I recently moved to California. Before i moved, people asked me “why are you moving there, its so bad?”. Now that I’m here, i understand it less. The state is beautiful. There is so much to do.
I know the cost of living is high, and people think the gun control laws are ridiculous (I actually think they are reasonable, for the most part). There is a guy I work with here that says “the policies are dumb” but can’t give me a solid answer on what is so bad about it.
So, what is it that California does (policy-wise) that people hate so much?
It absolutely has a lot to do with Right wing/Republican propaganda, California, Chicago, and New York represent everything they hate so they constantly use both states and that city as negative talking points.
One point they constantly make is that New York City is a crime riddled hellhole, meanwhile NYC has one of the lowest crime rates in the entire country, and one of the lowest murder rates, it’s just a massive city with a massive population and everyone there has cameras so when stuff happens it goes viral. Also the Red States tend to have much higher crime and murder rates.
All in all this is usual conservative/right wing tactics, they constantly want to isolate and segregate themselves from other ideas, and aren’t afraid to take over where other people live to exclude the people already living there. This is why Idaho, Texas, Florida, and Utah have similar campaigns about “don’t California my state” and by “California” they mean don’t bring your “liberal/socialist/Communist/woke/progressive/democratic” outlook to their states, because they don’t want to be responsible for cleaning up the racism and various other problems that the red states seem to have adopted as their identities.
Also I know quite a few conservative Californians and New Yorkers that recently moved to Texas and Florida, and as conservative as they thought they were they actually talk about moving back to where they came from because of how it is in their new states, except for the fact that they moved to the new states because they can afford so much more than what they could in California.
Overall my point is, if you consume right wing media then you are conditioned to hate blue states, and particularly those blue states are Cali, NY, and the city of Chicago as well as DC, I’m not saying these places are without flaws, but I am saying that the propaganda and disinformation about those places has amplified the hate towards those places and their residents.
My conservative family still asks if I’m safe here in Seattle because they “hear so much about it on the news”. They still think Seattle is just always being with protests and the libbrerl government is just running the city into the ground.
Which Seattle and most cities have problems, all cities have crime, but no more than usually. It’s just that people live in cities. Per Capita crime in a big city can and is around the same of a rural area, but people don’t think in terms like per Capita.
But fox news loves to spin that to keep rural people afraid, keep them thankful for their backwards laws and ideas. Because what really happens when you move somewhere like Cali? You meet people from different backgrounds and religions and suddenly your views might be challenged a bit
I wish the city council was what Republicans make it out to be! This place is dominated by NIMBY centrists.
Also damn near everything I’ve read about crime rates says that rural areas have substantially higher crime rates on average.
It’s their got dam libbrerl government causing problems I tell ya
Crime in rural areas is, on average, higher than in cities, per capita.
Vermont is safer than large cities, but that’s never what the right wingers are talking about when they say rural.
This is why Idaho, Texas, Florida, and Utah have similar campaigns about “don’t California my state” and by “California” they mean don’t bring your “liberal/socialist/Communist/woke/progressive/democratic” outlook to their states, because they don’t want to be responsible for cleaning up the racism and various other problems that the red states seem to have adopted as their identities.
This also happens to a lesser degree with “the nearest large & fairly progressive city” I grew up in Madison, WI, fell in love with a girl from a small town across the state and we moved in together, got married started a family etc. So the dogwhistling that happens when you talk about the nearest liberal big city is real. I’m selective about who I tell that I grew up in Madison, and I listen for the obvious dogwhistling like “oh I try to avoid Madison as much as possible” “oh I really don’t like Madison”
And now that trumpian politics have had a chance to really take hold we’re planning on moving to a larger city, in part because we dont want our kids growing up around so much racism. When local online communities, local organizations and local community meeting places (aka the local bars) are riddled with dogwhistley comments because people feel comfortable saying them (which wasn’t so bad just a few years ago!) It’s just not pleasant
Exactly right! Conservatives will say this about literally any nearby city, the only thing I’ve been able to come up with is that they’re petrified of the city, just pure fear. Even something as small as Madison they’ll dogwhistle up and down on because they’ve never been and they’re terrified of it. Anything new or different is bad, of course.
I don’t know that they’re actually afraid. I think they are just signaling group affiliation and have chosen to side with the bosses.
Oh no I’ve seen pure fear, bringing rural friends to my city to hang out has had legit fear with them. It’s stuff that will pass, but simple things like jumping on a train to go downtown or walking down a busy street will freak them out. Crowds and people sure, but there is truly a layer of fear that they’ve been taught about going into cities
I believe this is true. Progressivism is just one thing I like about the state. It’s also gorgeous. Big Sur, San Francisco, Yosemite, sequoias, numerous vineyards, craggy beaches, and scenery that can transition from valley to plains to desert to mountains in just a couple hours’ drive.
California gets trotted out in the conservative media sphere as “liberalism run wild”, a place where being what they consider to be a “real American” is illegal but crime is subsidized by the state, where everything is expensive and dangerous, and homeless people have gay sex in the street. There’s an entire industry focused on filtering for the most extremely awful news they can find in a state of almost 40 million people, packaging that news as though it’s the typical experience everyone there goes through, and then blasting that news into the brains of Americans 24/7. That image, carefully crafted to be as extremely negative as possible, is the only experience most people have with California.
I moved from Canada to California a few years ago and spent almost 5 years in the San Jose area. Loved California; the food, the people there, the scenery, definitely the weather. End up hating America though.
I live in the Bay Area and love all the natural beauty in all directions. We can hike a different trail every weekend during the months when it’s not unpleasantly warm or chilly and never repeat. The tragedy of it all is that it’s attached to the rest of the country, by which I mean red states.
sure, once you look past the insane wealth inequalities and transient tech workers it’s mighty beautiful.
Hating it because of politics? If so, the California-like or Florida-like type?
I’m from bumfuck nowhere in the US, but damn I am jealous of California and it is wasted on the US. But hey, if leaving the US entirely is out of the question, there’s bound to be a few places there that are somewhat bearable.
The liberalism run wild concept is kinda what I’m curious about. Like what things? I know California protects abortions and has stronger gun control laws. But is that really it? There’s gotta be more actual examples
A lot of social programs, better employee pay and benefits, legal weed. Conservatives are just jealous that their shithole backwater hick towns will never change so they point at the scary liberal boogeyman that is “Commiefornia” in some vain hope they will get noticed.
their shithole backwater hick towns
That was beautiful. Thank you for sharing it.
Nope. Conservatives are a simple people. You tell them something is bad because god doesn’t like it and they won’t question it.
We have different views on incarceration as well. Ask a conservative what they think about Prop 47, for example. I guarantee you they’ll not only know what it is but they’ll have a very strong opinion as well.
Ronald Reagan began California Gun control as a response to the Black Panthers. supported by the NRA.
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The conservative rallying cry- “nuh-uh!”
That image, carefully crafted to be as extremely negative as possible, is the only experience most people have with California.
That’s the thing. No one I’ve ever heard who says this kind of shit has ever lived here for any length of time or knows anything about the state beyond what the “news” has told them to believe. There are issues here like there are issues everywhere. So people want to focus on homelessness. Of course we have more homeless people, we have more people. We have two of the largest and most well known metro areas in the nation with an up and coming third.
The bitching takes away (maybe intentionally) from the homeless issue that is rapidly increasing throughout the rest of the country. This is an issue of inflation and greed masquerading as inflation. Of corporate property owners buying up rentals and raising rents. Of workers not being paid a living wage. Of food and essentials becoming increasingly unaffordable by the month. Of course people are losing their homes and stealing from walmart. But this is a national problem. It gets worse all over the country for the same reasons and at the same time that it gets worse in California.
But what I will say is, we do have reproductive rights. Reasonable firearms regulations. More tenant regulations that most places, though still never enough. Some cities have social worker response teams instead of sending cops to kill people having mental health problems. We have homeless outreach and a statewide homeless census. Our schools and colleges still have diversity programs and sex ed. The state provides tuition waivers and grants for low income and marginalized students. We have drag shows and pride parades. And our libraries aren’t being purged by fucking nazis. So there’s that.
California is the target of conservative fear mongering.
Which is silly considering how many conservatives there are there. The current speaker of the House is from California.
Same with Chicago
There’s a large amount of perceived haughtiness from the residents of California. They have a lot to be proud of though - it’s a great state in a lot of regards.
Full disclosure, I’m Canadian but travel to San Diego often for work.
Downtown San Diego is not as I remember it from before the pandemic. It’s quite clear to me that California is struggling with a massive mental health and addiction issue. The cost of living compounds these issues and amplifies the worst in people. Even “normal” working class folk are quick to anger and explode at the slightest inconvenience and people just do not give a shit about each other. I pin it to everyone being stressed out because they live paycheck to paycheck and the future is always uncertain.
Things that I think could help: universal healthcare, increased public housing, and the execution of the sackler family.
Also universal basic income
Long time resident of California (SoCal in particular), can confirm haughtiness. I’ve grown increasingly prideful of my state for holding strong on specific human right issues.
You’re also right about the increasing disparity though. It feels like stratification is getting stronger and stronger each year. The Beach Cities area in particular, from my experience, where they’re building a bunch of (very expensive) flats. California has had a history of states shipping homeless/refugees to us and that doesn’t help our increasing number of state-grown displacements.
When I lived in Southern California (which is very different from other parts of the state) in the early 90s it was exactly like that. And when I have visited. I always tell people to watch it because a lot of people are really quick up take offense and anger in public and they never believe me until they see it, which they have on each trip back.
I love other areas of California, it’s beautiful, but Southern California always felt like a pressure cooker to me.
San Diego used to be a lot worse in a lot of ways. Honestly people have short memories. Admittedly, downtown is starting to look like 80s-90s downtown again, in a lot of ways though.
I can honestly say that there are a lot of terrible people out there, but in my experience San Diego always manages to come together when it matters. And honestly, in most day to day interactions, the vast majority of people I interact with are pretty nice overall.
I mean I lived in Anaheim in a terrible part of town on the early 90s with no car and a 40 minute bike ride to work, it was inevitable that I was going to have some bad experiences (robbed at gunpoint, crazy lady with rabid dog living in front of my building, getting screamed at and having stuff thrown at my by passing cars because I was on a bike, etc).
My coworkers (kitchen work in a big hotel) were great, it was just when I was going to and from work I’d see a lot of crazy stuff.
In later years, going back, I just found people were on a hair trigger. Like I was with two co-workers (was there for something like a work conference) in a store buying beer and these two guys were in costume so my buddy (from the Maritimes) said “those are awesome costumes” and these two guys went nuts on us.
Profanity, threats, it was wild. We just apologized and they were telling us to go f ourselves as they left.
Or I went to sf with my wife about ten years ago and she wanted to stop at a gas station in the city to use the washroom. I was like “just keep your focus on the cashier to get the key and I’ll wait outside the bathroom”. She told me I was being paranoid. Before we even got out of the car two dudes got into a fistfight and a cop saw it and tore in return the lights and siren going.
Just stuff like that going on all the time. Meanwhile, a few hours away you have paradise on earth.
Totally. It’s definitely area dependent. I was speaking to San Diego as a whole, more than downtown specifically. I personally wouldn’t go to downtown SD by myself, to like walk around. But, I never would have since I remember it back in the day.
Just like you didn’t go to certain neighborhood here unless you had a reason. My husband doesn’t remember SD like that, so whenever someone invites us to one of those neighborhoods (which most have been heavily gentrified now) my first reaction is always like uh….fuck no.
Shit even parts PT Loma/sports arena are are getting pretty awful again. Sports area was okish for a while, but there are SO many encampments in there now.
I think every downtown in every city in North America is pretty bad right now. I’m not anti-city but poverty, drug poisoning (like cutting drugs with crazy stuff that makes taking them very unpredictable), and general disorder are really stacking up in every downtown. I live in a large city in Western Canada, the downtown is really not ok to hang out in even during the day.
For various reasons, I am familiar with the situation in many other cities and they all seem to have similar issues. The city here put out water dispensers for people to use and then criminals started to gate keep them, charging money to access. I just don’t know how to stop that besides putting a cop or two by each one but police here continue to use their inability to stop this crisis as a way to get additional funding each year… Sigh. Not really sure why I’m ranting like this, it’s just really frustrating.
I don’t doubt that at all. It’s hard for everyone. SD and CA big cities as a whole are the destination for a lot of homeless/unwanted either willingly or “forcefully”. Largely because of our temperate climate and “liberal” policies, so we see a lot of it that we wouldn’t, if people didn’t explicitly come here for that reason.
I was mostly trying to comment on how SD was vs how it is now. It’s definitely MUCH safer here than it was in the 80s/90s. Early 90s was bad here, but people don’t remember, or more likely, are transplants and weren’t here for it.
Right on, I get you. Thanks for clarifying and have a good one. :)
There’s a large amount of perceived haughtiness from the residents of California. They have a lot to be proud of though - it’s a great state in a lot of regards.
The Napa Valley liberals are staggeringly arrogant when you meet them in person.
California has Medi Cal which is pretty close to universal healthcare.
It’s nice, but it does have some glaring gaps in it, such as the usual exceptions for most “luxury bones” concerns (teeth). Last I checked, Medi-Cal only covers one basic cleaning a year, for example.
My dental is taken care of by local Indian tribes. I’m not native.
It depends entirely on where you visit in the city. Plenty of areas have zero issues. Downtown sucks, though. I’m more surprised you’ve ever enjoyed it there…
It’s a left-leaning, progressive state. Everyone who talks shit about this state in anything other than the cost of living generally doesn’t have an answer because their actual reason for disliking the state is that it’s not a republican state.
Fwiw there are more Republicans in California than most red states it’s just a matter of having an enormous population. Hence OP’s coworker.
To drive your point home: More Californians voted for Trump than Texans.
And they all seem to be in the Central Valley; The worst region of the state.
Even the worst valley republican is better than the best Bay Democrat
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And it still isn’t enough to be representative. A vote in California is only worth about 1/4th of a vote in Wyoming.
california is the largest “sub-national” economy in the world. if california was a country, it would have the fifth largest economy. bigger than the uk, or bigger than india.
if i had to guess, the answer is “success breeds jealousy”
If anything, it should be California thats pissed off, having all its tax money go to support the failed red states and their failed policies via the federal redistribution.
I maintain that if red states want to end government handouts, we should respect their wishes, for them.
100% agree.
All accusations are confessions, and quite possibly the biggest of them all is their calling everyone welfare queens… When republicans rely on federal welfare to keep states above water so they can continue to convince those very same idiots that welfare bad and federal gubmint bad.
If its so bad, turn the faucet off and let them see how bad it really is under republican rule.
The problem is that policy hurts the poorest who have the least say in thr policy
Aka haters gunna hate
I think this is mostly due to the highly polarized political climate. California is the most populous state and it’s policies frequently end up spreading to other states and therefore is frequently focused on because if it’s major influence. This is similar to how Texas and Florida are in the news a lot for their more conservative policies. While there are people out there who take the time to inform themselves and make their own decisions most people are only able to parrot back talking points they hear from the news or their friends. I suspect your coworker is one of those people and probably leans conservative so all he hears all day is how California’s policies are making housing too expensive and it’s too “woke” etc.
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Political policy that’s extremist, whether left or right, doesn’t make sense.
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I could have written most of this, but about Massachusetts.
Prop 13 (1978) is part of the cruel legacy of Ronald Reagan, who had stopped being Governor in order to gird his loins for becoming President, but was still highly influential. The Howard Jarvis Association continues to poison the political sphere to this day.
Sounds mostly to me like the free market working as intended. You have a single state expressing the majority of American’s values, so everyone wants to live there. California’s portion of the GDP reflects what the concentration of blue voters does for the economy.
Except in a true free market zoning laws wouldn’t keep adorable, high density housing from being constructed to artificially boost housing prices.
Other than that I agree with you.
The high costs really are kind of insane. Even before COVID. I honestly don’t know what the solution is or if it’s actually preferable to have high costs but also a tremendous amount of money coming into the state from continued interest in Californian real estate.
I remember when a city wanted 1 million dollars to construct an outhouse. At that price, with that level of graft, the voters thankfully voted against it.
If we can’t even get an outhouse built, what does that spell for larger projects?
We pay so much just for the real estate / rent and so much in taxes and what does it get us?
My uncle got fined for installing his own solar panels (although this happened over a decade ago). Honestly the state gets a lot of things right but when it gets things wrong it gets them infuriatingly wrong, and for the amount of money we are spending this shit shouldn’t be happening. I have no problem paying for an administrative state, as long as it administrates!
Recently we found out that over 300 physical assaults against Asian seniors were all done by one guy, which honestly I don’t even know if that’s true or not, and the implications in either case are terrible. One guy who was arrested for stabbing a senior citizen in the neck was released into his own recognizance and he ended up successfully murdering another senior citizen within 24h of his release. Of course, black perp Asian victim, so no surprise the justice system suddenly finds clemency. We will shoot black toddlers for playing with a toy gun but if it’s a black person stabbing Asian senior citizens in the neck, suddenly this is a precious creature who must be protected.
Another recent headline grabber is when they eliminated the sats as a criteria for college admissions. That one really pissed me off, as someone who absolutely hated homework and was too timid to ask someone else to do it but who aced all the tests. They got rid of the sats but they will introduce a new test in 2025?!! They should have the new test ready before they eliminate the old test! Leaving admissions fully in the hands of incompetent teachers is so fucking stupid that it could only be intentional.
These past few years have really clarified for me that I think I identify best with social Democrats and not with actual leftists and certainly not with right leaning saboteurs. I don’t mind giving the underprivileged a voice or giving them accommodations, but certain govt services are necessary and we need them to work.
Funny enough for the right wingers that don’t like the gun control in California, it was first brought in because Reagan was fearful of the Black Panthers who were openly carrying fully legal assault rifles and those white politicians couldn’t handle that second amendment applying to black gun owners.
SYSK do a good explainer on this and the Black Panther party in general - https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-26940277/episode/the-black-panther-party-29467333/
Because its a right-wing dogwhistle.
As a very left leaning individual who does not like California my reasons basically come down to all the benign neglect of the homeless (leaving people to rot in the streets with their fentanyl addictions isn’t progressive, assholes) the militant oppositions to building housing anywhere (progress is being made but it’s like pulling teeth) and the huge focus on performative laws that effect 0 actual change.
… Notably these are all problems in other states too. Most of them just use police to lock them up instead. Not better.
But California rubs me the wrong way because they act smug about it.
California also has more homeless than other states… Reasonable weather and they don’t get thrown in jail? Homeless people migrate here for those reasons.
I also wish we did a better job… It’s not that California doesn’t spend money on the problem… It’s just the money we have spent has been ineffective. If we could get more housing first options maybe it would be better? It sucks though to go downtown sometimes.
The amount of Californians who blame everywhere else doesn’t help.
90% of the homeless in California were there when they lost their houses. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_California
And the problem is y’all refuse to build housing or shelters. 2/3rds of them are unsheltered. Housing costs are why they’re homeless.
NYC has the other concentration of the homeless (and a lot of problems with the housing market as well) but at least 90% of the population has shelter.
I don’t disagree. We should be building low income housing and we should approach homelessness with housing first.
I love affordable housing but I’ll settle for market rate.
It’s a national problem but it’s definitely more pronounced the more a place has grown, and Cali just keeps growing.
California is also the dumping ground for Republican states who ship their homeless and refugees out of state. Every one of them does it so they can claim there is no homeless crisis.
Notably these are all problems in other states too. Most of them just use police to lock them up instead. Not better.
They don’t always lock them up. Sometimes they put them on a bus to California.
That represents such a miniscule population that it’s not really worth talking about.
90% of your homeless population is home(less)-grown.
In the context of this discussion about attitudes towards CA, the fact that CA is held to a higher standard than other states is worth talking about.
I live here and it’s all propaganda. From my lefty perspective there are no shortage of things to criticize about California, but most of the criticism in the mainstream comes from the right and more or less 90% of it is made up.
Example: last year San Francisco elected a DA who said that they wanted to reform the justice department, used Black Lives Matter rhetoric, etc, and the conservative media sphere drummed up a propaganda campaign against them and against San Francisco generally that convinced everyone that a spike in crime had occurred even though there was no actual evidence that crime had gone up (and even if it had the new DA hadn’t been in nearly long enough to be the cause of it). This resulted in that DA getting recalled and replaced and everyone outside the state thinking that San Francisco is Mad Max, even though statistically things are basically exactly the way they’ve been for the past couple of decades.
The real problems are what other people said, things are expensive and the cities have a lot of inefficient sprawl which makes the cost of living worse and starves the city governments of funds for social services. We’ve been staring down the barrel of a water crisis for like two decades and the state government is seemingly incapable of taking any action on it, we spend way too much money on cops, the government is completely captured by the local industries, the only thing we seem capable of doing to homeless people is systematically brutalizing them - but none of those problems are unique to California.
I think that happened under Trump. If it really was last year she should have declared a state of emergency and have Biden send in the feds to clean house.
Trump wasn’t even willing to take care of wildfires on federal land, but an extreme case of blue flu, or whatever the hell you call it when you feign incompetence so severe that they are letting red handed murderers go on their own recognizance (Asian targets, black criminal, suddenly the court finds it’s clemency), demands a clean out. Eliminate the cop gangs and provide 24h security for the governor and da.
Biden has been a disappointment in some areas and a welcome surprise in others but his inability to address bad policing is one of the disappointments. The thing is, the administration is usually powerless to act unless their aid is specifically requested.
Poor republicans are butthurt
As California goes, so goes the nation. Conservatives don’t like this.
If it wasn’t for the high cost of living, I’d move to California as well. Still hope I’ll make it there some day.
Largest population and a GDP that at last I read was somewhere around 5th GLOBALLY supassing most countries which is no small feat for a single state. So it makes good sense that the rest of the nation takes notice when they enact something. Fortunatly most of the policies they enact tend to be for the benefit of the populous (environmental, gun control, privacy, etc) rather than corporations amd the elite so keep it up I say.
Some say people don’t like it due to the cost of living. Property costs are reflective of both the prosperity of a local population and the desire people have to live there, so it’s hard to say people don’t like it because of the cost of living, if anything I’d see the opposite.
Most people out of the state who complain about California, never lived here, they are just repeating what they heard on conservative media.
If it was a hell hole like they say, the property prices would be cheap, no one would want them.
Most people that are leaving, are leaving because they got priced out and cannot afford to stay.
I would think that the people leaving have the money to move anywhere, due to being cheaper than CA. Buying home in cheaper states or due to work.
You’d think, but it can be difficult to save up moving costs for a long distance haul + deposits + getting a new job lined up while living paycheck to paycheck.
It’s the network effect. Many industry leaders are already here so everyone else wants to be also.
The real estate / rent prices are so insane that it is already affecting malls and smaller shops but it’s still not causing the real estate market to draw down. In fact if anything the continued trend of prices rising higher and higher only attracts more demand.
