California

America's Great Migration

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

‘For many states that were once great have now become small; and those that were great in my time were small formerly. Knowing therefore that human prosperity never continues in one stay.’ So wrote Herodotus in his Histories, in the fifth century BC. He reminds us that world history is not a morality tale between the ‘powerful’ and their victims. Rather, societies evolve, grow stronger and overcome weaker ones. People – and, more recently, capital – migrate to places that offer greater opportunities.

This was certainly true in the time of Herodotus. He was born in Greek colonies in what is now Turkey and died in another Greek colony in Italy. The search for better conditions – whether for grazing, farming or, more recently, manufacturing and technology – unravels older orders and paves the way for new ones. As a result, centres of power move. As French historian Fernand Braudel noted, between the 16th and 18th centuries, capitalism shifted from one hub to another – Venice to Antwerp to Amsterdam, and then to London.

With these shifts in power often come shifts in migration patterns. Where droves once headed to Western Europe from the former Soviet bloc, as the old centres stagnate, many may consider returning to the Eastern bloc, and even parts of the once-cursed ‘Club Med’, including Herodotus’s Greece.

Nowhere is this pattern more dynamic than in the United States. Most settlers who flocked there from the old world were motivated by hopes for a better life, not as a quest to impose racial supremacy, as is so often claimed today. Whereas Europe’s density tends to anchor power in London, Paris or Berlin, all of them capitals, the balance of power is constantly shifting in the US, from New England, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, to the mid-Atlantic states, followed by the rapid rise of the upper Midwest, which was then supplanted first by California and the West Coast, and more recently by Texas and the South.

Travel across America and the differences between regions can seem almost like those between nation states. The elite classes – and their chattering-class interlocutors – remain concentrated in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, places that retain much of the world’s ultra-rich. Yet the supremacy of these cities is being undermined by their growing failure to offer working- and middle-class citizens, particularly the young, the prospect of a better life.

Over the past decade, economic and demographic momentum has accelerated towards Texas, Arizona, the Carolinas and Florida – places once dismissed as economically and culturally backward. None of America’s major growth hubs is now located in the north-east or California. The rising cities of today include Dallas-Fort Worth, Raleigh, Houston, Austin, Phoenix, Nashville and Salt Lake City.

This shift has been fuelled by stronger job growth in states such as Idaho, Utah, Texas, the Carolinas and Montana. By contrast, large urban states like New York, California, Illinois and Massachusetts sit near the bottom of the rankings. The same pattern applies to smaller metropolitan areas where job growth has surged, such as Fayetteville, Arkansas; Greenville, North Carolina; Grand Forks, North Dakota; and Ogden, Utah.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Aerial view of Austin, via Goodfon under CC 4.0 License.

California Job Cuts Will Hurt Gavin Newsom’s White House Run

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 19:28:14 -0500

California Governor Gavin Newsom loves to describe his state as “an economic powerhouse”. Yet he’s far more reluctant to acknowledge its dramatically worsening employment picture. According to new outplacement figures, Golden State employers announced over 170,000 job cuts this year, up 14% from last year. More than 75,000 of these cuts were made in the all-important tech sector.

No other state outside Washington DC has been cutting so many jobs, and California now suffers from America’s highest unemployment rate at 5.5%. But this is nothing new. The state has been haemorrhaging jobs in fields such as manufacturing, construction and business services since Joe Biden’s presidency.

Michael Bernick, who previously served as the director of California’s labour department, has pointed to the state’s “Upstairs, Downstairs economy”, in which a wealthy college-educated class relies on service economy workers. California manages to be at once the state with the most billionaires and the nation’s poverty capital. Its teenage unemployment rate tops 21%, just short of twice the national average; for those under the age of 30, it ranks second nationally behind Mississippi.

This shortage of jobs, particularly high-quality ones, has steadily built into a crisis in recent years as politicians look away. Affordability, particularly for housing, is a big issue but California is also by far the worst state at creating jobs which pay above average, losing 1.6 million such roles in the last decade. In the past year, the only jobs created in California were in government-financed healthcare and government itself.

Tech is supposedly California’s strong point, yet even here things are murky. While venture-financed AI startups descend on the Bay Area, the overall picture is one of tech job losses. This year, according to the LA Times, thousands of workers at the likes of Amazon, Meta, Paramount and Warner Bros have been laid off. Worse still, many tech jobs are headed elsewhere. Texas is leading the charge, followed by Florida, as Southern states including Tennessee and Georgia make significant gains.

One factor here is that California’s nationally high energy prices are undermining its AI industry. Firms such as Nvidia and Samsung are now looking to establish data centres in locations with lower prices, so that they’ll be better placed to develop advanced chips and processors. For instance, the University of Texas at Austin is planning a substantial new quantum computing centre, while energy-rich states such as Pennsylvania are now seeking AI growth as a way to reanimate traditional industrial sectors.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Felton Davis, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

How California is Failing Its Latino Population

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Few states so self-righteously proclaim their commitment to helping minorities like California does. Gov. Gavin Newsom rarely misses an opportunity to assert his solidarity with people of color, proclaiming in 2022 that “our incredible diversity is the foundation for our state’s strength, growth and success — and that confronting inequality is not just a moral imperative, but an economic one.”

Nice words, but on the things that matter — affordable housing, good jobs, and decent education — the current California regime has been a disaster for minorities. In a new study I did with attorney Jennifer Hernandez, released by the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute, we found that in most critical areas, African Americans and Latinos do worse here in California than in most of the country.

To be sure, some minorities have benefited from such programs as diversity, equity and inclusion to get into elite colleges and universities. But this has not stopped the rise of the state’s poverty rate, which increased to 18.9% in 2023, well above 11.0% in 2021, according to new Census data. Latinos, with a poverty rate of 16.9%, remained disproportionately poor. Some 13.6% of African Americans, 11.5% of Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders and 10.2% of white Californians lived in poverty.

These awful results reflect state policies — particularly around climate change — that hurt job growth and wages and yet are embraced by Newsom and the Legislature. For his part, Newsom still sees climate as a useful wedge issue with Democratic primary voters, as he demonstrated by making an appearance at the recent climate summit in Brazil, which most leaders of the top carbon-emitting nations skipped.

Yet his climate obsessions have had some awful results for the poorest Californians. Recently, the California Air Resources Board, the primary executor of California’s climate policies, projected that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 a year, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

At the same time, the state has created the continental U.S.’ highest electricity rates, which disproportionately fall on low-income consumers in part because others have shifted to solar. Those companies that use a lot of electricity, including tech firms, increasingly move outside the state. Manufacturing has lost one-third of its jobs in California since 1990, one reason few new electric vehicle plants, semiconductor and other new industrial facilities locate in California. This matters particularly to Latinos, who represent the vast majority of Californians in “carbon economy” jobs from production workers to material handling and truck driving — all industries in the crosshairs of state climate policy.

Despite green claims that renewables will lower prices, California’s electricity rates have surged 80% since 2008, compared with 28% nationwide. The impact of high energy prices on households is direct — particularly in the less temperate, overwhelmingly Latino interior. For poorer California, mostly Latino, energy costs take up 4% of the household budget, compared with barely 1% for better-off Californians.

As vast wealth has been generated by the tech sector and real estate, 85% of all new jobs in California have been in the low-paid service sector. California is the single worst state at creating jobs that pay above average; the state hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state.

Particularly for Latinos and other minorities, California is losing its economic advantages. Indeed, according to our new report, the average Latino wage earner here earns roughly $10,000 a year less than their counterparts in less regulated places such as Texas. They also fare better in many Midwestern and Plains states such as Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska.

At the same time, the state’s climate-driven housing regulations make it harder to build affordable single-family homes, mostly on the periphery of urban areas. Policies favoring small urban units may be fine with a 25-year-old single tech worker in San Francisco or Manhattan Beach but are not likely to please the more family-oriented Latino population. Our survey found that the vast majority of Latinos prefer single-family homes, and most are seeking the same basic things as most people — that is, safety, good schools and closeness to jobs. (Interestingly, the notion of living near other Latinos, or people they agree with politically, was ranked as a low priority.)

Yet wanting a house and getting one are two different things. African Americans and Latinos in California do far worse in homeownership than their counterparts do in the rest of the country, including in heavily Latino Arizona, Texas and Florida. Overall, 59.2% of Hispanic households in Texas, for example, own their own homes, while only 45.9% of California’s Hispanic households do.

Perhaps the biggest failure has been education. In California, for example, Latino students account for more than 56% of all public-school students, but only 36% met standards for English language and just 22.7% for math. California Latino students perform worse than their counterparts in Florida and Texas; in fourth-grade reading, the state ranks behind longtime laggard Mississippi. Overall, California Latinos rank among the bottom 10 states in higher educational degree attainment in the nation.

Clearly California is failing its minorities, including Latinos, now the state’s largest ethnic group — expected to constitute more than half the state’s population by 2030.

Yet many of the state’s young Latinos will enter the labor market in a poor position because of our dysfunctional schools. Many may already be unemployable; the state recently suffered the nation’s highest rate of unemployment, particularly for teenagers and Generation Z, or people under 30.

Only by changing directions, and looking for ways to boost Latino economic prospects and those of other minorities, can we align our boastful multicultural rhetoric with reality.

This piece first appeared at: Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Don Barrett, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Tom Steyer Would Drag California Further Left on Climate

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

After over a decade of mismanagement and misdirection under governors Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown, Californians now can double down by electing the latest aspiring Gubernatorial candidate: billionaire Tom Steyer.

Steyer, who made much of his money investing in such things as fossil fuels, including coal, is now preaching to the masses as a converted environmental zealot. He has remained a hardline defender of the state’s climate regulatory regime, a stance more central to his candidacy than even Gavin Newsom or his prospective rivals.

Given the impact of such policies on California, a potential Steyer Governorship and the continuation of dogmatic climate policy is exactly what the state does not need. For well over a decade, the state’s politicians have indulged in a misguided drive to lead the world’s response to climate change, with catastrophic effects.

But there’s no bucking this trend, and Steyer may soon lead the charge. The unfortunate Kamala Harris has bowed out, and former Representative Katie Porter — an Elizabeth Warren acolyte — has undermined her candidacy with televised outbursts and nasty testimony from former employees and her ex-husband.

California’s lower-income and minority households are already suffering from the consequences of the ruling elite’s green obsessions. The California Air Resources Board, for example, has produced evidence that the 2022 Scoping Plan for Achieving Carbon Neutrality policy was likely to hurt the income of those earning less than $100,000 annually while raising the income of those above this level.

It’s no surprise then that California is now moving below the national average of both income and job growth and even further behind rivals like Texas, Utah and Washington. When you add this to the fact that regulations aimed at stopping suburban development have helped push the median cost of a home to 2.5 higher than the rest of the country, the detrimental impact that climate policies have had becomes clear. This has been particularly tough on Latinos, California’s largest ethnic group — with some even labelling these policies “the green Jim Crow”. For Latinos, California ranks near the bottom in terms of homeownership, business ownership and real adjusted incomes — roughly $10,000 less than in Texas.

For his part Governor Newsom, in his bid for national power, has realised the weakness of these policies. He has shown some signs of adjusting his reality, pushing back against Steyer and the powerful green lobby by allowing the once massive oil industry to remain and keeping the last nuclear and natural gas plants, which together account for more than half the state’s electricity.

Given his quasi-religious commitment to Net Zero, Steyer is unlikely to follow Newsom in taking these moderate steps, or let his Democratic opponents suggest any changes. And it’s not like the GOP hopefuls — former David Cameron Advisor Steve Hilton or Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — will prove to be effective opposition. Republicans have not won a state-wide race in almost two decades.

Intensifying the push to Net Zero is the last thing working-class Californians need. But with his money, entrenched lobbyists and a compliant media, Steyer looks hard to stop. Even if he doesn’t win, he could still shape the race, forcing candidates to cleave ever more to the Left on the environment. The Golden State deserves better.

This piece first appeared at: UnHerd.

Photo: Phil Roeder via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

California's Billionaire Tax Could Bring Down Gavin Newsom

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Gavin Newsom’s run for the White House is going from bad to worse. Last week, his former chief of staff was arrested for allegedly siphoning off campaign funds for personal use, raising questions about the California Governor’s control of his inner circle. Now a bigger challenge looms: a rising socialist tide.

After Zohran Mamdani’s sweep to the New York mayoralty and a similarly high-profile win for Katie Wilson in Seattle, California progressives are eyeing a new billionaire tax initiative — a policy Newsom is staunchly against. The union-backed legislation would see the state’s richest residents hit with a one-time, 5% tax on the net worth of individuals — including everything from investments to property value, and even other assets like jewellery and paintings — worth over $1 billion. The revenue would go into a special fund with 90% reserved for healthcare spending and 10% for the state’s ailing K-12 education system.

Newsom likes to claim that California is “the envy of the world” when it comes to social justice. In reality, the state suffers from the highest poverty rate in the country and maintains the highest unemployment, which is particularly acute among young people under 30. To top it off, the level of inequality is greater than Mexico and closer to countries such as Guatemala and Honduras: hardly the envy of the Americas, let alone the world.

In the past, Newsom sought to stifle debate about the dire condition of the state by building what The Nation called an ideal “blue welfare state” — a model of government based on European democracies that prioritises welfare. But economic and budget conditions suggest the state is running out of money and cannot continue handing out ever bigger subsidies to poorer residents. California spends more of its budget on welfare than almost any other state, twice as much as arch-rival Texas.

Even larger infrastructure projects are facing problems. Many state transit agencies and hospitals have huge deficits and are seeking for more state aid, while the troubled “bullet train” is also short of financing. To make matters worse, it could take upwards of $100 billion more to address the state’s consistently awful homelessness situation. In the long run, some have noted that California and Newsom face a tsunami of payments with trillions of dollars in pension debt set to rear its head. It’s therefore no surprise that, despite the tech boom, California places 42nd in fiscal health among the American states.

But will a levy on billionaires fix the situation? Although the wealth tax could help to address the budget deficit, it could also ramp up the departure of the wealthy residents — the top 1% of taxpayers pay more than 40% of California’s personal income. California, like New York and New Jersey, has suffered a drain of wealthy taxpayers already, losing over $300 billion in tax revenues over the past decade. This is mainly to the benefit of other — usually red — states.

Newsom, then, finds himself in a bind. The California Governor must look to keep his historical support base while simultaneously making himself the self-appointed leader of the Resistance. His stance against the wealth tax will not be popular with progressives, but massive income redistribution resonates with many voters in the home base of some of America’s wealthiest citizens.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Can America Really Afford a Gavin Newsom Presidency?

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

To the surprise of no one this side of the Sierras, Gavin Newsom is gearing up for a presidential run — a move he’s been rehearsing since succeeding Jerry Brown as California governor in 2019.

Newsom can often come across as a caricature of the opportunistic politician who is more focused on climbing to higher office than tackling California’s problems. By a margin of more than two to one, Californians say he cares more about his political ambitions than about delivering competent governance — a criticism echoed recently by San Jose’s Democratic mayor, Matt Mahan.

Still, it would be a mistake to write off the Governor. He’s quietly leapfrogged the far less fluent Kamala Harris in the polls. While Harris is still flirting with a run, few in the party’s upper ranks seem eager for it. Newsom, meanwhile, remains a darling of Silicon Valley’s oligarchs, many of them wary of Trump’s confrontations with China, and he’s even peeled away some Harris operatives.

As Democratic strategist Dave Gershwin notes, Newsom isn’t just ambitious — he’s methodical. “He is one of the hardest-working politicians I have seen,” Gershwin told me. “He will outwork any other Democratic candidate, and he knows how to adapt to win the propaganda war.”

Such flexibility shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed California politics. Newsom has a habit of repositioning himself. As San Francisco’s mayor, he courted business interests; as lieutenant governor, he made pilgrimages to Texas — where so many Californians have fled — praising its economic dynamism. After the Donald Trump’s presidential victory last year, he changed tack once more, extending a hand to conservatives like the late Charlie Kirk.

More recently, in response to his party’s fiercely anti-Trump mood, Newsom once again shifted gears, recasting himself as a self-styled leader of the “Resistance”. He has adopted some of Trump’s own rhetorical tactics, deploying sharp personal insults as if to borrow from the master provocateur himself. His effort to redraw congressional districts, effectively erasing what remains of the California GOP’s presence in Washington, appears likely to succeed, further cementing his standing among Democratic activists.

Newsom’s big challenge lies not in his tactics, but his record. The Governor has presided over California’s fall from economic preeminence. This is evidenced by poor GDP growth, the nation’s highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate, a consistently underperforming public education system, a powerful out-migration trend, record homelessness, low homeownership and ever-increasing inequality.

In response to these harsh realities, Newsom likes to crow about California’s status as the world’s fourth largest economy, which largely reflects the success of a handful of tech companies. Unfortunately, however, the rest of the state is suffering. That is likely why he has fended off progressive proposals, such as a 32-hour work week, raising the state’s income tax, and adding new payroll taxes to pay for universal health care.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Photo: Bureau of Reclamation, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Scott Weiner's Autocratic Regime

Tim Campbell — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

On Friday, September 12, the last day of the legislative session, the California Legislature passed SB-79, a bill supposedly meant to increase high-density affordable housing near urban public transportation hubs. Governor Newson, who indicated his support, will probably sign the bill within the next few weeks.

State Senator Scott Wiener, the bill’s sponsor, claimed it will decrease the cost of housing by removing the need for city approvals to build apartment buildings of up to nine stories within a half mile of a “transportation hub.” But it is a singularly odd bill, packed with caveats, exemptions, and strange definitions of what a transportation hub is. For example:

The bill only applies to counties with 15 or more train stations, or only eight counties. Affordability is a statewide issue, so why exempt 50 other counties?
Although advertised as a housing affordability measure, only seven percent of a new development has to include affordable units. The rest can be rented at market or above.
As originally written, the bill would have applied to all areas within a half mile of most bus stops, encompassing large swaths of residential areas. But Wiener whittled the bill down to target homes within a half mile of train stations, subway stops, and “high-frequency” light-rail and commuter rail stops. Buildings within the nearest quarter mile of Amtrak stations and Los Angeles subway stations can top out at nine stories. But parcels farther out or closer to less used transit stations will be limited to about five stories.
Cities will be obligated to approve high density development within these zones as a simple ministerial process, regardless of zoning or nearby land uses.
To force tenants onto public transportation, developments will not be required to provide parking facilities. Nor will builders be required to take infrastructure capacity, such as water and sewer services, into consideration when planning a new development.

Since 2018, Senator Wiener has been trying to gain approval for such policies. He finally succeeded by winning union support when he included prevailing wage language into the bill’s construction requirements. Because of the odd limit of 15 train stations in a county, legislators in suburban and rural counties could support it knowing it wouldn’t affect them. But approval of SB-79 represents more than the usual give-and-take of the legislative process. It is the victory of Wiener’s single-minded obsession with forcing his urban vision statewide. Many legislators didn't listen to their constituents, choosing instead to follow Wiener’s misguided path and the theocrats who have declared single family homes as one of society's greatest evils.

In reality, many of the housing bills Senator Wiener has sponsored have had little impact. As Zelda Bronstein detailed in a 2023 48hills.com column, Wiener's bills haven't produced very much affordable housing but have done a great job weakening local control of land use. Dick Platkin regularly writes about the failure of California's housing policy in CityWatch. The day before the bill passed, Christopher LeGras wrote in his urban community blog Allaspect.com, an excellent piece on how SB-79 will undoubtedly fail to produce the promised results. Yet despite a vast body of evidence showing how density policy fails time after time, our state legislature keeps passing apartment developer-friendly bills.

There are really two things behind SB-79's approval. One is simple corruption. In 2020, Housing as a Human Right, hardly a NIMBY organization, published an expose of Wiener showing he gets major funding from developers and real estate speculators. Although one of his favorite tropes is that single family housing is a relic of institutional racism, his policies s has pushed working-class and communities of color out of their homes in favor of market-rate and luxury development. He's not progressive in any sense of the word--but created bill designed to maximize revenues for his developer sponsors while placing other special interests. This was voting trading at its worst.

The second thing behind SB-79 is more insidious and predates Wiener’s appearance on the political scene; the usurpation of local control by the state. As a “police power,” land use has always been one of the fundamental prerogatives of local government. Cities form as an expression of a community’s collective will. Orange County is geographically one of the state's smallest counties, but it has 34 incorporated cities. One of the reasons is local control. People in Anaheim live in a different city than people in Mission Viejo and need different services. By having direct access to community leaders in their city councils, residents have a say in how their city operates. That is as it should be the state has a role that is distinct from local government; it should set state-wide priorities like highway planning, environmental policy, and indigent health care. Cities should control policies closer to home (literally in this case) like land use and public safety.

But over the last several years the state has been exerting more control over land use and other local policy matters. This trend usually manifests as one-size-fits-all regulations that supersede local ordinances. Cities were expected to adopt extensive sewer regulations, regardless of cost, and the state regulations imposed substantial penalties for noncompliance. The penalties focused on process violations rather than actual environmental damage. In 2008, the state, acting as judge, jury and executioner, fined the City of San Marcos $119,000 for failing to submit sufficient reports on its sewer spill response. Note the fine wasn’t because of the damage the spills caused; it was because the city didn’t file reports to the state’s liking.

What we see in the sewer, housing, and homelessness policy areas is a focus on process over outcomes. The goal should be to increase the stock of affordable housing by the most expedient means available. Instead, the state has adopted policies that focus on vague theories of easing construction of high-density developments under the assumption that the cost of housing will decrease as supply increases. There are two fundamental flaws with that theory. Critically, it ignores other market forces like location, neighborhood amenities, and desirability. In October 2023, I was a member of panel on housing and homelessness that included Senator.

Senator Wiener’s--and therefore the state’s--housing policy is also an example of the paternalistic and arrogant ethos of the state government’s self-labeled New Progressive wing. It is a theocratic belief that only certain officials have the intellectual and moral superiority to make decisions about where and how Californians should live. It is the belief that they can tell people they must live in densely-packed apartment complexes with no green space, even though, as Christopher LeGras points out here, more than 70 percent of California’s families live in single family homes.

High-density is central to the progressive dream of 15-minute cities, communities where people can live, shop and find amenities within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their apartments. While a potentially admirable dream, the 15-minute city is simply fantasy given the sprawling geography of almost all California cities, with the exception of Wiener’s San Francisco. It also devalues and demonizes the foundational American Dream of owning one’s own home, . the leading way the middle class can build generational wealth. It is a manifestation of an absolute worldview, where housing, as a reflection of economic justice, is either good or evil.

This absolutist view creates some impressive acts of moral acrobatics, where self-professed progressives ally themselves with corporate developers. One of SB-79’s backers were Streets for All-LA, a supposedly grass-roots bicycle advocacy group. Streets for All is aligned with California YIMBY, a nonprofit funded by corporate real estate and tech billionaires. California YIMBY has a reputation for creating housing for high-tech employees at the expense of communities of color and working-class neighborhoods. California YIMBY was also one of Wiener’s SB-79 supporters. It is an odd breed of progressive who say they support affordable housing while simultaneously supporting organizations that seek to destroy it.

What we are really seeing in bills like SB-79 and other state efforts is a concerted effort to make city government obsolete. Like absolutist theocrats from Lenin to the Taliban, new progressives believe being a state official imbues them with a broader vision than someone at the local level, hence authority must come from the top down. The goal, as one California YIMBY spokesperson, is create something “closer to even dismisses the vastly different history, the Danish capital is one of the most expensive cities in Western Europe, especially in terms of housing.

The California elite is betraying what California is and The right of California’s cities, and their citizens, to have some say over their community.

Tim Campbell is a semi-retired veteran public servant who spent his career managing a municipal performance audit program. Drawing on decades of experience in government accountability, he brings a results-driven approach to civic oversight. Campbell emphasizes outcomes over bureaucratic process, offering readers plain English analyses of how local programs perform—and where they fall short. His work advocates for greater transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness in Los Angeles' government.

Photo: Brookings Institute via Flickr, under CC 3.0 License.

Gavin Newsom Trashed California. Worse, He's Getting Away With It.

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

For the past half century, California has been the driving force in American technology, culture and political development. After all, it was Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who led the last great resurgence on the Right from the state, and Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown who largely created the green-oriented, high-tech progressive underpinnings of the Clinton and Obama regimes, even if he never reached the presidency himself.

Today, history may be repeating itself, but in a way that – to paraphrase Mark Twain – no longer rhymes. Under Nixon, Reagan and Brown, the California connection was a golden one; California was the epitome of American success, the dream cubed. Today, Gavin Newsom – increasingly seen as the front-runner for the presidency in 2028 – would find it difficult to make anything like such a claim, given the awful condition in which he is leaving the state.

Yet Newsom’s relentless self-promotion seems to be succeeding, at least among Democrats. He won’t have to worry much about any serious scrutiny from big media, either inside the state or nationally. Even in the race to succeed him as California’s governor, it seems all but assured that his successor will continue his approach or move further to the Left.

Now that the unfortunate Kamala Harris has bowed out of consideration for California’s governorship once Newsom’s term ends, post position belongs to former Representative Katie Porter, an acolyte of Elizabeth Warren and firmly on the Left of the party. But the true front-runner, if he chooses, would be Senator Alex Padilla, who has generally acted as a pliant tool of the California establishment. If he runs, suggests Democratic consultant Paul Mitchell, “it will be game over”.

The only reasonable hope for a course correction lies in the possible candidacy of LA real estate mogul Rick Caruso. Yet although he has the business skills desperately needed to engineer a state recovery, he was a disappointing candidate in his 2022 LA mayor race against Karen Bass, coming off more like a rich guy on an ego trip than a relatable candidate. The only Democrat looking to fill the middle lane, notes long-time Democratic consultant David Gershwin, might be former LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, but he would likely be crushed by the union- and green-dominated Democratic machine.

How about the Republicans? As we would say in my native New York, fuggedaboutit. The state that gave birth to modern conservatism has become a no-go zone for the GOP. Even as the Democrats seek to limit the number of seats Republicans might win in the House, already a paltry nine out of 52, barely one-in-four California voters are registered Republican, while Democrats own close to half.

Demographics explain much of this. “How do you win elections when you keep losing your voters?,” asks a pained Shawn Steel, the GOP national committeeman for California. California’s conservatism was rooted in the migration of voters from the Mid-West and South, who found in the Golden State an outlet for their material aspirations. But over the past two decades, over 2.6 million net domestic migrants have left – equal to the population of San Francisco, Anaheim and San Diego combined – and many, according to IRS estimates, are concentrated among the middle class family-age population.

Left behind is a rapidly ageing population, as well as a large coterie of affluent professionals, state-dependent individuals and, most importantly, the public sector, whose unions are helping to fund Newsom’s redistricting drive. It’s almost impossible to imagine any of the Republican hopefuls for governor – former David Cameron advisor Steve Hilton or Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco – winning, and it’s possible that neither will even make it to the run-off election. A Republican has not won a state-wide race in California in almost two decades.

Leading Democratic pollster Mitchell says that the Republicans recapturing the Governor’s mansion would be “a one in every 200 years event”, possible if too many Democrats run and the GOP stays united. But generally Republicans remain stuck with 42-45 per cent of the vote, not nearly enough to make a major challenge.

But the Democrats’ stranglehold over California is both unjustified and damaging. Newsom can crow about the state’s giant economy – largely due to the presence of a handful of the world’s seven companies with trillion dollar valuations, and the highest number of billionaires in the US. But the average Californian has not benefited much from his regime, as the Golden State suffers among the nation’s highest proportion of the population living in poverty, tepid job growth and the US’s highest rates of unemployment, particularly elevated for teenagers and Generation Z.

For those older than 30, buying a home – the traditional route to the middle class – has become a nightmare. Regulations aimed at stopping suburban development have helped push the median cost of a home to nearly 2.5 times higher than in the rest of country. Not surprisingly California has the second lowest homeownership rate in the nation, at 56 per cent (New York’s is lowest at 54 per cent). High prices have been a boon to upper-middle professionals, increasingly the Democratic Party’s base, but ownership rates for those under-35 are half the national average. This is precisely the group that is deserting the West Coast for “cost of living” reasons.

Even worse, the Newsom economy has been a disaster for workers. California is one of the worst states for creating jobs that pay above average. In the year to January 2025, the only net new jobs created in California were in areas substantially subsidised by government (like healthcare) and in government itself as well as some in the low wage service sector.

Meanwhile, companies in key high wage sectors – technology, aerospace and defence – are heading increasingly to other states, notably to the Carolinas and Texas. Many will be tempted to follow the likes of Elon Musk, who is busily working to turn the Lone Star State into the epicentre of America’s 21^st century space economy.

Although they have little choice in the matter in an essentially one party state, most Californians, according to a UC Berkeley poll last year, think it is headed in the wrong direction. Only around 44 per cent of voters approve of Newsom; by two to one, voters believe he is more concerned with his political ambitions than delivering decent governance, a charge made recently by San Jose’s Democratic mayor, Matt Mahan.

Even Californians no longer see their state as a model for the country. In a 2024 survey conducted for the Los Angeles Times, only 15 per cent of respondents felt that California is a model other states should copy; 39 per cent said the state was not a model and should not be emulated. Barely one in three state residents – and only one in four younger voters – now thinks the American dream is achievable.

This is a far cry from the California that produced Nixon, Reagan and Jerry Brown. Its failures, which should make Newsom vulnerable, will be hidden as much as possible by a compliant media, and largely ignored in the gubernatorial campaign. But Americans, however distressed over Maga excesses, may still have second thoughts about adopting a Golden State political agenda that promises, on the national level, something potentially equally or even more catastrophic.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Why is California Losing Good Jobs to Other States? It's Not Rocket Science

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

For a century, it worked, and brilliantly. The “California model” rested on massive investments in higher education, development of industrial zones in places such as the South Bay and Silicon Valley, and persistent upgrading of basic infrastructure.

Yet the system that made California dynamic and prosperous for so long is now broken and backward-looking. The state still provides ample opportunities for technological and financial elites but leaves behind a broad spectrum of the middle and working classes.

This failure is reflected in the state’s poverty and unemployment rates (both the highest in the nation), and its tepid job growth. Meanwhile other states — Texas, Florida, Arizona, the Carolinas and Tennessee, for example — have copied the California model and they have done it, as Californians once did, based on the goal of lifting up all classes. Long reactionary in their politics and social structure, these states’ business-friendly policies now have something to teach the progressive Golden State.

The defense and aerospace industries are showcases for California’s problem and missed opportunities. The state still leads in numbers of aerospace engineers and creates cutting-edge technologies. But once companies develop products based on all that innovation, they’ve tended to move the manufacturing, with its high paying blue-collar jobs, elsewhere, chasing fewer regulations, cheaper energy and a less expensive cost of living.

Take Jet Zero, which makes fuel-efficient planes. The company, based in Long Beach, is ready for prime time, with large orders for its new planes. But those jets will be built in Greensboro, N.C., in a $4.7-billion plant employing more than 14,000 people over the next decade. The company also plans to move its headquarters to Greensboro when the plant is finished.

Elon Musk’s story is well-known. The space economy is expected to be worth trillions, but Musk’s rocket company has already decamped in large part from California to Texas. Space X and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have built large test facilities in Brownsville and Van Horn, Texas, bringing a blue-collar bonanza to traditionally poor regions.

Even companies that plan to stay headquartered in California are making big investments elsewhere. Anduril, a fast growing tech-driven defense company, designs its systems in Orange County but has announced plans to build a 4,000-job plant in Ohio and is also expanding its operations in Mississippi.

This pattern should alarm the state’s leaders who seem more concerned with boosting green energy, fighting Trump and saving Hollywood. Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi has been pushing for a space commission, as exists in Texas and Florida, but so far to no effect. The California Coastal Commission’s recent rejection of Space X’s request to double launches at Vandenberg Space Force Base, ostensibly over environmental questions, is another sign that the state’s focus is anywhere but on aerospace.

Read the rest of this piece at: Los Angeles Times.

Photo credit: SpaceX launch of Iridium-4 from Vandenberg AFB by Kevin Gill, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

California Roulette

Christopher LeGras — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 20:28:33 -0400

Serious question, occasioned by evidence and experience: Do some members of California’s political class actually want people to die horrific deaths in wildfires and other natural disasters? Because they’re sure acting like it.

In the game of Russian Roulette, people put guns to their own heads while gamblers wager on the outcome. California Roulette is different. It involves politicians putting guns to everyone else’s heads while the powerful financial and business interests that control them rake in massive profits. At least Russian Roulette requires balls. California Roulette is premised on cowardice, mendacity, and avarice.

Take state Senator Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), who has been on an eight year crusade to destroy suburbs and single family neighborhoods. He has called houses “racist and exclusionary,” as if inanimate objects can be bigoted. Wiener, who grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, one of the wealthiest (and whitest) suburbs on the planet, doesn’t want anyone in his adopted state to enjoy the kind of life he did as a child. He envisions a brave new California in which 39 million people all live in small, densely packed apartments and get around on public transit and bicycles. No more front or back yards and quiet, tree-lined streets for us naughty, carbon spewing fleshbags. Definitely no more cars.

His hypocrisy isn’t just galling. It’s dangerous. Wiener, who has been called “California’s most devious and craven politician” (which, considering the competition for that particular crown, is really saying something) routinely dismisses concerns about housing development in hazard zones. In fact, he’s introduced multiple pieces of legislation that sought to make it easier for developers to make millions constructing huge apartment buildings in high fire danger severity zones (HFDSZs), tsunami zones, liquefaction zones, areas vulnerable to subsidence, and other places in which dense housing is completely inappropriate.

A flood of dangerous, irresponsible legislation

For example, last year Wiener introduced Senate Bill (SB) 610, which would have eliminated local officials’ power to identify high fire danger severity zones (HFDSZs) in their jurisdictions and prohibit development within those boundaries. He asserted that cities were “weaponizing” HFDSZ designations in order to limit needed new housing (more on the Big Lie behind California’s non-existent housing crisis in another post).

In Scott Wiener’s fever dreamworld, selfish city councilmembers are forever concocting all manner of nefarious schemes to prevent new housing construction. It is beyond his (limited) power of imagination to grasp that local leaders actually care about the safety and lives of the people they represent. Wiener lives in a purely transactional, binary world in which there are only two sides in the housing debate, YIMBYs and NIMBYs. The former are beyond reproach while the latter are beyond salvation. Everyone must be shoved into one of those categories, else his entire reality comes crashing down.

Wiener’s cynicism is boundless. In February, even as the embers of the Eaton and Palisades Fires in Los Angeles were still smoldering, even as a hundred thousand Angelenos were barely beginning to sift through the ruins of their homes and their lives, even as the body count was still being tallied and cadaver dogs were sifting for human remains, he wrote and introduced SB 677. That bill would have made it easier for developers to replace single family homes with four, eight, or ten units – but only in disaster zones.

Read the rest of this piece at All Aspect Report.

Christopher LeGras is an attorney, journalist, muckraker, and Californian.

Photo: Pacific Palisades: To normal people, a scene of unspeakable loss and tragedy. To many in California’s political class, a blank slate and opportunity. Drone image by Christopher LeGras.