SB 51: the California politics thread

Only 3.7% or 4,264 of recorded address changes in five Bay Area counties went out of state, suggesting "exodus" is mostly hype. 72% stayed in Bay Area: https://t.co/xYrBfWnimS w/ @susieneilson

(USPS excluded batches from one zip code to another of 10 or less) pic.twitter.com/twAegdAdsA

— Roland Li (@rolandlisf) March 1, 2021

Also, the boys' acne masks were not blackface, which is also reassuring

@caek, some anecdotal data:

A friend of mine went to the largest UHaul yard in SF a week ago to reserve a truck for yesterday for an intracity move and was told by the manager that their truck inventory is ~10% of normal and that it is taking them about 5-6 weeks to get the trucks back to SF.

huh. i wonder if that's the winter weather rather than a covid exodus

anecdotal also but I only know one person (well, family) that have moved out of the bay area in the past year (they moved to Seattle)

Winter weather this past weekend was ~72F across the state so if you are to believe the USPS analysis that 72% of SF relocations were within the bay area it has to be something else (not ruling out Uhaul's internal inefficiencies haha).

i can imagine weather in the central US impacting something like uhaul in california, no shade on uhaul. whether it's enough to explain what you heard i dunno.

I have had zero good friends move out of SF during the past year (okay, a couple expecting a baby who went to the east bay to get a larger place.)

My spiteful guess is that there's a big split between recent tech transplants living in SoMA/FiDi, who bailed, vs people who actually like living in SF.

oh there are a lot of people moving -- but it seems like (anecdotally) most are just moving to other places in California, mostly due to size and price.

On the way to take the kids to the playground, I passed a neighbor loading up two big moving trucks.

"Where y'all going?"

"Back to Michigan"

"Ah good luck"

(they were a couple that were on buses 2-3+ hours a day to work a couple area codes away)

anyways, take that Louis DeJoy & your change of address analysis!!!11 #harddataisgooddata

my backyard neighbors moved to Tahoe, I think to give themselves and their toddler some respite from the pandemic. They put their condominium up for sale months ago but don’t think it has sold yet.

I know having a child changes everything, but they have a great outdoor space and my guess is that they will want to move back as things return to normal

no measurable rain in socal in february and only 40% of the usual rainfall total since july. not looking forward to fire season this year. fix your hvac, stock up on furnace filters for the year, windows that seal, etc. before the summer rush.

There were some out of season 40-50mph gusts last week as well, fire "season" might soon be all year long in SoCal.

Some neighbors of my GF with small children are moving back to Washington D.C... but they seemed like half-hearted Californians anyway. They mostly stayed home and looked at their computers, which is likely what they'll do back east. I'd ask them if they'd visited Napa, Sonoma, the beach, San Francisco, pretty much anywhere: "No! that sounds fun! We'll have to go check those out!" after three years.

Could be the kids thing. I like to think that if I had kids, I wouldn't completely stop doing things outside the house, but a lot of people seem to.

my guess is that's not a "half-hearted californian" thing so much as a "half-hearted raising kids anywhere other than maybe half a dozen major cities on the east coast" thing.

parenting in DC/NYC/philly/boston is very different to parenting basically anywhere else in the US. if you're not into formally seeking out fun things to do, the outdoors, and driving kids to everything then i can easily imagine that difference being a negative.

SF is maybe the only city i'd put in this bucket outside the NE, and it obviously that has its own challenges if you have kids (i.e. $$$$).

I think they actually owned a home in DC (renting on the Peninsula) and had family back there to help them with the toddlers. He came out for a tech job, she found one, and then Covid allowed them to move back there and keep the jobs.

All of which I completely understand; they just seemed very cloistered in CA, even before the pandemic.

speaking from experience, it's pretty easy to end up cloistered if you're from a city and you have kids in the suburbs (which is what most of CA, including the cities, for the purposes of my point).

Which may well be behind the whole mythical "California Exodus"; I doubt it includes many CA natives or longtime residents.. it's probably mainly people who've moved here fairly recently. The San Francisco Chronicle recently profiled some techbro douche who moved here four years ago and had had enough: "Things have gotten so bad," perhaps not realizing that SF has been a really scruffy city since about 1851.

those people are young/white/rich so they get written about.

but people are leaving california from LA and orange counties at twice the rate per capita they're leaving from SF or alameda counties.

seems like it's mostly a mixture of the white conservatives with families (e.g. https://calmatters.org/economy/2020/09/anti-california-dream-moving-industry/) and young CA natives who can't afford to live near their parents.

as a group, “CA natives or longtime residents” have greater housing security/affordability than recent arrivals. but sure, it’s fun to point and laugh when more recent arrivals can’t get a foothold.

as a group, “CA natives or longtime residents” have greater housing security/affordability than recent arrivals.

uh, that is not a good generalization ... unless by "recent arrivals" you are referring to immigrants, refugees, and homeless people

maybe if you modify that to "white" CA natives or longtime residents ...

yeah i was gonna say. the adult children of LA natives being forced to move to inland empire or texas do not have more housing security than ... me.

The fact that I was born and raised in California doesn't really have as much impact on my housing stability compared to the fact that I am white and well-educated and have relatively affluent parents. There are plenty of people in the city I live in who were also born and raised here, and they do not have this, because of racism, poverty related to racism, poverty related to police violence and the carceral state related to racism ...

did I mention that housing security/affordability is significantly affected by racism?

yeah i was gonna say. the adult children of LA natives being forced to move to inland empire or texas do not have more housing security than ... me.

What pieces are you talking about?

I mean it’s a rich genre but the latest Broke Ass Stuart comes to mind.

(as does the post I was replying to)

anyhoo, since “as a group” seems to have invited the #notallCAnatives discussion it was seeking to elide, let’s try it this way:

if a person is the immediate or generational beneficiary of Prop 13 or rent control, and that person celebrates the disappointment of newcomers who fail to find a toehold, that person is showing their NIMBY ass

BrokeAssStuart is kinda a hack tbh ... idk why so many people view his opinion as some sort of expertise or whatever

if a person is the immediate or generational beneficiary of Prop 13 or rent control, and that person celebrates the disappointment of newcomers who fail to find a toehold, that person is showing their NIMBY ass

i get what you're saying, but in raw numbers, "generational beneficiaries of prop 13" are less likely to be the nimby adult children of nimby berkeley professors or whatever, than the adult children of african americans and latinos in coastal southern california, who are being forced inland and out of state while they wait for their parents to die.

(to be clear, i don't think the solution is more stuff like prop 13)

also adult children of african americans in central bay area for whom the fact their ancestor was able to buy a house in say, West Oakland or South Berkeley, was a significant achievement considering the racist practices of zoning and real estate sales and mortgage lending that required major Civil Rights legislation to be passed. And also the fact that less than 200 years ago, their ancestors were considered property that could be bought and sold?

(to be clear, i don't think the solution is more stuff like prop 13)

otm

and there's also the history of urban/suburban development that tended to build freeways and civic infrastructure by demolishing neighborhoods that were predominantly black, latino, or Asian.

I'm guessing that SoCal has it's equivalent(s) of Highway 24, the Racist Highway?

(n.b. I am including the 980 extension as part of Highway 24, the Racist Highway)

what's the deal with 24? one side is "bad"? or both sides are bad because it hollowed out a community?

I think nearly every freeway in CA destroyed something or other.

Highway 24 was designed to improve the commutes of white people who moved to exclusionary suburbs that were traditionally Republican (up until maybe 10 years ago) at the expense of traditionally black neighborhoods that were historical organizing hubs for civil rights/black panthers

Some CA freeways were built alongside/or replaced existing roads. Like 101 which in many parts follows the old El Camino Real

I am by no means defending SoCal freeways because I am not as familiar with their history

not CA, but great article on that https://jalopnik.com/the-highway-was-supposed-to-save-this-city-can-tearing-1836529628

This is a pretty good article about 980 -- which was basically a connector for Highway 24

https://sf.streetsblog.org/2019/04/17/inside-the-push-to-tear-down-an-oakland-freeway/

I'm guessing that SoCal has it's equivalent(s) of Highway 24, the Racist Highway?

― sarahell, Friday, March 5, 2021

Leading candidate would the 10 aka Santa Monica Freeway, tho there are other contenders.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-24/bulldoze-la-freeways-racism-monument

The reason the 710 (Long Beach straight north to Pasadena) wasn't connected is largely that it went through a middle (or higher) class white area (South Pasadena). It does seem to be finally dead as a possibility now, after 50+ years of fighting.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-06/california-counties-criticism-state-contract-covid-19-vaccine-distribution-blue-shield

who could have foreseen this?

this seems like an extremely bad idea https://laist.com/2021/02/01/head-scratching_over_newsoms_choice_of_blue_shield_to_lead_vaccination_push.php

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, February 2, 2021 5:54 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Welp

Proponents of an effort to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom say they have enough signatures to trigger a vote. https://t.co/DV4HmT6htA

— Michael Li 李之樸 (@mcpli) March 8, 2021

such bullshit