Just some boys from Bakersfield"
https://youtu.be/5sAYtl-XEv4
Mom's side was a part of this great migration from Arkansas. Scot-Irish to the core. All settled in the central valley. All of them still there and depressed about what has become of that great part of America.
I can't help but feel like there's a link to the *Beverly Hillbillies*, here, but perhaps that's just coincidence.
Beverly Hillbilies is just an adaptation of Grapes of Wrath without the Marxism.
Keep in mind that some of the commuting from CV>BA is not going all the way to SF. People live in Stockton and commute to Concord, or live in Tracy and commute to Livermore. You're still saving 300k on a house.
Yep. And the people living in Concord are likely to actually work in SF, themselves also saving 300k+ on a house compared to buying in the city. The pattern radiates outward from the economic engine of the region in SF/Silicon Valley. Enormously inefficient; hopefully the YIMBYs continue to make progress.
> This is a weird article. It seems to confirm that things used to be better - nobody would call the Central Valley “the good life” now. But its concerns are smog, sprawl, and decreasing share of agriculture. These seem like the problems of somewhere that’s growing - local NIMBYs complaining that too many people want to move in. Today the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave.
> Sometimes well-off residents of California coastal cities get houses in the Central Valley and commute. It’s about 2 hours from LA to Bakersfield, or 1.5 from Stockton to San Francisco, so it’s not worth it for most people. But Central Valley houses cost between 25% and 50% the cost of coastal houses, so I guess it’s worth it for some. I don’t know whether this is good (because these people bring money in and create jobs) or bad (because these people bid up land values).
Your two assumptions here- that it's the rich buying second houses and commuting, and that this isn't a significant number of people- are wrong.
Anecdotally, I live in the South Bay and have spoken with multiple random workers who have multiple hour commutes from the Central Valley. I can't find statistics on this, but this more-or-less matches what I'd expect- the people getting pushed out of the Bay Area due to housing prices are the poorest, not the richest.
Regarding the sheer number of commuters, here's an article: https://extras.mercurynews.com/megaregion/
The article calculates that ~130,000 workers commute from the Central Valley into the Bay Area. If the average family has 4 people, one of whom commutes to the Bay Area, that's 500,000 people who have been pushed out the Bay Area. The Central Valley has a population of 6.5 million; if you exclude the 2 million who live around Sacramento (the state capital, an exception as you discuss in the article), over 10% of the Central Valley's families have somebody commuting to the Bay Area. I know much less about LA, and couldn't find good stats from google, but if it's similar then that's ~20% of the entire population of the Central Valley who live there in large part because lack of housing pushed them out of the coastal cities.
I came here to say this.
When I lived in San Jose, almost every construction worker, gardener or cleaner I spoke to commuted in from Lodi or Tracy or Stockton or Modesto etc because they couldn't afford to live in the Bay Area.
When I first got there people used to move to Fremont or Pleasanton. Even those places are no longer affordable.
If random people say it uses to be better when they were young, but the data says it was always bad, isn't the obvious answer that people have rose colored glasses?
Also, as an aside, crime is down there from the 90s just like it's down everywhere else in the country from the 90s.
I think crime is going back up again in the CV. The murder rate is way up again.
Bakersfield and Fresno have sizable gang problems (and lousy police departments).
I presume that as Los Angeles got expensive, a lot of gang members got squeezed out and relocated to places like Bakersfield.
You can think of NIMBYs in LA and the Bay Area successfully squeezing out a lot of their problem people over the last few decades and offloading them on the Central Valley.
Crime and murder are also going back up in other places.
The other obvious explanation is that things have got worse in ways that are not captured by whatever data you're looking at.
Per capita GDP is not a metric that captures things like "is there a homeless encampment in your local park" or "how often are you woken up by a screaming methhead"
>I always think of Mississippi as bad because of a history of racial violence, racial segregation, and getting burned down during the Civil War.
This sounds disingenuous, but perhaps our host is merely the victim of a California public education.
Agriculture isn't a great business in a developed country. Why fertile Mississippi isn't doing better than the relatively dry Central Valley seems a better question, but no surprise neither are thriving. Ag ain't the future and never was.
Still another way to frame this might be: Why Is The Central Valley So Successful? People *migrate* there for work and find better lives. Not so for the Midwest or Mississippi.
It is true that urban places do a lot better than rural places, but that can't be the full story. Midwestern rural states like Nebraska seem to be doing lot better than either Mississippi or the Central Valley.
Nebraska is substantially less rural than Mississippi. Jackson, MS isn’t as big as Lincoln or Omaha. Mississippi is 50% rural while Nebraska is only 21% rural.
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/rural-states-are-almost-entirely-ignored-under-current-state-state-system
The interesting question is why Vermont is doing so well.
Your list actually lists Nebraska as 27% rural. Moreover it lists California's rural population as 1,880,350. Even if all of them live in the Central Valley that's make the Central Valley 26% rural (going by wikipedia's popultion figures). The Central Valley therfore is not more rural than Nebraska, at least if you go by the muesure your source uses.
Of course both muesures considers people involved in the agricultural industry that live in cities non-rural.
Sorry about misremembering the digit for Nebraska! But yes, the Central Valley has bigger cities than any of these states. So it doesn’t explain why the Central Valley is as poor as it is.
One thing the OP doesn't mention is that, if I understand correctly, the federal government heavily subsidizes corn and soy (grown in the Midwest) but not fruits and vegetables (grown in CV). I wonder how much difference this makes? Would CV be better off with government subsidies for fruit and vegetables?
You could argue that the government subsidises fruit and vegetables by not enforcing immigration laws.
Do you eat food? If so, then sustainable agriculture is your concern.
I grew up in the valley from birth until I left for college in 2009. A couple of things that I remember looking back at that time:
1. The 2009 housing bust hit HARD. Like, really hard. Housing prices skyrocketed in the couple years before and then in what seemed like overnight prices tanked and everyone lost their jobs. I recall hearing about cities like Stockton pushing a 25%+ unemployment rate. There were already crime and drug problems in cities like Stockton, Modesto, and Fresno, and that made everything worse.
2. There's very little to do, and you have to drive a long ways to do it. Outside of Sacramento and perhaps a couple of pockets elsewhere if I'm being generous, there's nowhere in the valley where you can, say, walk around and enjoy a day in the city and do things. I remember that parts of downtown Modesto and Fresno, at least back in ~2008, were literally shut down after dusk because of crime. Even then those fairly large cities are built like massive suburbs.
3. Water. I think this is the big one. The valley is only agricultural because of a large canal network. And for a long time (not sure how it is now), farmers got incredible water subsidies, partially rationed, which they were not allowed to sell. When I was growing up, one of the most common ways of irrigation I'd see was literally flooding orchards because farmers had so much water that if they didn't use, they lost. So they'd use it on the least efficient method of irrigation possible. I think that's changed a bit in the last decade, but only in response to very severe drought. I believe to some extent some farmers are now being subsidized not to grow crops at all to save on water. When that's the backbone of your economy you're in trouble. (Growing up I heard that I lived in the "breadbasket of America" frequently. I wonder what they're telling kids now.)
Also, your categorization of the region as being a strategic location by which you can escape is spot on. People would talk about how great it is that you can reach SF, Monterey, Yosemite, or Tahoe for a day trip quite frequently.
„ Also, your categorization of the region as being a strategic location by which you can escape is spot on. “
To be honest, as a non American, that actually makes Sacramento appealing enough. San Francisco I’d prefer visit than live in anyway. Don’t get me wrong it’s a great place to visit. And Tahoe is wonderful.
Yeah, Sacramento, last time I was there, was alright. Particularly some of the surrounding areas. But that's the northern tip of the valley and not necessarily representative.
Sacramento is the mid-point of the Central Valley. I suppose its fair to call it the northern tip of the San Joaquin Valley, but there's no obvious split, except the Sacramento River. And there are several bridges.
Note that towards the beginning of the thread some people were talking about how bad Red Bluff was. (I didn't see Redding or Chico mentioned.)
A couple of thoughts courtesy of someone who's never been there and should probably go to sleep instead of typing this:
You mention how people want to leave, but also the problems are problems of growth. I wonder if what this is, is replacing farming with being exurbs of the big cities; and the people who want to leave are the old farm people (and people who grow up there but don't want to stay), more than made up for by the people moving there chasing cheap housing and because they're immigrating to the US.
Matt Yglesias had a thing on his blog today that said this:
"The unintended legacy of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was that illicit seasonal labor migration was largely replaced by one-off permanent migration, while the three- and 10-year bans made it harder than ever for permanent unauthorized residents to regularize their status without meaningfully deterring illegal entry. "
So maybe this means fewer migrant farm workers leaving in the offseason, more staying in the central valley full-time.
Also since Matt Yglesias is always going on about how underrated an issue air pollution is - I wonder if that is causing a lot of the issues (and I'm guessing caused by a combo of population growth, and geography that's conducive to the air pollution hanging around).
Also the water situation seems fucked up in a way that more population must exacerbate.
Also Kansas is 12.7% Hispanic, compared to 17% nationwide. Dodge City is 57% Hispanic.
You mention progressive legislation as a potential issue, so in the interest of defending my tribe while being too tired/lazy to write anything more thought out, I'll also mention federal rules that make it harder to employ people who are immigrants or homeless or whatever (like those IRS forms you have to fill out when you start a job with your ID and all that). Also everything I hear always makes it sound like these farms are really exploitative towards the workers. The recent (wrongly decided) Supreme Court case about how a law letting union organizers onto farms is an unconstitutional taking comes to mind.
> and the people who want to leave are the old farm people
Or the people moving in are approaching retirement and the people moving out are young, go-getters with a future somewhere else.
(I'm speculating. no data)
Regarding the plot at the beginning of IV (Per Capita Income Compared to California) you write:
> Here it looks like things got worse from 1975 - 1985, then have been basically stable since.
In 1985, the range is approx 65%-80%. Today the range is approx 60%-72%. The decline since 1975 almost as large as the initial drop.
If by ”stable” you mean a slow steady decline, you should say that explicitly, because in context ”stable” sounds like ”stopped getting worse.” If, on the other hand, by ”stable” you do mean ”stopped getting worse” then this is objectively wrong.
This is an intriguing article for someone like me, who lives in Central Europe. A few years ago, I went to an academic conference in L.A., and afterwards flew to SF for some sightseeing. Rented a car there, and drove back to L.A. for the plane home. The intent of driving back was to see some touristy places on the way which are only car-reachable, like Sequoia.
This obviously took us along parts of Central Valley, which was a fairly unsettling experience. To Europeans, U.S. cities are somewhat disconcerting to begin with, what with the large numbers of visible homeless, and the acutely mentally ill who roam the streets, apparently untreated (these demographics of course overlap). But Central Valley was even worse: the entire region radiated an aura of poverty, neglect and despair that you don't even find in the really bad parts of Eastern Europe.
For years, I put down the impression I got back then down to bad sampling: I figured we must just have had the bad luck to stumble into the bad parts, and missed the good ones. Seems like I was wrong about that.
“the entire region radiated an aura of poverty, neglect and despair that you don't even find in the really bad parts of Eastern Europe.”
This was not bad sampling. It’s an apt description, and I’m sorry you experienced it. Hope you did get up to Sequoia though!
I’m from the U.K. and have been to California for rock climbing trips, so I’ve driven through the CV several times. Last visit I stayed in Merced which felt super sketchy and unsafe, then driving from Yosemite to Joshua Tree even the highway rest stops felt risky. I have worked in places like Afghanistan and South Sudan so I’m fairly used to dealing with difficult places but even so this part of the US was unsettling to me too. It really wasn’t very nice!
Holy cow, "compares unfavorably with Afghanistan and South Sudan" is a really strong indictment of CV. I had no idea it was *that* bad!
Haha no those places are way worse! But I would certainly feel safer in a city like Delhi. CV felt more like South Africa - quite developed but also a bit dangerous (SA still worse tho). It’s very different to anywhere I’ve been to in Western Europe.
Nice to have the validation but sorry you had to experience that while a guest here in the US
You can probably blame the size of the United States and the cultural tendency to move for jobs. It's great for economic productivity, but it leaves behind any area that no longer meets the immediate needs of industry or commerce. You can find lots of places that were booming within living memory that are terrible now. Detroit is famous for this, of course, but so are many parts of Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and others. I'm not including places that were never very rich, like Alabama or Kentucky.
European countries are much smaller, and I think culturally the people are far less likely to move around chasing new economic booms.
1) Americans move for jobs less now than at any other point in history.
2) The classic dying town is itself a creature of economic migration: once upon a time it was a cost effective place to put an industrial plant and the town grew up around it, etc. It seems to me that if we are willing to create towns for contingent economic reasons, we should also be willing to destroy them for the same reasons. Otherwise we’ll have and endless accumulation of places with no reason to exist and dependent on huge subsidies.
I don't disagree with you at all.
That said, the sense of loss from a formerly prosperous community falling apart, and the attendant rapid expansion that leaves a new area feeling overwhelmed, are both costs and I don't think we as a society truly consider those costs very often. It's a choice we make, rather than an inevitable effect of economics.
I happen to live in a small town, of my own choice, because I prefer the environment and believe it's better for my family. I have a good job, but could probably be making 2-3X the cash salary with similar or better benefits in a city. Especially with the higher cost of living, I don't consider that a worthwhile tradeoff, but understand that many people do, and that the economy as a whole benefits from it.
Everyone who lives in a growing city considers it every time they pay their NIMBY inflated rent. Real estate is like the number one topic of conversation. We don’t neglect these things at all, policies intended to address them are far and away most prominent and consequential exercises of government power in our lives.
We consider the consequences after millions of people are moving around, but Americans de-emphasize the choice that leads there in the first place.
What do you think is the biggest factor in the absence of visible poverty and neglect in places like Bulgaria and Romania, which are substantially poorer than anywhere in the US? Are the people who live in the countryside generally prosperous, and the less successful folks are vacuumed up into the cities where they can't leave car parts laying around in their yards, because they live in an apartment building?
I would suggest that behaviour is about class, not economics. A middle class Bulgarian is as poor as a lower class American but behaves like a middle class person.
I get this idea, but what about the lower class Bulgarians?
Presumably they're busy lousing up the bits of Bulgaria where they live. And you're right, they're probably apartment blocks so they're less visible... with the exception of gypsy encampments which presumably have all the problems of Modesto only worse. (I've never actually been to Bulgaria so I'm guessing.)
I do think there's an issue where the lower class in the US is either larger or worse behaved than in many comparable countries.
Comments like these are always so strange to me, because in all my travels to Europe I've never noticed the cities there having less homeless or mentally unstable people than the average US cities. Rome has huge homeless camps, there's people huffing paint on the streets of Amsterdam, Athens feels basically like Fresno with culture, etc, etc.
I always wonder if it's just people become blind to the homeless in their home cities, but notice it more when they travel.
add France to that list for sure. London not nearly as bad though despite there being lots of poverty in the country overall.
I suspect (note that this is largely uninformed speculation on my part) that there are two largely unrelated issues going on here that shouldn't really be lumped together. The Central Valley's population consists of:
1.) Predominantly immigrant communities centered around the agriculture industry.
2.) Generic, predominantly white, suburban communities that aren't especially different from other suburbs you'd find in, say, the Midwest.
The immigrant communities are largely poor, but as far as I'm aware they have always been poor (see Cesar Chavez, etc.) and given the economic data presented I don't see much of a reason to imagine that things have gotten dramatically worse in the past 10 years or so. Meanwhile the suburbs are declining and dealing with issues like downward mobility, brain drain, drugs, etc., but these issues are hardly unique to the Central Valley.
These two groups are largely segregated from each other and their problems are very different--the discrepancy between the narratives of decline and the economic data come from the fact that the immigrant group forms the majority of the Central Valley's population and are thus primarily what the statistics reflect, while the suburban group is the one that produces most of the accounts about the region's decline that most of readers of this blog would hear about. In reality there are two populations there are two populations that are not very alike outside of sharing a space, one of which is growing as normal (but which has always been very poor) and one of which was wealthier and is declining is declining (but forms a minority of the region's population). The growing sense of something being wrong in the Central Valley is a combination of typical declinism from the suburban group and increasing media attention towards the poverty of an immigrant group that was previously less visible due to marginalization.
This sounds like a very plausible description.
I do think it leaves out the growth of exurban supercommuting. It would be interesting to compare to northeastern pennsylvania that way (a region where a growing number of people commute multiple hours into New York).
I wonder which of those two groups if either demanded the new Cesar Chavez National Park to go along with the Cesar Chavez National Monument we already have.
Kids, let's go have a fun day exploring Cesar Chavez's old office!
Victor Davis Hanson has written many times about this, from the perspective of someone whose family has farmed in the Central Valley for generations.
In a general way, my vague feeling is that it's probably the dark side of the explosion of huge tech money in the Bay Area in the 90s, which utterly changed the Bay Area itself[1], and led to substantial revision in the priorities of the California Legislature -- which have been since reflected in all kinds of infrastructure neglect that strongly affects Central Valley business -- water and power distribution being most obvious, but also including transportation -- as well as state-level priority setting that gets approving nods from $400k/year Google engineers and is utterly flabbergasting for schmos growing raisins in Fresno[2], like it's a broadcast from Mars. It's a shame the Bay Area can't be split off into a sort of Hong Kong, it's own little city-state, and then the Central Valley could pursue its own best interests. Doesn't mean the two areas can't do mutually profitable business with each other, but they should not be making rules for each other, the cultural and lifestyle gulf is too large.
----------------------
[1] I lived in Oakland in the 80s, and the contrast between then and now is staggering.
[2] I mean, only electric cars can be sold in 2035? This is frankly delusional with respect to Central Valley denizens, and to the extent actually implemented will screw them over economically.
If the Central Valley's issues were a reflection of poor economic management of the region then we would expect agricultural productivity there to be falling, which as far as I'm aware does not seem to be the case.
Productivity in steel-making has steadily increased for decades but Gary is still a pit, a pale shadow of what it was when steel was king. You are overlooking the fact that rising productivity does not directly translate to rising economic well-being. I mean, if nothing else, productivity goes way up when wages crash, right?
For that matter, *economic* management is only a small part of what I suspect has gone wrong.
American steel production has been falling from the Rust Belt’s glory days though, while California agricultural production and employment is holding steady (or at least was before the droughts, I’m unsure what the current state). The rest of California’s interest in the Central Valley is that the agriculture industry remain robust, which it is (in fact arguably too much, given how the state’s agribusinesses are contributing to the water problems)—the initial post is claiming that the state government is harming Central Valley businesses through mismanagement and poor prioritization, but the businesses themselves are fine.
The remaining issues are less that the state government is mismanaging the economy and more that it is simply more sensitive to the preferences of the coastal areas who form a majority of the state’s population and economy than it is to the Central Valley (or rather to the preferences of the predominantly white farmowners within the Valley who dob’t actually even form a majority of the region’s population), which is… fine? There are many states where the political preferences of a large urban area go ignored because of the dominance of rural and exurban interests in the state government (Charlotte and Austin being prominent examples off the top of my head) and people generally don’t suggest that these areas should be allowed to split off and fork their own states—why should it be any different when the Central Valley suffers from the reverse problem. Especially since, unlike Charlotte or Austin, the Central Valley is a drag on the overall state economy that likely takes in more spending than it gives and benefits from being part of California for things like water negotiations with other states.
I'd be more sympathetic to demands from conservative agrarian regions to secede from liberal states *if they were consistent* and a reflection of the broader principle that all regions should have a representative government rather than one dictated by the accidents of state boundaries, which they currently clearly are not.
You know, if your position is "Who cares?" it's fine, you can just say that, there's no real added value in appending a few paragraphs of rationalization.
Yes, there's a bit of "let them eat cake" here, as if food doesn't require agriculture and the folks who produce it preferences don't matter anymore.
Atlanta's another example, though there's at least signs of Georgia going purple now.
Indeed. I lived in Berkeley in the '80s and Oakland from '94 to last year, when we left the state.
I like your city-state idea--it would be a fascinating experiment.
Correct take.
(Fresno born and raised, family grew and packed raisins til 2002...victim of massive oversupply, decreased consumption in the decade of the Fruit Rollup)
https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-dust/ This may be of interest.
https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/1510~8004~1157/Comparison-of-the-Average-Weather-in-Visalia-Austin-and-Sacramento
The weather isn't that bad by most standards. Notice the graphs there showing how it's never muggy. I think "often reach 110°F (43°C) in the summer" is clearly an exaggeration, perhaps influenced by the recent heat wave.
Also, some areas are rather nice. Yuba City, Chico. There are nice neighborhoods and sometimes fantastic natural areas within a reasonable drive.
The last time I was in Redding it was 110; the last time I was in Bakersfield (totally different trip) it was 106. Maybe I just have bad luck.
Redding is hot as hell, I think it's the hottest of them all for some reason (edit: ok Bakersfield apparently's a bit worse.) But even still that's probably just in the deep summer and the nights are still coolish. And again, it probably compares reasonably ok to the South.
I once motorcycled through there in the summer and yes it was a wall of heat. But "it was a dry heat". I suspect a lot of us only ever have reason to drive through these in summer.
You almost never get 110 in the South. Many Texas cities, for instance, have hit 110 on a single digit number of occasions in all of recorded history.
It's a dry heat, as they say. 100 in Houston is a lot more uncomfortable than 110 in Bakersfield.
I completely disagree. There is nothing worse than the oven feeling of being in a desert. I'd take swampland over it any day of the week. I've lived in Chicago, Redding, and New Orleans, and Redding by far had the worst weather of the three.
Perhaps on the thermometer temperature but Texas can get over 110 on "perceived temperature" (heat index, feels like, etc.). due to humidity and such.
https://weather-and-climate.com/average-monthly-Humidity-perc,houston,United-States-of-America
https://weatherspark.com/h/s/9247/2022/1/Historical-Weather-Summer-2022-in-Houston-Texas-United-States
https://weatherspark.com/h/s/145218/2022/1/Historical-Weather-Summer-2022-at-Redding-Municipal-Airport-California-United-States
Houston July 7 the dotted line "perceived temperature" hit 112 degrees. And was still 93 at midnight.
In Redding on September 6 it reached 115F, which was an extreme weather event, but the chart claims a "perceived temperature" under 110, and dropped to 80F at midnight.
I'd still prefer the Redding weather in summer, just on this basis at least. I'd probably try to escape to the mountains though.
The weather is nice, and it does "often reach 110°F in the summer". Those statements are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it occasionally reaches 120°F.
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/red-bluff
https://youtu.be/-7pJIHyIre8 Here’s VDH describing the changes in the Valley.
Why is an agricultural region so polluted? And when did it start to be bad? Imho it could be an important part of the story; at least in my country, middle class people are moving away from most polluted region
Look at the map at the start of the article. Where is any pollution going to go?
It's like Mexico City writ large. Especially since winds would tend to blow from the west.
I think basically the only industries more polluting than agriculture are ones that involve coal. The fact that these areas are also downwind of cities with a lot of cars doesn’t help. But I think airborne dust and cow manure are the main atmospheric pollutants.
You mean the air? Two reasons: first, and obviously, for the same reason the weather is so placid. The region lies between the Sierra Nevada to the east, and the coastal ranges to the west, so the air circulation is limited. (Death Valley is this phenomenon greatly intensified by much higher mountains and a smaller space.) Along the coast all your car smog gets blown out to sea, or blown inland by the sea breeze, usually both.
Second, a lot of cows plus cars. It turns out NOx emission from cars plus methane from the cows plus sunlight is one of the main drivers of so-called "photochemical smog," which is the brown fug you often see over the LA basin (in the case of LA the cows are in Riverside County and the cars are in LA County, but the emission from the two happily mix 5000 feet up). An exceedingly complex chain of photochemical reactions causes NOx radicals to turn the methane (and similar small hydrocarbons) into large fluffy soot-like particulates, which is what turns the air a funny color and is also rather bad to breathe.
I dunno man, it sounds like the conservative realtor was pretty much correct? Other than the air pollution angle this article seems to be just confirming what he was saying with data and more historical tidbits. I'm from and live very far from California, but to re-cap the story both data+news+realtor are saying:
- In the old days the central valley was rural but nice enough.
- Mexican workers came, worked temporarily, went home again.
- At some point in the 80s/early 90s, some party (presumably the left?) got in and decided to give lots of those people citizenship and thus welfare rights without thinking about how anyone would pay for that. Probably on the belief that Mexican immigrants would then become reliable voters for the party that most supported welfare.
- Combination of events+tech change led to reduced employment needs, simultaneous with increased unskilled workforce size. This would also create a massive influx of a foreign culture that reduces demand for production of local culture. Result: suppressed wages, subsequent poverty, and not much culture.
- Newly minted citizens do indeed vote reliably for the left, flipping the state permanently and ensuring the government can now pass lots of policies hostile to agriculture, which they see as "devastating the environment" and not food production, making the poverty situation worse.
Seems that the root cause here is being painted quite consistently: once the left took control of California they did a series of things that shored up their own power but sacrificed the Central Valley along the way?
My memory is that the central valley - and local government - is overwhelmingly conservative even if the state is democratic overall.
Yeah most of the central valley and also the northern bits near Oregon are red state country overall. Maybe not Sacramento proper.
Although in theory they benefit from rich coastal cities, I suspect that in a bigger picture long-term sense they'd actually be better off being an independent state (or set of states, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Californias).
A bit dated. By current partisanship, the CV is pretty balanced. Sacramento and Yolo Counties are enough to flip it D. All counties but those 2 voted for George W. Bush, but some other big ones voted for Biden as the state overall has moved left since the mid-2000s.
The timeline is a bit jumbled in my head so this may be off, but Reagan era immigration reform 1. Had (one off) amnesty making staying in the US more attractive, and 2. Increased border enforcement so rather than seasonally migrate every year between the US and Mexico people moved their families to the US permanently.
OK. If it was Reagan who did that, then the outline above doesn't really work, unless I guess he was 'forced' to include the amnesty to get his laws passed in order to improve border enforcement. Also - I had taken from the above article that the seasonal worker system was legal and there were temp agri worker visas. Sounds like you're saying the whole Mexicans-come-for-the-season system was actually illegal, but nobody got prosecuted over it?
I don't remember it myself, but I've heard a lot of people saying that the 1986 amnesty was supposed to be part of a larger immigration reform that made it significantly harder to get into the US in the first place.
For many conservatives who have been watching the discussion lately, they are very unwilling to compromise now because they felt like they cooperated and the other side defected back then.
So, the politics of immigration have kind of flipped, where conservatives were pro immigration (cheap labor for businesses, beat the soviets, America as a shiny city on a hill), and Democrats were more anti immigration (the populist labor being a more important part of the coalition). Immigration wasn’t as sorted politically back then, but you can find debates where Reagan and HW are fighting over who is the most pro immigration candidate.
Yes, this is to a first approximation correct. In the 80s is when it started. Bad (really bad) urban planning in Fresno didn't help. Born (1980) and raised, before I decamped to the Bay for college.
I have said for the last 15 years that I think the fine particulate matter air pollution that builds up due to immovable air, diesel trucks, ag dust, etc. etc. is a big hidden factor...as someone who went back and forth a lot in my young adulthood, I felt I lost a measurable chunk of IQ points every time I came home when the air was really bad.
Combined with a population in poor metabolic health, and decades in the mid 20th century of who-knows-what-effects ag chemical exposure by farmers, workers, farmers families, water supply....the biological factors are probably significant...
"Newly minted citizens do indeed vote reliably for the left, flipping the state permanently" -- but isn't the CV is the reddest part of California?
California has a $14 (for small businesses) minimum wage whereas Mississippi just has the federal minimum wage of $7.25. It's hard to imagine that agriculture is twice as productive in California's central valley with it's relatively dry climate. I think this is enough to explain the poverty? People just aren't allowed to work? If there were no minimum wage, then a dollar would naturally be worth more in a rural town than in a high-productivity region like San Francisco. Wages are naturally lower in rural areas because they're not as productive but it's okay because everything else is cheaper as well. The minimum wage totally disrupts this. Employers are forbidden from paying the natural wage so everything involving service gets artificially expensive and people get unemployed because many jobs are just not allowed to exist.
Could be, but wouldn't people making $7.25-$13.99 an hour still technically be living in poverty?
If your labor is only worth $7.25 then it's better to make $7.25 than $0.
Thats only true if the opportunity cost of taking that job is < $7.25/hr.
I believe that "your labor is only worth $7.25/hr" must imply "the opportunity cost of taking that job is < $7.25/hr". Consider the contrary of the implied predicate. If the opportunity cost were greater than $7.25/hr, then that opportunity must be worth more than $7.25/hr, which means someone is willing to pay you to work more than $7.25/hr, which means your labor is worth more than $7.25/hr, which contradicts the implying predicate.
It does not imply that, because opportunity cost can be expressed in terms of utility, and not just in terms of money.
Working for $7.25 an hour only makes sense if the utility you derive from it exceeds the utility you would derive from doing something else (hanging out with your kids, fishing, watching TV, whatever). Nobody has to pay you to do that ‘something else’ to make it a more attractive proposition than working.
The idea that minimum wage causes unemployment is empirically untrue.
If your labor is only worth $7.25 then who in their right mind would be willing to pay you $14 for it, and why would the absence of such a person not result in you making $0? Without a rational explanation for why minimum wage should not cause unemployment, the only remaining explanation for empirical evidence contrariwise, is an error of some sort in the empiricism.
If the facts don’t fit the theory it’s time to ignore the facts.
Actually it's time to examine how the facts are being created.
When studying economics in primarily the empirical manner, a great many degrees of freedom are left to the person who collects the data and to the statistician who analyzes it. Establishing cause and effect is notoriously difficult. There is never a control-group like there is in a clinical trial - confounders can happen any time with any magnitude. There is rarely even a passable understanding of each individual's reality - if there were, then true communism would function well for nations whose populations are bigger than Dunbar's number, and Effective Altriusm would not suffer from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-anti-politics .
This is why treating economics as an empirical discipline of aggregates has been producing poor results, in contrast to a deductive discipline of how individuals engage in purposeful behavior and how those behaviors might add up to some consequences.
IIUC, every test of whether minimum wage increases unemployment has numerous flaws that invalidate the result as a general statement, and reduce it to "This result is correct if the following conditions are present....", where the conditions are different for different studies.
When I think about it, it's probably nearly impossible to come up with a test that doesn't have that problem. You'd need to run the exact same test in multiple environments, and in each case you'd need to guard against boundary effects. This would be at minimum extremely expensive, and is probably impossible. Which may be why there's continued disagreement over that point (and several other generally related points).
I want to believe that minimum wage has no adverse effects, but I don't think you can really whow that.
THE CBO disagrees with you.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55681#:~:text=In%20general%2C%20increasing%20the%20federal,their%20family%20income%20would%20fall.
I don't believe you. There are countries which have had different minimum wages for different ages and there's a sharp discontinuity in employment rates right at the legal cutoff.
The claim is that it causes unemployment. Not reduced employment, which is different.
Australia has had a very high minimum wage for decades and has just significantly increased it again.
https://wageindicator.org/salary/minimum-wage/minimum-wages-news/2022/minimum-wage-updated-in-australia-from-01-july-2022-june-24-2022
The rate has risen from AUS$772.60 to $812.44 per week.
So that’s a minimum wage increase of 5% and it’s a yearly minimum wage of $42,246.88
Unemployment in Australia is 3.5% which seems low given how high that minimum wage is already. Maybe people should try predict the rate of unemployment. Has to be higher right?
Maybe someone can do the mathematics of this over the last decade and:
1) work out the rate of unemployment in 2002 or 2012
2) work out the increase in the minimum wage in the last 10-20 years.
3) apply the economic formula (must be a formula) that will work out how high the unemployment rate should be.
4) see if that formula works.
(But but Australia is different).
You're ignoring all the possible confounders to this, and also, this is an arbitary level of minimum wage, and yet you're making a general statement. It's literally impossible that a minumum wage of $8000 a week wouldn't cause unemployment, because its literally impossible for businesses to pay that much money and continue operating.
What is the difference between "reduced employment" and "unemployment"?
There would not be a simple formula where you plug in a minimum wage and get out an unemployment rate because there are so many factors which affect that rate.
Also in addition to the replies above Australian minimium wage is a complex topic and is actually a well designed system that helps mitigate some of the more pernicious effects of minimum wage laws. That you didnt mention this shows either A) You dont know what you're talking about or B) You do know what you're talking about and are being deliberately dishonest, I don't know which is worst.
Why say this if you aren't going to provide evidence?
And you need to be much more precise. I assume you mean "the minimum wage that currently exists", not the very concept of wage controls in general. Unless you wish to claim that a $50 dollar minimum wage (in 2022 dollars) would not cause any job losses.
By "technically", I assume you mean the *legal* definition of poverty, in which case the answer to your question is probably "yes but why should we care". The legal definition does not take into account that its single income threshold provides very different standards of living in different places. Our goal should not be to reduce the incidence of legally-defined poverty, but rather to reduce "actual" poverty (as manifested in things including but not limited to food insecurity and homelessness); this is harder to define but much more important. It's entirely possible that people making $13.99 in a given location would be "actually" poor instead of just legally poor (I don't claim to know anything about what living in the Central Valley with that wage would actually be like), but this is something that takes evidence and arguments to establish, not a simple appeal to the word "technically".
Basically don't Goodhart yourself - legal poverty is perhaps a useful measure in some situations, but don't ever let it blind you to the real goal for which it is a very imperfect proxy.
The median home in Mississippi is $134,000, verses about $900,000 in California.
I've heard that $18/hour in SF is about $11 in the Deep South. $7.25 in the rural South (and just because that's the federal minimum doesn't mean many places actually pay that low) will get you further than $14.00 in most of California, but the Central Valley is not as expensive as the rest of the state. If SF and LA price the rural parts of the state out through a collective minimum wage or strict regulations, then that could be a big problem.
"The median home in Mississippi is $134,000, verses about $900,000 in California."
For purposes of this conversation I think we probably want median home in the California central valley rather than California as a whole. We might want to use rural Mississippi home prices, too.
Random Googling gets around $325K for the median central valley house.
I don't know how to get rural Mississippi home prices.
I agree, though I think my point still stands that the central valley houses are approaching 3X the cost of MS houses as a whole, not just rural. Rural houses are almost certainly cheaper.
Forget about rural, in the richest town in Mississippi a house near great schools costs $225k and is practically a mansion.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/146-Annandale-Pkwy-E-Madison-MS-39110/83923612_zpid/
The only house in Fresno for $350k is a fixer upper. Bakersfield is the same.
"It's hard to imagine that agriculture is twice as productive in California's central valley with its relatively dry climate." Seriously? California agriculture is certainly the most productive in the US and is among the highest in the world. Dry weather with irrigation from mountain runoff is much better for agriculture than humid (pest-inducing) weather with unpredictable rainfall. Also, the crops grown in California are very valuable: wine grapes (!), fruit, greens, nuts, compared to those grown in Mississippi.
All that aside: do you really believe illegal migrant workers are being paid minimum wage?
Back in 1969 the federal minimum wage was $1.60 - about $12.80 in current dollars. That didn't seem to cripple employment then. With a much richer and more productive economy now it seems unlikely $14/hour would be so crippling.
When making that comparison it is important to remember who wasn't included in the minimum wage pool. That doesn't invalidate your point, but it does complicate it.
If you want a framework to think about this problem, and similar ones, I can recommend the book "How The World Became Rich" by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin.
This book is a survey of current thinking about economic growth and how it happened. There are several major strands of thought: geography, politics/institutions, culture, demography, and colonialism. We could apply these lenses to the Central Valley:-
Geography: the Central Valley doesn't have a major navigable river running through it, so it's never going to benefit from trade. It's also close to major trading centres, for which it will act as a hinterland, a source of workers and resources. It would always have struggled to develop as a major centre of activity in its own right. It's pretty much stuck with agriculture.
Culture: people in the valley come from low trust cultures (both the Latin cultures, and the Anglo Western USA culture). This means that they would not naturally band together to try to improve their lot (by political agitation directed at the state and federal governments, or directly, by building things themselves). If things get bad, they can't cooperate to fix them.
Demography: Throughout its history since Anglos got there, California has depended on working age immigrants to a greater degree than almost anywhere else in the world. This means it could get away with being woefully undersupplied with the capital needed to bring up families and integrate young people into the work force. It is.
(You probably disagree. But do a thought experiment: what would need to change to successfully, continuously, integrate the children of the Central Valley fully into the economies of L. A. or S. F. from now on?)
Politics/Institutions: These are dominated by socioeconomic elites. In highly unequal societies institutions are set up in ways to disadvantage the already poor, for example by having few, inaccessible, and badly resourced offices. Low trust societies tend to have corrupt governments (that operate on personal connections), which further disadvantages those not politically connected, who don't believe that government would mitigate their problems anyway.
Colonialism: seasonal migrants were merely a resource to be exploited, not part of local society. Cultural attitudes like this take multiple generations to change, once established.
Not hard to *get to* major trading centers, hard to *have your own* major markets without water transport.
Land freight is orders of magnitude more costly than water-borne. The cost is borne by the supplying side, because they are price takers in the markets. Coastal California has large ports (and therefore market centers) and ships.
The existence of the bright lights of nearby cities will draw talent and entrepreneurs away from rural areas nearby. Cities also keep the immigrants. The rural areas don't develop their own businesses as a result.
The other factors do apply to some extent. However the higher productivity of specialized large business in cities means they can pat their workers more; competition means they have to; higher pay provides more agency (choices, basically) and contact with/observation of other people from a variety of cultures, who have made a variety of educational, lifestyle, and occupational choices, better informs families when making their own choices.
These effects offset institutional and political weaknesses and dilute cultural factors.
Generally, rural places in America where the farmers are of Germanic descent tend to be a little less depressing than where the farmers are of Anglo descent. I don't think there are many German farmers in the Central Valley, although some of the grape growers are Italian like Gallo and Mondavi.
As far as rivers go, the San Joaquin once upon a time was navigable, but now isn't. Also the Sacramento River was navigable from the Bay all the way past Red Bluff. Dams and farms destroyed these river systems and lots of lakes (famously Tulare Lake).
Indeed...
https://eccentricculinary.substack.com/p/californiaa-vanishing-lakes-and-the
English society is high trust. What happened in the western US?
Selection effects
I don't know; I wasn't there. But: gated housing developments with guards on the gates, a reputation for corruption in government, (consequent?) distrust of big government and underinvestment in public capital, and winner-take-all economics (e.g. fixed property taxes) all seem to be features these days.
"Median income" can mean different things that often get confused. When you see figure in the $25-40k range in the US, it typically means median personal income for everyone over the age of 16. This includes students, retirees, homemakers, people on disability, part-time workers, etc., so the value is typically about 2/3 of the median earnings for full-time workers, and half of the median household income, and should not be (but very frequently is) confused with either of these.
Note that this is not median household income divided by the number of adults in the median household. It's based on asking people over the age of 16 how much money they personally make, as individuals.
Per capita income, on the other hand, is total personal income divided by population. So if people have a lot of children, that's going to drag the average down.
Gotta love the "(UTC Time)" on the Fresno housing price plot, as if seven or eight hours on that scale weren't less than 1/40 of a pixel.
“ Although immigrants don’t usually lower wages”
The evidence is against that. There’s a negative elasticity between immigration and wages, particularly for low skilled immigration and lower wages.
"Immigrants don't lower wages", we brought in 100,000 immigrants and while the current 100,000 residents make half as much money as before, the 5 CEOs now all make twice as much so on net it is the same! Wages haven't changed!
How has the total population of the region has evolved over years? If I understand the post and comments correctly, it seems like any Central Valley resident with any ambition and means leaves for the big cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, but those urban regions are so sprawling that they grow into the Central Valley itself (which could mean that those counties get the costs of serving suburbanites without any of economic activity, and thus tax revenue, of those residents). Also, the Central Valley does have some decent and not declining urban centers like Sacramento or Davis, but they are generally concentrated in the North, which is doing better generally than the South.
Is this right, or have I missed something?
1. "There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed." RFK
The idea that some 40 year old has any objective notion of actual history is laughable. Would you rather your child be born in the 1900, 1930, 1960, 1990, 2020? The objective answer is 2020.
2. Read the first 2 pages of Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879). It is the same question: why amidst technological advances is there still poverty?
Every few years it's time to pull out Candide, ou l'Optimisme for a reread.
Matthew Yglesias thinks the advances in digital entertainment are not such a good thing:
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1561663020492890113
>I’m a bit sad that I don’t have time to play everything I’m interested in due to adult responsibilities and would love to be a kid again so that I could…
Kids probably had more fun playing video games in the 90s than kids do today
This obession you have with video games is weird, but the reality is that 'playing a lot of video games' is NOT a strong predictor of mean happiness or lifestime satisfaction.
If your view of the world were correct, American should be happier now than at any point in history. This is absolutely not the case. But hey, I'm sure if everyone just sat down and experienced more solitary electronic amusement, they would be positively joyous!
"there’s much more stigma against bullying-type behavior today that was the bane of my childhood"
It's all fake. I grew up in that climate, and I would much rather have been told "just hit them and make them stop". The schools wouldn't do a damn thing about bullying; their hands are tied by bureaucracy. I was constantly bullied for being a racial minority at my school. When I went to the teachers because of all that bluster in the afterschool specials, nothing got done. I made my parents go and the result was being taken out of class as the victim and feeling more isolated.
Thinking that having "better" ways to be amused on your own is the main determinent of how good a time period is is very sad indeed.
>I doubt kids care about churches and civic institutions
The point is not who has a better childhood - the point is who has a better life (given a particular birth-date starting point). And children back then had more friends, spent more time with friends (instead of playing video games as much - and when they did later on it was more of a social activity at arcades etc).
>How many of those childhood friends last though? For instance, OP said as a kid he did 4H, FFA, and church group, but now has no friends as an adult. I don’t think those childhood activities add much value in terms of adult friendships.
And how do you not see how you're moving the goal posts? You said churches and civic institutions are irrelvant for children, but are now criticizing having a superior social life as a child as irrelevant for adults!
And sure it adds value. If you didn't have many friends as a kid, you almost certainly have a worse social life and worse social skills as an adult. What possible benefit does sitting on your ass playing video games as a kid bring you in adulthood (for the 99.99% of people who will never have any career related to it)?
>And if you want to talk about who has a better life and not just childhood, the advantage in technology of being born today is again overwhelming. It’s not just video games and entertainment, but pervasive.
And yet people are substantially less happy today - all this wonderful technology has certainly not made up for profound decline in friendships, community, religion, civic life, more prevelant/earlier/larger family formation and so on. Oh, but we have video games now!
You can point to anything in the world you want, but none of it is irrelevant if it simply hasn't made people happier. What else could possibly matter?
What is the strongest evidence that "people are substantially less happy today? Can you point to your favorite study which demonstrates this?
People were happier in the past.
This is so sad reading.
And you sound like the kind of person who would at least try to fight the tide of helicopter parenting and overuse of screen time. My dad was also lower-middle class income and mom stayed at home with us.
Our slightly depressed neighborhood of mostly rental houses was great. Trick or treating was safe. People came over for Christmas parties. If you were walking down the street too late at night, the cops would stop and try to figure what was going on and you would be deeply embarrassed. They weren't wearing external level III body armor with an M-16 in the patrol car.
For me it was the whole alimony thing; fundamentally I didn't have enough 'game' to attract a woman of equal earning power, which meant if I marry one of less she basically has a 'put' option on the marriage at my expense indefinitely. Sure there are prenups but then they increase the spousal support to get around the prenup.
I plan to leave the excess funds to the Prostate Cancer Foundation. ;)
My apologies; no shade intended at women who work hard to make marriage work, support a husband or family through difficult times, or negotiate their free-living lifestyle ahead of time. ;) What I don't like is the whole "sure you're a nice guy, but I'm leaving to go find myself, and now you have to pay me a third of your salary in perpetuity." (See Honor Jones in the Atlantic for example.) I don't mind if you pursue your freedom; I've done the same. But don't expect me to pay for it.
(You also said "lack of women" in your post about these areas--wouldn't you be more concerned about the onslaught of creepy guys who won't take no for answer? Serious question.)
Cool. You're right. We're both rationalists so we don't have to stay angry. :)
"I am female and am the higher earner. (My partner is actually a househusband). I'm just ambivalent on kids. He's more solidly on 'no kids' than I was which was the leading factor."
Things have drifted a bit (or more than a bit) from California's central valley...
Let me make a small pitch for not being quite as negative about the current child rearing situation.
I've got a now 21-year old and he was raised in deep blue Silicon Valley. YOU don't have to helicopter parent your children and you don't have to monitor them 24x7. And if you are upper middle class you can even turn them loose with very little chance of a bad (or child welfare department) police interaction. Even if you DO get unlucky and have that bad interaction you will most likely get a warning before anything bad happens.
My child was walking alone the 1-mile from hour house to the local downtown starting when he was about 9. He'd walk to the library, spend an hour or so reading, wander over to a favorite restaurant and have lunch and then walk home. He was never harassed. He was taking light rail, again alone, by the time he was about 11. Again, never an issue ... police never called.
If your spouse is stay-at-home then homeschooling is an option.
The "trick" is finding *other* kids whose parents let them be outside and unsupervised. We mostly missed on this ( :-( ) but I'm pretty sure that those other kids do exist!
So don't assume that you have to raise kids helicoptered. You don't!
I'll admit that most of my concerns would be around the difference in medicine, just considering that I'd have a terminal disease if I were in '50-'70, and my children would have not small odds of inheriting it. I'd definitely rather be alive for another 60 years in the modern era than another 10 in the mid 1900s. Your kid is also going to get drafted, whereas I honestly would be surprised if we had another draft in my lifetime considering that the US seems to have mastered the art of proxy wars
Not sure how that is the "objective" answer. I was born in Southern California in 1971 and my childhood/high school years and into the 90s was the most idyllic period I could imagine in my wildest dreams. My children, all born in the 2000's are not going to have anything like that. The America I grew up in is gone forever.
We used to drive several times a year from LA up through the central valley to visit family right in the middle of it (Turlock/Modesto/Oakdale). It was heaven. Farms, green everywhere, etc. I would not trade those memories to born in the era of "smart" phones and whatever else people think is so great about being born now.
It could be your view is tainted by the lead that was in the gas in 1971.
The life expectancy the year you were born was ~71; when your children were born it was about ~79.
Did you use seatbelts or have airbags in your idyllic childhood drives or was avoiding drunk drivers the main concern. Survivors bias?
Perhaps your mother and the mother of your children would like to compare maternal mortality rates.
Gentle robot overseers roger that.
> robot overseers
Business opportunity: using drones to oversee kids, as a service. Like kindergarten, but maybe cheaper, and available also when kids are a bit sick.
Helicopter in loco parentis.
The gains in workplace safety have been because of market forces via workers insurance laws, and because of past union demands.
OSHA standards and regulations are pretty minimal.
When someone gets hurt, they can't work and it reduces efficiency and productivity and increases costs. Man, machine, milieu, methods - Ishikawa. The man part includes increasing safety. Injury is loss!
Right but those are just preferences of focus. I would rather live 71 years with no seatbelt laws and cops who don't look like soldiers in Afghanistan than 79 years like we live today. It's not "objective."
The cops were way worse in 1971.
Even if there is no excuse for the militarization of them in the last few decades.
We see how they act now with body-cams, how do you think they acted when there was basically no public oversight? The police of the 70s actively resisted reform attempts like for example having college education requirements.
Why on Earth would you want a college education to be a requirement for a police officer?
And why would anyone expect it to improve their character on the beat? Reduce incidences of unnecessary force, for example, or abuse of authority?
I suppose if you assume that learning calculus, pulling all-nighters, drinking too much, and writing papers analyzing "Native Son" makes you an all-around better person, more humane and insightful, you could come to that conclusion.
An idyllic drive in the 70s. Did you have to wait in the lines at gas stations.
If this pandemic had hit in 71, there would probably have been 10 million dead in the US not a million (which is still pathetic).
Crime, heroin, police brutality all worse in 1971 than in the 2000s.
I suppose a crooked President who resigned might be marginally better than the orange clown who didn't and attempted an insurrection.
Again, some of these are trade offs (and the others debateable). The cops were not "worse" where I grew up. And how can you know what would have happened with Covid in the 70s?
We had a year of lawlessness on behalf of leftist causes, but one group of idiots at the capital who had zero chance of overthrowing anything is cause of widespread panic about an insurrection.
oy. There wouldn't have been a safe and effective vaccine in 9 months
A year of lawlessness. Laughing out loud.
Bobby Kennedy was talking about guys like you.
I know. I didn't grow up in Watts, where the police did what they had to do maintain order.
What does that have to do with me? I didn't ask to be born in a country that was more or less culturally and ethnically homogenous and then turned into a refugee camp for the entire world during my lifetime.
Our experiment in "civic nationalism" has failed because it doesn't work with large groups of people who barbeque live guinea pigs in central park and wonder why the police get called.
According to the CDC[1,2] the maternal mortality rate was 18.8 deaths per 100,000 births in 1971 and 23.8 deaths per 100,000 births in 2020.
-----------------
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/mort71_2a.pdf, Table 1-15.
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2020/maternal-mortality-rates-2020.htm
Well that stinks, maybe that a different discussion.
But 2020 I think maybe an an outlier. Since 20.1 in 2019. And 17.4 in 2018.
And if you look at the actual table - there is certainly a problem with pregnancies over 40.
But did you see the rates from 1954 to 1971 as well thru 1915 (p 83) and the footnote for 70 and 71, in which "non-residents" were excluded.
54 52.4
55 47.0
56 40.9
57 41.0
58 37.6
59 37.4
60 37.1
61 36.9
62 35.2
63 35.8
64 33.3
65 31.6
66 29.1
67 28.0
68 24.5
69 22.5
70 21.5
71 18.8
But compare
1987 6.6
1988 8.4
1989 7.9
1990 8.2
1991 7.9
1992 7.8
1993 7.5
1994 8.3
1995 7.1
1996 7.6
1997 8.4
1998 7.1
1999 9.9
2000 9.8
2001 9.9
2002 8.9
2003 12.1
2004 13.1
2005 15.1
2006 13.3
2007 12.7
2008 12
2009 13.5
2010 12.1
2011 13.3
2012 11.9
2013 13.4
2014 13.7
2015 13.1
2016 12.8
2017 17.4
2018 17.4
See the historic chart
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-brief-report/2020/dec/maternal-mortality-united-states-primer
There's a great deal of truth in that. I've watched my own kids get started as young adults (my oldest just turned 30) and there's no question in my mind it's significantly harder than it was for me and my brothers 45 years ago. It's harder to build a decent middle-class career and life, it often seems to be a harsh choice between being a fanatic and trying to squeeze into the upper class by 80-hour work weeks, huge piles of student loans, kissing every ass you can and making zero social mistakes, or ending up dependent in some way or another. You can definitely still succeed, don't get me wrong, but the effort and wits required seems more, and in particular the room for error seems much smaller. That whole generation seems on the whole less happy, more stressed, feels less free and more hemmed in, pushed around. It's no wonder they're not having as much sex or babies as we did ha ha.
This feels different. When I was just getting started, I had opportunities my father and uncles didn't, and both they and I knew that, and looked at it as a good thing -- it meant genuine progress, that the world was slowly getting better for everyone. It seemed much easier for my generation to break out of birth circumstances, to do things our dads and grandfathers never dreamed about -- to be an engineer where they had been mere mechanics, say, or be a physician where they had been just schmos in a warehouse. Going to college was much more possible than it had ever been, class barriers were much reduced, and it was reasonably affordable, there were places where you could still work your way through on your own.
Why this is happening is a God-damned mystery to me, although of course I have my pet theories like anybody else might. But it definitely seems to be going on, a very slow gradual grinding multi-decadal impoverishment of opportunity for the young.
I'm aware there are anecdotes of success, thanks.
No, it's not, certainly. My response was directed at the part of your comment that constituted new data, which is the experience of yourself and your friends. It is of course anecdotal, but so is my observation, and in both cases it's still data.
By itself this establishes nothing about general truths, but both are interesting stories that demonstrate the variety of experiences out there. If you are persuaded that your (and your friends) had no more difficulty "getting started" in life than any other generation, then that's great news. It isn't exactly what I've seen, but I don't pretend to have seen everything.
I'm baffled by what bearing you see the BLS data having on the question. A priori the point you've established is that 1/3 of the jobs in the US pay above $100k, which is a fair distance above the mean wage ($34,000). But...what else would you expect? There are jobs above the average, there are jobs below the average. That 1/3 of the jobs are above average doesn't seem by itself to say much about the typical experience of a young job-seeker. (Indeed, about all we *can* say is that 2/3 of people starting off in careers will *not* end up in those high-paying careers.)
If I sort that BLS list by income, I find I need to go all the way to #21before finding any career that doesn't requires a graduate degree as an entrance credential. #21 itself is "CEO" and I think that doesn't quite qualify as a starter job. The entire list of 142 above $100k has 54 (38%) that require advanced degrees.
Was it also true in 1975 that ~40% of the jobs paying $18,000 or more (the equivalent of $100,000 or more in 2022) required graduate degrees? Maybe. Feels a little dubious to me, though. It might be a salary to which you had to work your way up, over some years, proving yourself. But that the gate might be permanently closed unless you could afford college *and* graduate school seems much less likely to me, although I have only my memories on which to base this.
I love this. It encapsulates exactly what my experience has been. I have a PhD. Neither of my parents graduated HS. I am a member of the "striver" class, and I can handle it, but my kids are not going to have the trajectory I did.
<i>The idea that some 40 year old has any objective notion of actual history is laughable. Would you rather your child be born in the 1900, 1930, 1960, 1990, 2020? The objective answer is 2020.</i>
The mental illness and suicide statistics say otherwise.
There are way too many suicides. (I think globally since 1990 more suicide deaths than deaths by war. WHO reports. )
But maybe all those who make up today's mental illness and suicides, were previously victims of war, drunk driving, unsafe automobiles and workplaces, and poor medicine.
<i>But maybe all those who make up today's mental illness and suicides, were previously victims of war, drunk driving, unsafe automobiles and workplaces, and poor medicine.</i>
Firstly, do you have any reason to think that's actually the case?
Secondly, I'd rather live a non-suicidally-depressed life and die from a workplace accident, than be so miserable I end up topping myself, even if my life is equally long in both scenarios.
I am against death from all causes.
I am not sure what to make of the trade you propose in point 2. You mention work place accidents (ok since I did) but what if going to war and unsafe automobile travel (drunk and reckless driving in unsafe cars were really hidden methods of "topping")
As to point 1, it is or has been (I am pretty sure) by an large safer to be a teenager/young adult than it was before, notwithstanding tragically increasing suicide rates. I suppose we'd test the hypothesis by comparing survival rates of 14 to 30 year olds (i.e. chances of 14 year old making it to 31) historically.
Another topic for a different thread, but its not really a case of "so miserable that one ends up topping oneself". (Or so I would propose.) There aren't I don't think more "so miserable people" per 100K. What there is are less "suicide-averse thinking people" per 100K. The removal of the taboo on suicide seems to be part of the root problem. Once it is normalized that there is allegedly legitimate auto-euthanasia, then the step to saying end of life (terminal illness) misery might be the same non-terminal misery gets unfortunately easier. Of course, the second root is again not increased miserableness but increased access to instrumentalities (the ubiquity of guns and opioids.)
Again, you haven't given any reason to think that the obvious explanation is the right one.
What is the obvious explanation? I am not sure anymore what we are "explaining". (Increased access to instrumentalities of suicide has increased suicides. Sounds like an obvious explanation.)
Then mental illness should have been much worse in the past.
How would we know it wasn't?
Ask me again in 2110.
>The objective answer is 2020.
You are OBJECTIVELY wrong.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/3A457QN25ZF5LL5JQ6WX25Z3KI.jpg&w=767
Those are extremely tiny changes, amounting to 1% of the total range. The best description of that plot is "no matter what happens, people on average are equally happy".
LOL. For goodness sakes, 2.212 ~= 2.2, 2.178 ~2.2, The precision (3 decimal places) is amazing for a scale of 1 to 3! Having an ice cream cone surely increases happiness at least by .5
What is the standard deviation? Probably 1.414.
I would take slightly less "happiness" in exchange for some more "statistical thinking".
Reflecting: maybe you were being sarcastic.
I lived in Davis for about 6 years when I did my phd, and loved it. I think you can get to Tahoe in closer to 90 minutes. You have nothing but sun for 9 months of the year. Summers are too hot, but it's at least low humidity heat, and it often cools down substantially at night and in the mornings -- unlike in the midwest. Winters are mild, and by March 15th you have sunny, 60-70 degree weather. Wine country is right there. Also 90 minutes to San Francisco. Seemingly lots of things to see and do. I remember reading how polluted the air is, but I mostly didn't notice it myself.
That said, Davis is an oasis b/c of the UC there. I remember driving through nearby small towns with visible signs of poverty that looked approximately 100% hispanic. I have never been to Merced but I've also heard bad things.
I was in high school from 1990-1993 in the area and it was bad back then. I was in small towns -- Reedley, Hanford, Lemoore. We only lived in Hanford for a few weeks before moving; the town water smelled like rotten eggs and we couldn't handle it.
We never went to Fresno even though everyone had cars because we were all scared of being shot there. The only people with "good" jobs were stationed at the Lemoore Naval Air Station. Which was the destination when the US shut down bases in the Philippines, so Lemoore High had the weird demographic of being like 30% Filipino; I was the only non-Filipino on the high school tennis team my senior year.
It was hot back then. I remember a 30 day stretch of over 100. We checked the PBS station in the mornings to see if school was going to be delayed due to fog or not. Driving outside of the town meant among the farms and ranches you hit so many bugs you had to hose off your windshield once a week or so.
There wasn't a movie theatre in Lemoore, in retrospect I don't remember any of us ever going to see a movie, which would have required driving to the next town over. Even though we all had cars, we never really left town because outside was just giant farms for miles in every direction.
Even though my school had honors classes and plenty of smart kids there was also just a general lack of vision about what to do in life. The school valedictorian went on to attend community college.
So I'm not really buying any real golden age there.
Your one line about immigrants not lowering wages unless agriculture is the only industry really cleared up why my personal experience never matched the data on immigration. I grew up in an area where everyone was in either agriculture or construction, and it seemed clear that immigrants were lowering the wages of both. I'm glad there's an explanation that doesn't conflict with the data.
I don't really think the data on immigrants not lowering wages is really believable. Immigrants are good for employers and especially big business. They absolutely drive down wages, you see this in construction, bank tellers, programming, frankly everywhere they are common, and the stories about how this all somehow nets out in the end don't really make any sense.
Oh I am aware of the general story. Immigrants are great for Coke, so economists love immigrants (because economics as a discipline is mostly in the thrall of big business). But generally the people being scolded that "actually the immigrants are good for everyone even you" are exactly the people most hurt/displaced by them.
And the fact that Coke makes 3% more profit this year and their beverages cost $0.005 less is a benefit that really does not accrue to a very large slice of the population, and is little solace to the dude who saw his job lost or his income cut 20%.
Immigrants are AMAZING when you have a labor shortage (say the 17-1800s US which had a poor balance of people to land/resources). That is not the state of affairs in most of the world.
The stubbornly tight labor market of the last year or two following a massive immigration crackdown has led me to come around to the belief that immigrants can depress wages as well.
California has regulated itself into oblivion, has an unfunded pension mandate that is going to break the state and has done really weird things with water and other resource management that has destroyed it. The rich people who live in the bay area and LA look out over the vast wasteland of the central valley and are dumbfounded by what's wrong with it. California is a microcosm of what the entire US will look like in 50 years. Like a south American country with super rich gated communities with box cities surrounding them.
Quote: “California is a microcosm of what the entire US will look like in 50 years. Like a south American country with super rich gated communities with box cities surrounding them.”
This is a good prediction of the general trajectory of very large countries, in particular if they are (relatively speaking) sparsely populated, and if they share a common language. Large Latin American countries would be examples. But the US could drift that way as well. It is also an American country, albeit in the Northern part, and with a common language across regions.
..if a country is very large & the language is shared, people can easily move with their feet if they dislike where they grow up, or dislike their present surroundings. That creates geographical selection effects. You get sorting into gated communities (micro-welfare states), pseudo-gated communities (local high housing prices & locally funded police serves as a pseudo-barrier to outsiders), and 3rd world areas beyond that. Being big also means that it is difficult to coordinate politics across the whole country/polity, to solve common problems (made worse by federalism and formal & informal checks and balances on getting anything done). Generalized trust-building also becomes more difficult when a country is very large.
Small countries have other problems - for example, they need to smooch up to some larger country to be protected against other large countries. (Thankfully, they can often count on big countries having an interest in having small countries as allies.) But small countries can more easily overcome the above type of collective action problems.
As the then-ruler of fairly newly minted Montenegro remarked, when a journalist asked if it was really a wise decision to set up a state as small of Montenegro: “Have you ever seen a small European country that is poor”?
...so the puzzle that needs explaining, is perhaps why the US is not more similar to Argentina and Brazil already. What slows down the process?
Montenegro became independent in 2006. All the poorer, smaller countries you list are in Eastern Europe. Poverty may have something to do with the history of Eastern Europe, to put it that way. That said, the statement was meant as a bit of dry humour, food for thought-ish. You could see what he meant, at the time.
You aren't supposed to do one word responses, but I "like" this one. It gives a lot to think about.
> “Have you ever seen a small European country that is poor”?
Survivor bias. Countries that were small *and* poor were easy to conquer.
On balance national size is probably a benefit for per capita incomes because of economies of scale, so long as the nation is a coherent economic entity and not a failed state. Economies of scale are probably why the US is richer than Canada, which has both more natural resources per capita, and, one would think, more favorable demographics.
Singapore and Liechtenstein are rich, but that's because they serve specialized, non-scalable functions in the global economy. If Malaysia were broken up into Singapore-sized entities or Germany into Liechtenstein-sized ones, they would both be poorer.
The mechanisms I suggest are not primarily related to average GDP per capita; they are more related to the regional and social distribution of whatever wealth that is produced.
For reasons given, I believe these mechanisms are more likely to be at play in large countries than small countries. Including in the three largest American countries: the US, Brazil and Argentina. (But quite possibly also in Canada.)
That said, these mechanisms are obviously just some among many that are at play, and they may be overrun by others. Many small, Central American countries are poor and uneven. So are many small, East European countries over here. And so on.
Bad historical luck, degree of ethnic homogeneity , landlocked or not, differences in settler culture etc. etc. all play their parts. (My landlord a year I lived in Berkeley claimed that "while our settlers came to find God, Latin American settlers came to find gold" - and why not; it is also a possible mechanism - I am agnostic when it comes to the sum total of potential mechanisms influencing the trajectory of a country.)
That said, and as an outsider looking at the American continent from Europe, I think it is more fruitful to ask why it takes so long for the US to become more like Brazil and Argentina, rather than to ask why it takes the US so long to become more like other "western" (read: European) countries. It makes sense to assume that large settler-countries in the Americas should - across time - look more similar to each other, as the influence of their different colonial pasts gradually wanes.
So the obvious solution for the US is to break up into separate jurisdictions then? I mean, from an European perspective that makes sense...
>Economies of scale are probably why the US is richer than Canada, which has both more natural resources per capita, and, one would think, more favorable demographics.
On average, yes, though at the top, the best (most intelilgent/competent) people are mostly in the US. Both because they have a larger population (and threfore higher absolute number of elites) and because they have historically been where some of the smartest and most capable people in the world have been drawn to.
Yes, and you could call this one of the benefits of economies of scale. All things equal, more ambitious people are not going to be content to be "big fish in a small pond." They are going to be drawn towards the biggest, most competitive, most cutting-edge playing field. Though my sense is this particular dynamic is winner-take-all; there's very few points for second place (which, in the West, I suppose would be Germany).
Think Brazil, but with worse weather, less attractive females, and a more hyperbelligerent foreign policy.
So you're saying Brazil has a better living standard then the US? So immigrants should move to Brazil instead of the US?...
No. I am saying that the United States is on a trajectory to become Brazil, but without the charm.
So Brazil will be more attractive then the US for immigrants?
It well might. Brazil has a lot of immigrants already.
This whole post is driving me crazy. "The vast wasteland of the central valley" comprises 1% of US farmland and produces 25% of the country's food, including 40% of the best stuff. Without that largesse, we and much of the world would be hungry. The rich people who live in the Bay Area and LA should be down on their knees honoring the people who grow their food, not turning their noses up at them.
OH I am with you. THEY perceive it as a vast wasteland. Not me. Any "wasteland" properties it has now is the fault of the coastal elites and politicians.
Gotcha--I guess it's time for me to take a deep breath! The original post was just too much for me. The idea that someone living in SAN FRANCISCO would drive through the Central Valley and find the CV to be the irredeemable, poverty-stricken hellhole is nuts. And I was in complete agreement with your first sentence.
Yes this. One of the big reason we left Oakland & CA, despite being successful laptop class, & having a really nice old house, was realizing how our clueless neighbors' politics were preventing any hope for change.
The timing makes perfect sense to me if wages were dropping between the 70s and 80s and the place crashed in the 90s.
Think about it in terms of generations and generational wealth. If a middle-class family in the early 1980s already had a house and some established wealth (not a lot, necessarily), they can better weather changes in wages and front line economic conditions. Also, when an economy starts to hurt, it's usually the lowest paid and least skilled workers who take the initial hit. In this case, my guess would be that far fewer young people were hired, rather than large scale layoffs of existing workers.
Either way, those people already living there and doing okay continued to be mostly okay, but it drained the prospects of future generations. People at the top of their earning potential in the 1980s will be retiring in the 90s, but because of the change in economic conditions, fewer people are moving up to fill their places. This hurts the overall economy, as there is less money available to buy things from local stores or whatever. The chain effect becomes a spiral and will continue to get worse unless/until something big comes to the Valley to reverse the trend. With tough state regulations and very little incentive to pick the Valley over other parts of California, that seems pretty unlikely.
This is the same pattern that's played out in many parts of the Northeast and the Rust Belt. Old industries shut down, and as the existing money-holders die or move away, the economy sinks over time. Towns don't usually die right after a big manufacturing plant shuts down (unless it's the only major employer or something similar), but a plant shutting down can spell long term doom due to the knock-on effects later.
Sarah Mock’s book “Farm and other F words” on agricultural business practices feels relevant here. Inefficiency abounds with high capital costs preventing new entries in the market. Everything relies on artificially low labor price, which keeps the farm workers poor. Farming in the USA is generally myopic and pessimal, and I don’t think the Central Valley is worse than most other places. It’s just closer.
Someone shoulda ast Joan Didion, herself a Central Valley native.
This is really a side issue, but it's the only thing in this post I'm qualified to talk about.
The 1999 LA Times article said, "First-rate culture is scarce. The state capital doesn’t even have a symphony."
That was true then. The Sacramento Symphony had crashed financially and disbanded. But it soon reformed as the Sacramento Philharmonic (new organization, most of the same musicians) and still exists, despite their beloved music director dying unexpectedly a couple years ago. First concert of the season is a month from now: they're playing a violin concerto by Wynton Marsalis, isn't that an interesting notion.
But the same thing - orchestra disbands, later reformed - has happened in Oakland, in San Jose, and in San Diego, as well as in a lot of other cities around the country (Denver, New Orleans ...)
Also I should add that Stockton, Modesto, and Fresno all have professional symphony orchestras which prosper fairly well. Maybe other cities in the Central Valley do as well (I know there's one that splits its season between Redding and Chico), but I mention those because I've been to concerts by all three some time in the last decade (they were playing programs so interesting I couldn't resist taking the drive out), and they all did credit to themselves.
I just stopped by to say that I really appreciated this insider perspective!
I think there's a story here the data aren't telling. Give me Fresno over San Francisco any day.
[Me: I'm an environmental consultant (in a niche part of the field) who lived in Davis, then SF for 12 years until 2016. I still work exclusively with clients in California, including a lot of work in Fresno.]
Here's a story that will seem silly to anyone from outside SF but I can't forget it. In 2019 a Fresno client took me to lunch at a strip mall restaurant, and HE LEFT HIS LAPTOP BAG ON THE FRONT SEAT OF THE CAR. It was there when we got back. San Franciscans: Can you imagine such a thing? (In SF, the 4th time my car got broken into the only thing left worth stealing was the jack. So that was taken.)
That same day, the client drove me to see what he considered desperate poverty: a neighborhood in the shadows of an agricultural feed mill. It was smelly and industrial, the houses were small and older, BUT THE PEOPLE WERE LIVING IN HOUSES. I kept waiting for the kind of brutal conditions you see on every street in San Francisco--there is some of that in Fresno, but nothing like CA's coastal cities.
Then we went to a school where we were doing a project. Across the street from the school, a house was for sale. It was small, probably 1000 sq ft, on about 1/8 acre. But it, and its street mates, were well-maintained--lawns were mowed, houses painted. The price? $78,000.
Compare the opioid overdose rate between SF and Fresno Counties: 44 vs 7.
Possibly, what seems like poverty that is "humbling and a little scary" to rich coastal front-rowers, is a relatively pleasant middle class lifestyle to a Mexican immigrant earning 10x the median household of his home country?
The median household income in Mexico is nearly $14,000. You're probably thinking of one of the much poorer Central American countries.
Actually, I didn't realize that I was looking at a weird statistic called "Household Income per Capita," which you have to multiply by some number of "people in the household" for the numbers to match up. Thanks for calling my attention to that.
But at the same time, the richest states in Mexico have incomes about 4x higher than those in the poorest states, which are probably more representative of the situation of those coming to the US to work picking fruit in 115 degree weather in the Central Valley.
This is not relevant to your point, but might be worth keeping in mind for future reference:
1) Mexico is a middle-of-the-road country for per-capita wealth. Not wealthy like the US or Denmark or Ireland or South Korea, but wealthier than many other countries (think sub-saharan Africa, Laos, Bangladesh, Pakistan ....)
2) Mexico's per-capita income is roughly comparable to Russia. Really.
3) Both Russia and Mexico have fairly skewed income distributions (not claiming the US doesn't ...) so you have to be careful about averages.
You’re putting a lot of weight on two or three testimonials that said “things are getting worse since the days I was a kid”. You should see if there are *more* of those testimonials now than there were in the 1990s or 1970s, or if they are at the same frequency, before believing that the 1990s were a relevant change.
Mark Arax's work is helpful in detailing some of the bad choices that have had toxic effects on the CV, but many of the underlying issues have been there for a long, long time—way before the 1990s.
In parallel, there is an area of Hawaii that was impoverished and unscenic. I remember reading that Bette Midler(actress) grew up in such an area. Still, there are degrees of unscenic!
I'm going to guess the brain drain is a central problem. And it is the same across much of the USA. Smart people go to college, get good jobs and leave. I kept thinking of "Coming Apart" by C. Murray, if I was any good at writing I would enter it in next years book review.
Glibly, it's only bad if by the standards of the USA. By Mexican standards it's pretty normal.
If you look at raw population growth, the central Valley is if anything doing better than the coasts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_census#/media/File:Annual_population_growth_in_the_U.S._by_county_-_2010s.png
Santa Cruz County has had effectively zero population growth, is rapidly turning into a (Feudal) retirement village due to hollowed out middle-to upper-middle-class, middle-age demos, of course housing is the main contributor; right now I'm watching the Planning Commission review/edit the final drafts of the years long General Plan / Code update for the County...(lots of "Santa Cruz" urbanized "metro" area is in fact in the unincorporated County)...they just spent the last 40 minutes debating whether a temporary produce sales area should be limited to 3600 (as planning proposed) or 1800sq ft. (Commissioners edit)....proceed by induction
Conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson has written extensively about the Central Valley. His farming family has lived there at least two generations and he gives very good insights about what has happened in the culture of the place.
I was going to refer to him also. He's been there long enough to see it happen.
Yeah, kind of surprised anyone would write about CV without mentioning Hanson.
Wow, there are a lot of comments here. But the story sounds similar to another valley, the one I grew up in: the Ohio River Valley. It also crashed in the late 1990s. The cause there was the litigation against Big Tobacco. Tobacco was a labour intensive crop that also generated a lot of money per acre. My small town of 2000 people had three auction warehouses. A family with a small amount of land 20 acres or so could easily make a nice little supplement to their factory income off the tobacco crop. big tobacco gets sued, the lawyers get rich and the small town Ohio Valley farmers never recovered. This brings up an issue that might be relevant to California: Tobacco, like milk and chicken in Canada was a supply side regulated industry. The farmer had a quota, which created scarcity artificially, but this then boosted price and profits for the farmer. I suspect that supply side quota systems are not in place in the central valley for their crops. This ensures big farms with slim margins. Similar to the central valley, the Ohio Valley also suffers from smog and pollution at higher levels. Coal gets shipped down from West Virginia to countless coal power plants along the river. What would be worth exploring since the date of decline in California central valley seems to be a few years after the political shift from Red State to Blue State is what policy changes took place during that time?
Graphing per capita income relative to California seems a bit off -- California as a whole has grown significantly wealthier in the past few decades, so the change "relative" would be a weird combination of central valley getting worse off vs. e.g. the Bay Area getting richer.
More generally, I would be curious how much this is a central valley problem and how much the same would be true if you took the agricultural parts of any state -- is it just that the poorest parts of every state are worse off than Mississippi? That would point to very different explanations than "what specifically is bad about the Central Valley?"
Agreed better to normalise agaibst the US as a whole
Alternative theory: The cost of doing business in California is very high, the parts of California that have low labor/capital intensive businesses can absorb this overhead in ways that the poorer high labor/capital intensive areas cannot.
https://www.stewarttitleguaranty.com/en/insights/2021/09/30/cost-of-doing-business-by-state-2021.html
Here is some metrics on temporary ag workers. California has a lot - but not disproportionally so.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/
All kinds of interesting observations in that data set:
"More than 80 percent of hired crop farmworkers are not migrant workers but are considered settled, meaning that they work at a single location within 75 miles of their home. This share is up from 41 percent in 1996-98, reflecting a profound change in the nature of the crop farm workforce."
Having a minimum wage in the same ballpark as the median income can't help.
10000% true
Hmm...I was about to say that, while I liked this essay, the whole "poor region in a rich state" thing is hardly unique to California. Which I think is still true, but eyeballing that list of metropolitan areas by per capita income, my test case - Upstate New York - doesn't come off as badly as the Central Valley. The lowest-ranked city, Rochester, is 156th; NYC is 14th. Still a big difference, but not as big as the difference between, say the Bay Area and Bakersfield.
(Might also be worth mentioning that those figures are from 2010, and LA ranks 86th. Also somehow Chicago isn't even on there? That seems weird.)
Also, Upstate New York, while bitterly cold in winter, is a pretty pleasant region otherwise. I'd rather live there than in the Central Valley. But it is quite poor, especially compared to the NYC area. Maybe the difference between LA/the Bay (especially the latter) and the Central Valley is just the most extreme example of a thing that exists throughout the country. Which would be very on-brand for California.
One interesting comparison...opioid death rate (annual per 100,000)
Fresno County CA: 7
Monroe County NY: 31
I think my argument here is that there are multiple poverties. The poverty of the Central Valley is, (broadly speaking), the poverty of migrant workers greatly outearning their countrymen back home. The poverty of some other parts of the US, like Upstate NY, is the poverty of unemployed white people in despair.
Yeah, good point.
Reading this article is how I imagine it feels to live in a "less-developed" part of the world and read poverty-porn articles from American media outlets. The author "drives through as fast as possible" but feels comfortable making sweeping claims on the "misery" of the Central Valley based on a couple of newspaper articles and a few time-series plots.
"Temperatures often reach 110 F." Maybe going forward we'll see more of that, but by most accounts any day over 100 F is exceptional heat. A typical summer day? Balmy morning, a few hours of dry heat in the late afternoon, and warm, breezy evenings.
"Most people in the central Valley are conservative." The Central Valley is certainly more conservative than CA coastal cities. By area, I have no doubt that the Central Valley is majority conservative. But, since the author is already lumping the entire Central Valley under a single umbrella, I would be curious if "most" actually bears out in the distribution of political affiliations among Central Valley-ites. Lump in Sacramento and Stockton, and, since the author says "most people" and not "most voters," all of the non-citizen farm workers (documented or not).
"Sacramento is the sixth smoggiest area in the country." Based on an article from 1999. I would be curious how Sacramento air quality compares to standards today. "The smell." The author drove by a freeway-adjacent dairy on his way to LA and now knows what a four-hundred-mile swath of the country smells.
"Depressing tule fog." A morning mist that burns off by 8 am most days?
"Severe drought... partly [from] California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities." Coastal urban water demand has almost nothing to do with agricultural water shortages. Going to self-cite on this one (laziness; PhD in water resources engineering; married to a UC Berkeley water resources economist). Lack of winter rain/snow and associated land fallowing in the Central Valley almost definitely impacts agricultural labor demand.
"Everyone who can get out of the Central Valley does." Uh. Yes, most Californians are just dying to move to the Bay to try to eek out a semblance of life where a 2BR house costs $1.5M. If this doesn't reek of coastal elite naivety, I don't know what does. Disclaimer: By most definitions, I am a "coastal elite" (am reading this stack, after all) and, over the last 13 years lived in the Bay for a combined five years (and liked it).
"Drugs and crime have gotten worse." Like everywhere in the country.
The poverty and challenges of the Central Valley are super real. And it's no doubt great to see Bay-Area Californians peering outside of their bubble (walk around SF and survey strangers on what "the Delta" is to get a sense of the magnitude of that bubble). But this article amounts to the kind of naïve, drive-by opinion peddling that undermines nuance and so classically characterizes the self-assured attitudes that drive (similarly stupid) caricatures of "coastal elites."
Yes, yes, yes! Thank you. I am a big fan of our fine author here, but this post drove me mad. Imagine looking out at some of the most productive farmland in the world from the hellhole of San Francisco (former decade-long SF resident here!) and asking what's wrong with them!
And the irony (and, I would smugly argue, the case in point) is a comments section that is now populating with a bunch of people pontificating on problems that they became "informed" on based on an uninformed hack piece.
All good though; better to keep the riff raff out of my happy hamlet of normal humans.
I also hate San Francisco! I wrote a whole post a few months ago on what was wrong with it!
I don't love or hate either SF or the Central Valley. Balls should be called balls and strikes should be called strikes (sort of the ethos here, right?), but make sure you're watching the game if you want to ump it, Scott!
While most of your comment is solid, the heat remark is just wrong. I lived in Chico for two years and it was over 100 degrees -- *signficantly* over 100 degrees -- for most of the summer. I remember walking down the street the week before Thanksgiving and it was 93 degrees. It's effing hot in the Valley.
Fair enough. We benefit from the Delta breeze in Sac. Typical summer day here is 60s in the morning, 90 by mid afternoon (but dry and manageable in the shade; did I mention the trees in this town?), and beautiful, breezy, dry 80s by 6:30/7. Totally underrated. The recent heatwave not withstanding (which was brutal and makes me concerned for the future here).
> But this article amounts to the kind of naïve, drive-by opinion peddling that undermines nuance and so classically characterizes the self-assured attitudes that drive (similarly stupid) caricatures of "coastal elites."
This is the correct take! I like Scott's writing but sometimes they make it so easy...
-(Fresno born and raised, Bay Area for school)
Scroll up and you'll see plenty of comments from your fellow Central Valley-ites that make it seem even worse than what Scott depicts. You criticize Scott for relying on "a couple of newspaper articles and a few time-series plots", but you don't even have that much to back your own comment.
That would be valid criticism if my point was: "the Central Valley is greatest." But my point was: This is a poor characterization that draws on limited information to make some sweeping conclusions. That kind of thinking, I think, is the opposite of what we're going for in this forum. The Central Valley certainly has issues that deserve attention, but this was a simplistic, heavy-handed hack job.
The main things you write about just make me think the answer is pretty simple. It is a place with a poor economy that attracted a disproportionate amount of poor people. You see this in a lot of rust belt areas too.
You have some former sawmill town, or railroad town that is the regional hub with ~15,000 people. It was while things were thriving 50-80 years ago the richest place with the nicest houses and best people for 50 miles in any direction. Then as the economy falls apart the well off people move out to lakes and maybe a neighboring bedroom community, and what you are left with is a hollowed out core that has the central business district, the cheapest housing in 50 miles in any direction, and not enough jobs for all the low skilled people who move in. unemployment ends up being horrific, and the misery is a lot more concentrated than if it was spread out across 3 counties like it was 50 year before. Plus there aren't the remaining doctors/lawyers still living in town to counterbalance those forces.
Basically the central valley is SF/LA but without all the rich and upper middle class people to balance out the poverty. So even if there is in aggregate fewer destitute people, the average is overall much worse.
A community with 100 HHs, 1 rich HH, 9 upper middle class HH, 30 middle class HH 30 working class HH and 30 indigent HH is MUCH more pleasant to live in than one with 20 HHs 1 upper middle class HH, 5 middle class HH, 8 working class HH and 6 indigent HH, even though the ratio of poor people is the same and the total number of them is lower.
Yglesias recently wrote this about immigration policy:
> The unintended legacy of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was that illicit seasonal labor migration was largely replaced by one-off permanent migration, while the three- and 10-year bans made it harder than ever for permanent unauthorized residents to regularize their status without meaningfully deterring illegal entry.
I'm making no claims at all here, because I don't understand the bigger picture of immigration trends in the Central Valley. But if you think that immigration is part of the story, it's worth noting that there were some policy shocks during this time period.
> This is a weird article. It seems to confirm that things used to be better - nobody would call the Central Valley “the good life” now. But its concerns are smog, sprawl, and decreasing share of agriculture. These seem like the problems of somewhere that’s growing - local NIMBYs complaining that too many people want to move in.
I think these are indicative of a growth in *sprawling suburbs*, not in economic productivity. That is, people build houses to live there. But they commute into the city for work (or did pre-covid), and probably also spend a lot of their time and money there, and suburbs are notorious for costing more than they can ever collect in tax revenue to maintain. It also means a decrease in jobs available for anyone can't drive into the city, because these places tend not to build a lot of transit.
What are their educational results like?
I have no idea but it seems important to explain, are they suffering from brain drain or does everything start off badly.
Also the Albion's seed question, are they the same Mexicans as in LA or Arizona, my vague impression is that farm labourers are from the poorer more Indigenous South.
Victor David Hanson, who has written frequently and vividly about the social decay of the valley over the years, had a moving book published in the 1990s, "Fields Without Dreams," about the decline of family farms and the consolidation of agriculture into what are effectively absentee plantations. (The Resnicks are the most famous farmers who live in Beverly Hills, but there are others.) I don't quite recall his specific diagnosis of the cause then, but farming has always been very hard work that kids look for ways to avoid.
As an aside, almost a decade ago there was a ballot measure proposed to split California into six states. Never actually got enough signatures, but there was an interesting analysis by the Legislative Analyst's Office.
If the plan passed, the state that he designated "Silicon Valley" would have been the richest of U.S. states, while "Central California" (mostly the San Joaquin Valley) would have been the poorest. And they are right next to each other, so the economic gradient feels especially steep.
https://lao.ca.gov/ballot/2013/130771.aspx
I remember watching VDH talk about it on a youtube video. One thing he talked about was the water being redirected due to the plight of some endangered fish (I think its the 3 spined spickle back). It's the aggregate of polices like that that really hurt normal farmers.
The inability to keep reliable Central Valley Project supplies flowing to farms in the San Joaquin Valley is a real problem, but I think that is mostly more recent than his book, which was already very gloomy 25 years ago!
I grew up in Modesto, lived there through my teenage years and again in my early 20s.
It's probably a good thing you didn't focus too much on the crime in the Central Valley, because there are TV shows and media dedicated to its plight—American Crime's first season took place in Modesto (https://abc30.com/modesto-abc-american-crime-cecil-russell/718693/), there's the whole Scott Peterson/Laci Peterson murder story, and the fact that Central Valley cities each year vie for the highest grand theft auto rates in the nation—last I checked, Modesto was #1 several years running, but it looks to have been usurped by Bakersfield (by comparison, San Francisco is 6th worst in the nation, and I only see people on Twitter tweeting about crime in SF, let them move to the Valley and see what happens). https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/modesto-ca-is-among-the-worst-cities-in-the-country-for-auto-theft/article_b9607af3-0ec1-5f62-a2fa-15f8219fc390.html
Like a lot of my friends, we left the Central Valley but we still have friends and family who live there. Always a trip to go back on holidays, because it often reinforces why we left. The CV has some sparkles of industry (Gallo Wine probably is #1), but the drug problems, poverty, crime, politics, lack of attractions, and want of industry are hard to justify staying there in any permanent capacity. That being said, I wish my people the best!
I had a really weird encounter with the tweaker community at the frisbee golf park in Modesto once. No particular reason for telling you that.
grew up in bako and it was nice. Seems much safer than LA but IDK. It's conservativish though so we must spew hatred cloaked in analysis. "entire economy is based on devastating the environment in various ways", how kind of you! Much of the air pollution is run off from LA plus it's mostly based on wind patterns anyway.
Two scholars I know of have written about this problem eloquently. Joel Kotkin one of the foremost urbanists published: The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (2020). ISBN-13 : 978-1641770941 and has expounded on his thesis at https://www.newgeography.com/
Victor Davis Hanson is a scholar of the classics and warfare. He is also a central valley farmer. He wrote a book "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming" (2003) ISBN-13 : 978-1893554733. https://www.hoover.org/profiles/victor-davis-hanson
I think both of them would agree that policies, particularly "environmental" policies, imposed by the wealthy elites of the bay Area an LA have been enormously damaging to the working and poor classes of the Central Valley. Example: a large proportion of the fresh water coming out of the mountains is being directed to the Sacramento River delta to protect the Delta Smelt a sub species of bait fish, which is supposedly endangered and whose welfare trumps that of humans.
The way the urban elites treat the rural minorities in California (and New York) is a vivid demonstration of why the smaller states are protected by the two senators per state rule of the US constitution and the electoral college, and why they should never agree to give up those provisions.
Kotkin wrote and has written numerous artic
I read something recently that they're kind of giving up on the delta smelt now. I read Victor Davis Hanson's California essays for years as a long-time reader of City Journal (until they ruined, I mean, revamped, their website you be hip and cool). Joel Kotkin writes for them too.
A disconnect about water. Leftwing/pro-city sources point out they the farmers are the main consumers of water percentage-wise, whereas VDH points put how the farmers don't get enough for, you know, farming.....
Both might be true but you have to really dig into facts.
I feel like this is where you could really get some benefit from high speed commuter rail. Put some high speed rail trains essentially running branch lines into San Francisco and (maybe) LA (the geography makes LA challenging in that regard), and build dense suburb development along the stops of the branch lines for people to commute into the coastal metro areas.
I do think there's a lot to the "plantation economy" aspect of it, especially as people started to stay longer and bring families with border restrictions tightening (much harder to cycle seasonally across the border with a crackdown and high costs for getting back into the US).
Would vast bedroom suburbs really be an improvement?
If SF and LA have a labor shortage, and the Central Valley has a job shortage, then a commuter rail link should help.
LA at least is a big, big place. There's no single point to which you could deliver 100,000 people a day via train and have them all walk to their jobs.
There's no way to build useful high speed rail without bulldozing large parts of built-up cities, which will never happen.
I personally think the Valley is underrated and its diversity under-appreciated. This applies both to its cities and to its rural, ag-based communities. The stories of exploited and impoverished farm labor are all too true—“Factories in the Field” as Carey McWilliams famously described the situation back in Great Depression days. Yet there also are stories of upward mobility and cultural dynamism, such as the celebrated Masumoto and Thao family farms outside Fresno and the vibrant community of Punjabi truck drivers.
There is a treasure trove of literature, music, and other art coming from the Valley and/or about the Valley which has been accumulating since at least the 19th century. I will pick something relatively recent to share, a great track by Cracker from 2014: King of Bakersfield. https://youtu.be/dkvmzJkHx6E
The song illustrates some of the themes you discuss above, Scott, and it captures how love of the Valley is largely a matter of taste. For some, it is a version of California paradise; for others it is a long and boring stretch of empty highway miles. And for all those who know the Valley only from road trips along I-5, know that State Route 99 is significantly less empty. Even better, get off the main highways and explore the back roads. You may be surprised by the beautiful landscapes and interesting people and places you encounter.
As an "urban" midwesterner (KC) engaged to an Iowan but somewhat familiar with Central Valley dynamics, my observation is that the comp to the Midwest is apples to oranges:
1) Yes, a lot of midwest farming is wheat and corn (along with soybean), which entails large corporate farming and all the requisite skill and know how required to do that effectively. Many workers (management on down) are typically college educated. The standard stereotype of midwest farmers being in this category doesn't stick. Many have stable incomes and fall into a normy lifestyle of family, faith and fandom for their alma maters football/basketball teams;
2) The Midwest farmers that are "independent" rely on a small group of local folks (sometimes family) who manage the land. This dynamic leads to leadership supporting them as best they can (you ain't going to let your cousin or daughter's friend she grew up with go hungry and shelterless).
Some do well, some dont. For the former, these are the millionaires youve never heard of ;
3) There are actually a large number of immigrants moving/living in midwest small towns, but they typically work in meatpacking, not ag. Again, these are large corporations with the related benefits. Couple that with the cheap cost of living, it's hard to "fall through the cracks";
4) A commenter stated that (surprisingly to most who have never lived or visited the Midwest) most actually live in cities and thus commuting from small rural enclaves to cities is rare. There's very little NIMBY dynamics there. Metro residents, aside from your occassional trip to a small town over the weekend or to go see family, stay in the metro, and visa versa.
Long and short, this article seems to hit the mark on the proper questions for "what's the matter with the central valley". It DOESN'T hit the mark on a comparison between 2 regions. The Midwest ag dynamic is much more stable (for the reasons mentioned above, plus some I'm sure I missed). Central Valley, not so much (for the reasons this article got right).
Victor Davis Hanson has some thoughts: https://americancompass.org/essays/a-quiet-destruction/
Did they eat all they could and not sell the rest?
“The problem is not that government is doing too much or too little, but rather that it is utterly failing in those key tasks that must rightfully be its focus. For instance, in the Central Valley, the abstract culprit was “globalization”: disadvantageous trade with the European Union, the outsourcing of commodity production to Mexico and Latin America, floods of illegal immigration, and a rejection of the old melting pot creed of assimilation and integration.”
Look up Victor Davis Hanson. He owns a family farm in the valley and has written extensively about the changes to the region.
The standard California maladies of failing to police the underclass are made much worse when there isn't a giant prosperous industry like Tech throwing off lots of spillover wealth.
<i>A pluralist and cosmopolitan would not be ambivalent nor suspicious.</i>
Almost all the self-described pluralists and cosmopolitans I've come across have been ambivalent and suspicious about traditional western culture.
You could say that they're not real cosmopolitans, but the comes a point where this kind of argument just ends up as "But real communism's never been tried!"-type special pleading.
I know nothing really about the area, but something I heard from a Jefferson State activist has stayed with me:
His argument for wanting their own rural state in the northern 1/4 of the state is that California is ruled by the city people. They make laws that are great for city life, where nature is something pretty you want to preserve. Those laws then get applied to rural areas, where nature is something you make a living out of.
As a result, they live in a place very rich in resources, but they're not legally allowed to make a living of those riches, so poverty and misery abounds.
The Central Valley is different from the northern forests and mountains, but I assume some of the same dynamic is a factor.
Long live the great state of Jefferson! Long May the Double Cross wave!
My dad comes from Dunsmuir. I grew up in Lewis county Washington which has a similar dynamic: SeaTac rules the state, and the rest of the state just has to live with their crazy pronouncements. Our neighbor had some very nice hay farmland ruined when it was declared a wetlands by the greenies in Seattle.
Some notes:
I've been in the Central Valley for 25 years, four in Bakersfield and 21 in Modesto. Since I'm here, you might think I'm good with it, and you'd be right.
Weather: It's not as hot as Yuma or Phoenix or [list of other too-hot cities]. It's still too hot.
Air Quality: It's gotten better since I've been here -
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1352231020305525?via%3Dihub (less ag burning)
https://www.iqair.com/us/usa/california/fresno (everything is terrible, but meaningfully less terrible than it was)
Education: I don't really see Davis as genuinely a CV spot even if technically is, but there is a UC school - UC Merced. There are other colleges and universities in the Central Valley, but the area doesn't have high education levels overall.
Politics: "[M]ost people in the Valley are conservative." Relative to California, for sure, hard yes. Relative to everything, I don't think so.
https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-political-geography/
If you look at the counties in the Central Valley, Sacramento's middle-blue, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, and Fresno are light blue, while Madera, Tulare, and Kern are light red. My district has usually been pretty purple, with centrist D's and R's winning, though districts that attach to the mountain areas are red and those that head west get bluer.
This isn't all that new, either - Obama won most of the CV counties vs. McCain.
The LA Times: Look, I still subscribe to the Times, but this story isn't persuasive to me. To their credit, they quoted the late Carol Whiteside, who was one of the people who moved things forward here - downtown Modesto's not downtown (pick Bay Area town), but it's nice. Plus that's 23 years ago.
Per capita income: Cost of living is still much less, but housing prices have really spiked once again. We were ground zero (OK, maybe some areas in Michigan, but...) in the 2007ish crash; we had a wild, obvious bubble. This feels less bubbly. Housing prices are a genuine issue.
Crime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_locations_by_crime_rate#Counties
Sorting by violent crime rate... yeah, not great. The top five counties include just one CV county, but the next five include three.
Brain Drain: I can only say what I've seen in dealing with really smart kids around here: Yeah, they're out. I helped coach some kids in middle school on a robotics team, and the four strongest kids are all the children of immigrants, all have done well (Stanfordx2, Cornell, MIT, and one of them is now at Yale Medical School, so... yeah, smart, high achieving kids.) They're not coming back, and I don't think there's a good argument that they should. That's a problems for lower education areas.
Commute: I commute eight minutes to work. I have done the long commute, and there are heavily commuter-based towns way far away from the Bay Area. This seems awful. Proposed solutions are outside this comment's scope.
Vibe: Look, I'm not going to form a Jonathan Coulton fan club that meets every Tuesday, and I'm pretty sure there will never be an active Modesto ACT group. I get it. But we've got some culture - even if some of the acts that come through are the elderly versions of long-ago bands, our county has the Gallo Center for the Arts, which is really nice; an arthouse theater; and places to walk and see a lot of birds.
Plus a ton of really cool cars. It's a thing.
The restaurant scene is pretty good. Is it Cambridge? It is not. But I like it here.
Caveat: I also have a job where I don't break a literal sweat and in the summer, we have air conditioning for the human-unfriendly weather. There is real poverty, which I am not oblivious to.
That's all the CV I have for the moment.
I love Jonathan Coulton!
The smog sounds like a failure of government - lots of agricultural regions have bad air quality during harvesting season when farmers burn leftover biomass, but strong public coordination should be able to deal with it. Is the smog present year-round?
The jobs situation sounds like a classic case of cost disease - it's increasingly hard to justify working a low value-added job like being a farm laborer, when San Francisco has tons of tech jobs, or even service jobs like Uber driving.
A few years ago I lived on top of a huge hill looking east over the 580 freeway which connects the Central Valley to the East Bay and South Bay areas. I can still perfectly remember how depressing it was seeing the endless stream of headlights from what seemed like the millions of people making their daily 1.5 hour slog at 4:30 or 5:00 AM from their “affordable” Central Valley homes over the Altamont Pass on their way to what I’m guessing were their blue collar or lower level white collar jobs all over the Bay Area.
I read a book, The Dreamt Land, by someone who grew up in the Central Valley.
Two things that stuck with me:
- many of the farms were (still are?) owned by Armenians
- these owners were all fiercely individualistic. Which sounds great except it means they always refused to engage in any sorts of communal enterprises to popularize a new fruit, or brand a particular variety of fruit, or whatever. And so it was large companies like Pom that took in all the value from pomegranates becoming popular - because they were willing to do the co-ordination and groundwork that the small farmers were not willing to do.
The answer isn't rocket science.
It is:
1) Ongoing farmer economic repression by middleman/distributor monopsonies
2) Not just water diversion to the cities, but specific billionaire fuckery - look up the Sinclairs
3) They're still red...in a blue politics dominated state. Talking about red-headed stepchild...
4) Air quality is because of smog blowing in from the Bay Area into the bowl with a small opening. While car tailpipe emissions have reduced, wildfires have more than made up for it.
I’m sure California’s absurd system of senior and junior water rights doesn’t help. It distorts incentives, e.g. against efficient drip irrigation vs just flooding fields with water if you’re senior.
What about NAFTA?
NAFTA happened in the 90s and it had an enormous impact on the lives of Mexican farmers. It drove millions of farmers off their land because they couldn't compete with American farms, which were subsidized and more modern.
Impoverished Mexican small farmers had less opportunity in Mexico, so migration was basically a required to survive, whereas before many had migrated seasonally to make some extra cash.
Tightening of immigration also made it difficult for migrants to return home at the end of the season, so many were forced to stay in the US.
From CBS news in 2006 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/is-nafta-good-for-mexicos-farmers/
"Farmers said that entire towns are emptying because thousands of small farms have gone out of business. As many as 2 million farm workers have lost their jobs — the vast majority headed north across the U.S. border looking for better pay."
I'd be curious to know: what % of the Central Valley's GDP is exported from the local economy in the form of remittances abroad? This would seem to be a phenomenon that took off around the time period in question. It's otherwise confounding how a huge, successful industry that employs incredibly productive and in-demand employees contribute to conditions that result in such poor communities.
Hay pueblos que saben a desdicha. Se les conoce con sorber un poco de su aire viejo y entumido, pobre y flaco como todo lo viejo.
Allá, de donde venimos ahora, al menos te entretenías mirando el nacimiento de las cosas: nubes y pájaros, el musgo, ¿te acuerdas? Aquí en cambio no sentirás sino ese olor amarillo y acedo que parece destilar por todas partes.
High Country News has covered issues impacting the Central Valley for several decades. This recent article talks about the impact of water use regulations having negative impacts on the valley's ability to deal with it's horrible air quality issues. https://www.hcn.org/articles/south-water-conserve-groundwater-fallow-farmland-increase-dust
The more recent decline, which you mention in passing but don't expand on is regarding the impacts of climate change and its exacerbation of the mega drought and exacerbating the already existing issues with water resources, not just for the valley but CA as whole and its ability to grow crops in soils that increasingly are being denuded of nutrient and carrying capacity. These in turn impact the already high risk variability of crop production and reliance on monocrops. The Central Valley is being asked to fallow fields at a higher rate now to divert water towards the cities which in turn increases dust, which impacts air quality, which impacts out laborers abilities to work. All of these have knock-on effects towards make the CV progressively worse. More Angelinos and San Franciscans moving to the CV for cheaper housing only compounds the existing issues of an area that has operated at full-extraction levels for decades while kicking the can down the road.
I'm not from California, and I've never visited the Central Valley, but it seems to me that the situation is very similar to the situation in New York. In New York, half the population and most of the money are in New York City and its immediate environs. Upstate is smaller towns and cities, with a lot of farmland and decaying old industries. State policies are set to satisfy New York City residents, but these policies are profoundly unsuited to upstate, and upstate has become old, poor, and rundown. (I'm not from New York either, but Megan Mcardle wrote on these issues many times when she was at The Atlantic and Bloomberg).
Similarly, it seems to me that most of the population, and nearly all the money in California are in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and their immediate environs. Statewide policies are set based on the voting populations of these areas, and these policies have some serious costs. Specifically:
* Land use restrictions make building anything new extremely difficult. I know this is a huge problem in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and any coastal area - not sure whether there are similar problems in the Central Valley.
* Environmental rules have diverted water that used to be used for irrigation in the Central Valley to make rivers "more natural", putting strain in the Central Valley's agriculture.
* Water priorities have sent more of the available water to the cities, further straining agriculture.
* Climate change policies, particularly mandates for renewable energy, have made electricity expensive, making many industrial activities too expensive to operate. For highly educated tech workers or entertainment industry workers, this is a plus - it banishes dirty and noisy industries. But, workers in the Central Valley could really use industrial opportunities.
* California's legal system encourages anyone to become a freelance Attorney General, suing businesses for putative violations of laws pertaining to disability accommodation or consumer protection. This allows multiple people to sue public businesses, such as stores or restaurants, for huge awards unrelated to actual damages suffered by any person, which makes starting and operating a business riskier than it needs to be.
* California's unemployment insurance system seems to be designed to encourage and protect fraud. Warren Meyer (coyoteblog.com) has written about his experience with this system, but to cite one specific case: he had workers who left his seasonal business at the end of the work season, went to Mexico to spend the winter, but claimed to be actively seeking employment in California. When he called the state Unemployment Office to report obvious fraud, not only was the Office uninterested in pursuing the issue, but he was warned that he could be sued for maligning the employees in question.
* California led the nation in instituting a $15 per hour minimum wage. This may work well in the rich cities, but probably has contributed to mechanization in agriculture, while eliminating a potential lure for industrial businesses to move to the Central Valley.
All of these things are either desirable or tolerable to highly educated tech workers or highly paid entertainment workers in the rich coastal areas. They help to maintain the type of communities attractive to these voters, and allow them to signal their virtue by "looking out for the little guy." But, I suspect, the little guys in the Central Valley are deprived of opportunities to make a good life for themselves.
Edit to add: Errr - I hadn't quite read to the end of the post before I started my response. If I had, I would have noticed that Scott touched on several of my points near the end. I do think it's worthwhile to go into more specifics on the issues as I suspect them.
I disagree with the implied premise of "We would expect the Central Valley to be richer than Mississippi because it's in a rich state". There's plenty of evidence of very rich and very poor neighborhoods in the same city! (SF, LA, Chicago, etc.) Any benefit from being in a rich area is clearly worthless when the rich people just don't care about you. It would actually be more interesting and unusual if everybody in the state had their economic situation clearly linked together.
> it’s humbling and a little scary to realize how much poverty is so close to me, in such a rich state.
Look at the rate of homelessness for Cali its like top 5, https://www.statista.com/statistics/727847/homelessness-rate-in-the-us-by-state/
Its functionally not a rich state for majority of people who live in it, but yeah on paper its "rich". By the way Mississippi has the LOWEST homelessness rate of any state.
Typical of urban idiots who don't understand the world to call everybody else poor after glancing at a number on a piece of paper once. This type of ignorance is what has made the average city slicking tardo in the US to pull wieners out for every country which doesn't have a trillion dollar gee dee pee.
“Its functionally not a rich state for majority of people who live in it”
This isn’t even close to true. The median Californian household income is 80,440$, the 5th highest in the United States. The majority of Californians are rich and live in a rich state.
There are also a lot of poor people.
The majority of people who are in California are not rich. If you think otherwise you are brainy-deady. Regardless, $88k is Cali is like $30k anywhere in the midwest, because the average home price is some astronomical price for you tardos.
A state built by prostitutes and idiots who gave up their whole lives (not like they had any in the first place) because some moron somewhere caught a glimpse of gold in a stream. Enjoy living in a desert with no water, enjoy paying huge taxes, enjoy the homeless problem, enjoy paying $400K+ for a house that would cost $50K in the midwest. Literally bums stacking on top of each other.
California was and never has been part of the United States. Anything West of Texas is not the United States, just some freak weirdo manifest destiny Thomas Jefferson rape baby that genocidal federalists created using a black magic conconcotion of chinese slave labour, human scalps, fool's gold, and native american blood, sweat, and tears. One day we will evacuate the Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs out of the Western states then fire bomb the remaining drooling tards into ash just like we will do with Isntreal and Russia.
The idea the typical Western state rat calls them self American without shame, makes me sick.
This is the typical California rat:
- neo-liberal (while false claiming communism/socialism)
- atheist or eastern asian cultural vulture
- code monkey
- poor health, typically skinny fat; avoids exercise
- pale, balding, and low testosterone
- hates donating time/money to charity
- loves taxes
- has a "pet": neutered dog/ cat they trap in the house all day
- loves sodomy
- gay or gay for pay
- anxious and depressed
Having even one of those traits almost gurantees rat like behavior, but having the typical 3-4+ that the Cali -bali -fali -f slur has just proves these people are nothing but a parasite on true Americans. Mexicans are some of the greatest people who fight tooth and nail to come here and they actually produce a net positive for society. Maybe its time we welcomed in the Mexican true Americans and started purging these pale skin freaks over in the Cali lands or whatever gay little state you anal sex loving freaks live in. Atheists are so gross too, honestly they do not deserve a place in this country. Thomas Jefferson is remembered as a raping slave owning coward, just like all atheists will be once the Muslims and Christians unite and create the global religious caliphate, then proceed to burn every single secular book ever made, replacing them with the true history showing the true nature of the world and how its always been a fight between God (swt) and these little pagan jew atheist/ agnostic parasites who produce nothing with their soft homo hands.
Fuck California, I stomp on the skull of any Californian (besides the good christians, muslims, etc. of course).
The Central Valley:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/there-were-6-fresno-county-homicides-over-the-weekend-including-a-teen-mom-and-her-baby/ar-AA12gbWg
Great piece. Bet the California Native Americans, East Coast intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson, and the better natures of the people themselves never imagined we could make such a mess of a previously beautiful place. Apply the same tactics to “Anywhere, USA” and we may be close to the root of the problem. Look around at your country in 2022. The destruction is epidemic and it is planetary.
I grew up in Fresno and yes, it gets very hot (there used to almost be a charm to that heat, a dry heat you’ll always hear). The air has definitely gotten worse, the valley traps smog and agriculture adds large particle pollutants. I left four years ago for Albuquerque. It’s still hot here but I’m always glad that we’re 90 something as my mom reports to me it’s 114 or something crazy hot like that. Fresno was a good place to grow up 60s through maybe 2000. Before I left I noticed the homeless were moving northeast. Lots of homeless here in ABQ too, can’t go out without seeing them. I remember the park I once lived across the street from. Eventually you couldn’t walk through it without seeing some discarded needles. Vinland Park and Vinland Elementary. It was a good place to grow up in. I hope it gets better.
I would say this article is not even close enough to the true bleakness that is the Central Valley. Contact Dr. Eric Hickey, a local and renowned criminologist and you will get a picture of the historical crime rates (especially murder), gang activity and prison population (higher than anywhere else on the planet).
Coupled with the other details of your article, a lack of fair government funding and a place of weather extremes, you only touching the surface. Most towns, including Fresno, have an extremely provincial mindset, cronyism, and corruption are laid out in local media.
Digging deeper will only get you an exponentially dark picture and there is no light at the bottom only more of the abyss.
I'm a coastal Californian, but have spent substantial time in Bakersfield and Fresno in the past. Both of those cities have enough economic activity (Bakersfield has a lot of oil & gas executives and big farming families, closely held whether or not corporate) to create some dynamism. Many square miles of north Fresno and Clovis are indistinguishable from Santa Clara or Orange Counties - disappointing in the usual American way - big box stores and chain restaurants, but nothing really lacks compared to the coastal counties. Fresno has a symphony if Sacramento doesn't; Bakersfield has active sister city exchanges with 5 cities around the world. Don't know about fine dining in Fresno, but Bakersfield has quite a few surprises. Just think these places are more dynamic and less monolithic than the article implies.
There are many reasons several of these crops should move to the mid south region along the Mississippi. The California regulatory system creates an added burden. But even without those regulations the natural water supply and climate in the mid south would likely increase net productivity. The decline in California is likely a comparative advantage issue.
This sounds like a generic farm country complaint. It's boring. There are farms all over the place, some with animals living on them and the ones without animals are full of plants which are even worse. You have to schlep into town to get anywhere interesting, and there isn't much in town. If you are young, educated or ambitious, you'll head into a city to see how far you can get. There's a dearth of human capital because of the aforementioned. It's right out of an 18th century novel or a medieval folk tale except without actual starvation.
Modesto Is the worst one it’s so hot and poverty is everywhere