They're jealous because they're too poor to live in CA. They believe everything they hear on the news and don't realize that there's more to the state than wildfires and homeless people. They aren't cultured enough to appreciate theater, fine cuisine, fine wine. They're too fat to surf.
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I've only visited San Francisco once, and I loved it, I'd gladly move back if it were affordable.
But from the outside, California can feel like a bit of a nanny state. The perception is that the legislature passes a large bill to fix a problem, but the bill is poorly crafted and causes two more problem, then the bills to fix those cause 4 more problems.
I feel like one of the problems with California is the Proposition system. Anyone can introduce a proposition to be put on the general ballot with enough signatures. Most of the far-reaching laws in California were put in place by propositions including Prop 65 warning labels and Prop 13 property tax caps. They generally have provisions that make them very hard to repeal by the state legislature.
With the rise of political ads and social media, it allows special interests and corporations to pass favorable laws. For example, Uber and Lyft put up Prop 22 to classify rideshare drivers as independent contractors and poured a ton of money into ads to convince voters to pass it. It needs a 7/8 majority in the legislature to repeal it. For context, the California legislature had previously passed a bill to regulate rideshare drivers as regular employees, requiring the companies to provide benefits.
It sort of depends on where you are, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the homeless problem is noticeably worse than almost anywhere else in America. It’s bad.
An ex of mine lives in a pretty posh part of LA (Crestview). She works constantly and really hard to afford to live there. Now there are people literally shooting heroin on the street outside her home and to take her toddler to play at the park, they’re basically walking around the bodies of people high/sleeping.
I mean, I’m as anti-drug war as they come, but that’s no way to live and the police really should clear it out. Even in the poorer parts of most other cities, that’s not something you see.
As far as I understand, the problem stems from the fact that places like skid row provide infrastructure to help homeless people, so more homeless move there to get at least basic healthcare, food etc.
If all larger cities did that instead of repressive measures, the problem should spread among them, making single places less problematic.
Well, that's always been the case with Skid Row, though it might be debatable which came first -- the homeless encampments or the aid agencies. And for that matter, there were Hoovervilles in the Great Depression. In any city in America, there are transients milling around the shelters, which is why there's so much NIMBYism over developing new shelters.
But what's going on in California probably has more to do with the fact that LA and San Francisco tend to be very tolerant of the homeless encampments and provide generous aid, thus inducing demand. The homeless population is soaring across America for various reasons, but California is a desirable place to be homeless: better aid, better climate, softer police, etc.
Maybe California's big cities really are more humane and generous, but at this point it's to the detriment of livability in those places.
i just think a lot of the architecture is ugly af