Sacramento

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.

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: Phil Roeder 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.

Gavin Newsom, the Chameleon Who Destroyed California

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Gavin Newsom may be saddled with an awful record. But the California governor is rapidly emerging as a leading bet – even a frontrunner in some polls – in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. How is this possible?

The simple answer is that Newsom might be the ultimate candidate for the attention-deficient generation. He is a political chameleon who changes positions compulsively – not according to facts, but to whatever best seems to fit the national mood. We witnessed this after last year’s presidential election, when he began ‘bro-washing’ his slick image with some cringe-worthy appearances on podcasts. One of these even included an embrace of gun ownership – a surprise to many of his supporters who had voted for him on the basis of his strong anti-gun record.

Newsom follows what may be charitably described as a flexible ideology. He flip-flops even on his core issues, such as climate change. Newsom, an avid supporter of Net Zero, basically fell on his knees before Big Oil in April, when two companies announced they were shutting their Californian oil refineries as a result of oppressive green regulations.

Newsom has proven equally slippery on woke social issues. In recent years, he made California a ‘refuge’ for transgender children, supporting the experimental use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy on minors. Indeed, these policies were central to Newsom’s assaults on rival states Texas and Florida. But he shocked trans activists in March by admitting that having biological males compete with women was ‘unfair’. Clearly, he had sensed which way the political wind was blowing.

Now, the chameleon has changed his colours once again. After trying to appeal to MAGA voters in the aftermath of Trump’s November victory, he is back leading the ‘Resistance’. Last week, he promised to redraw California’s congressional districts to the advantage of Democrats. In June, as US federal agents targeted undocumented immigrants in California, Newsom accused Trump of a ‘brazen abuse of power’. Like all aspiring Democrats, he regularly denounces Trump as a fascist.

But Newsom has an even bigger, more vulnerable Achilles’ heel than his shifting political positions. It is the undeniable economic and social decline he has overseen as governor of California.

A state that was once the envy of the world is now best described as a bastion of feudal inequality. Huge wealth is concentrated in a few hands, while it accommodates roughly half of America’s homeless population. It not only has the highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate in the US, it also has the highest unemployment. Nearly one in five Californians lives in poverty, while the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another third live in near poverty.

This is a far cry from when the Golden State epitomised opportunity for the middle and working classes. Today, it is the single-worst state for creating above-average-paying jobs, while topping the league for producing below-average and low-paying ones. California haemorrhaged 1.6million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade – more than twice as many as any other state. Since 2008, it has created five times as many low-wage jobs as high-wage jobs.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

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

California's $100BN Railway to Nowhere Exposes the Cost of Democratic Incompetence

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 23 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The latest broadside in the seemingly unending war between President Trump and California Governor Newsom came with a presidential attack on the state’s long-delayed, over-budget high-speed rail project. Trump, who seems determined to stop federal funding for the project, even suggested that its dire problems will pose a challenge for Newsom as he gets ready for a run for the 2028 Democratic nomination.

If Newsom were prone to self-reflection, he’d admit that the line – intended to connect LA and San Francisco – is an embarrassment. The rail authority estimated in 2008, when voters approved $9 billion for the system, that it would cost $33 billion and start running by 2020. The projected cost has since ballooned to over $100 billion.

Governing magazine, hardly a voice for less public spending, placed the blame largely on incompetence – “uncoordinated planning” that ignored basic construction logistics and bent to the need to please political factions. Indeed, the route was in large part sold to people in the state’s hard-pressed interior as an economic boon, which ignores the nature of the area, whose economy is largely based on agriculture, manufacturing and oil. Wider truck lines for congested freeways would make far more economic sense.

Many projects go over budget, but, as the president has suggested, for once plausibly, the California high-speed train may be “the worst managed project” he’d ever seen. Even progressives are aware of this failure. The first to jump off the train, so to speak, was Kevin Drum at Mother Jones a decade ago, who called the project “ridiculous”. He assaulted the cost overruns and absurd ridership projections.

More recently, the train was singled out for infamy by the authors of Abundance. This new progressive bible, which embraces all the memes of the Left, for example on urban density and climate, expresses horror at how the train has been delayed and has escalated in cost. Today, even Democrats like former California State Speaker Anthony Rendon admit that there is “no confidence” in the project and have been far from anxious to pour more good money after bad.

Unless there is an unanticipated flow of state funds, the Legislative Analyst’s Office suggests that the project could grind to a halt within 15 months. There is now only enough money, and perhaps not even that, for a line from agriculture and oil-dominated Bakersfield to even more rustic Merced. Not exactly the glamorous LA-San Francisco route originally mooted, much less something to rival the lines connecting Tokyo to Osaka or Paris to Lyon.

Despite being described by Hoover Institute economist Lee Ohanian as “the greatest infrastructure failure in the history of the country”, the California disaster does admittedly have a great deal of competition. A similar pattern can be seen in the slow pace of repairs to the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore’s Harbour. Boston’s Big Dig (Central Artery/Tunnel Project) was plagued by cost overruns and delays, eventually coming in at nearly $25 billion, $10 billion more than previously reported.

In fact, the entire transit industry, a favourite target for investment among progressives and greens, is stymied by what the Marron Institute at New York University found were “among the highest transit-infrastructure costs in the world” – far higher than not only China, which can ascribe to less cumbersome processes, but the likes of Sweden, Italy, and Turkey as well.

Phase one of New York’s Second Avenue Subway, Marron notes, clocked in at 8 to 12 times more expensive than what the international analysis suggested should be the baseline cost, reflecting strict overtime rules, local union agreements that limit the available labour pools geographically, and an unwillingness to address staffing and labour agreements.

But even in this world of lavish overruns, Newsom’s California stands in a league of its own. Back in 2015, UC Berkeley scholar Karen Trapenberg Frick outlined how the cost of replacing the eastern section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge rose from an estimated price of $250 million in 1995 to $6.5 billion by September 2013. This was in part due to political pressures from elected officials, according to a report prepared for a state Senate committee.

But nothing quite matches the incompetence and overspending of Newsom’s choo-choo. It has likely undermined support for building a national network of high-speed trains, something promoted in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.

Despite the green visions, high-speed trains seem a bit of a step back – the St Louis Post-Dispatch labelled them “a bridge to the 19th century”. In a world where most people drive, and many commute from home, the idea of sinking tens of billions into high-speed projects seems a poor bet, as Britain has already found with the cancellation of large parts of the HS2 project. Even in China, where political opposition is verboten, the choo-choos have been plagued by corruption, rising costs and massive indebtedness.

Under Biden, Newsom enjoyed large lumps of gravy for his train, but under Trump, he is now likely to have to choose between funding the money-mad rail network or doing such basic things as balancing his budget and facing California’s gargantuan public employee pension costs, as well as paying for healthcare for the state’s estimated 2.5 million undocumented immigrants.

The overpriced choo-choo reflects the ultimate dilemma for Democrats like Newsom. In the 1930s and 1940, under Democrats, American ingenuity produced the infrastructure that underpinned the world’s largest industrial economy – the Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and countless bridges, roads, and other critical infrastructure.

Today’s presumed heirs of FDR still talk big about infrastructure, but are loath to offend public unions, green lobby groups and progressive non-profits. Most of the successful case studies on infrastructure come from red states like Florida, which built its new train lines at something approaching original costs and deadlines.

If you want to advocate for more government, perhaps it’s best to prove that you can do this efficiently. Newsom’s high-speed rail line proves that, for now, the progressives are prisoners of their own massive incompetence.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: California High-Speed Rail Authority, in Public Domain as a Government Work.

Gavin Newsom’s California Has Become a Neo-feudal Nightmare

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 02 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Never one to miss a reason to crow, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, was out in front of the media at the weekend, bragging about how his state now boasts the world’s fourth largest GDP, surpassing Japan. This is a natural posture for a potential presidential candidate, a chance to show how under his leadership California has thrived.

Unfortunately, few are likely to believe him. Newsom must realise that the notion that California is a model for the rest of the United States – the rationale for the Newsom-led “resistance” against Donald Trump – is no longer widely accepted. In a national 2024 survey, only 15 per cent of respondents felt that California is a model other states should copy; 39 per cent said the state should not be emulated. Barely one in three state residents – and only one in four younger voters – now thinks of California as a good place to achieve the American dream.

Even the GDP news has to be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, Japan’s downgrade is likely to be partly a result of the decline of that country’s currency, which has been weakening against the dollar for several years.

But beyond GDP, the illusion of Californian success is also a product of high asset values, like real estate, exacerbated by regulatory policies, with house prices typically more than twice as high as the national norm. Add to this the huge capital gains accruing to a handful of tech firms, who over the past decade have doubled their share of the S&P, and you have a large part of the explanation for California’s asset boom.

Rather than the exemplar of a new “progressive capitalism”, or a model for social justice, as Newsom and his cadre assume, the beneficiaries of the state’s growth have been very much concentrated on the upper crust. It may be springtime for Apple, Google, Nvidia and Meta (formerly Facebook), but the prospects for most Californians are anything but sunny. In reality, modern California increasingly resembles a feudal country – like Qatar, Brunei or the United Arab Emirates – where fantastic wealth is largely owned by a small elite.

Once an example for upward mobility, today California manages to be both home to the highest number of billionaires and the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate. The state’s poverty rate continues to worsen. Seven in ten Californians say economic inequality is getting worse, according to a recent survey. The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) estimates nearly a third live in poverty or near-poverty – roughly 13 million people in total.

Even the geography of growth since 2017 has been highly concentrated in three Bay Area counties, bolstered by four of the world’s seven companies with trillion dollar valuations. By some counts, real GDP in these counties rose at four times the rate of the US average while the rest of the state, home to the vast majority of the population, has grown well below. The same can be said about race; California may talk boldly about “equity” but in reality, its economy is remarkably unequal, with majority black or Hispanic counties growing well under the national average.

Overall, California today is one of the worst states in the nation when it comes to creating jobs that pay above average, while it is at the top of the heap in creating below average and low-paying jobs. Between 2008 and 2020, the state created five times as many low wage jobs as high wage jobs. In the past three years, the situation worsened, with 78.1 per cent of all jobs added in California from lower-than-average paying industries versus 61 per cent for the nation as a whole.

As tech stocks and housing in Montecito (home of Meghan and Harry) soar in value, Californians suffer the nation’s second highest rate of unemployment, lagging in job creation in comparison to its chief rivals, like Texas and Nevada. In the past year, its GDP growth has also been among the lowest in the country.

This will be in no small part because California has the highest energy prices in the continental US, double the national average, which has also exacerbated “energy poverty,” particularly among the poor and those in the less temperate interior.

Much of this reflects the impact of climate policy, a favourite hobby horse of the state’s dominant elite. But these same policies increase poor and working family costs, and shift billions of dollars to the wealthy, in the relentless pursuit of unilaterally modelled emission targets that even advocates admit cannot possibly “fix” the global climate.

It’s working class jobs – construction, logistics, manufacturing, energy – that have been most severely hit. Even without adjusting for costs, no California metro area ranks in the US top ten in terms of well-paying, blue-collar jobs. But four – Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego – sit among the bottom ten. They are also far more negative about the future of the economy than those nationally, and particularly compared to people in competitor states such as Texas.

Rather than the land of entrepreneurial opportunity, California increasingly presents a picture of medieval inequality. Huge wealth is concentrated within in few hands while around a quarter of the nation’s homeless population lives in the Golden State, many concentrated in disease and crime-ridden tent cities in Los Angeles or San Francisco.

If this is the model of Newsomian capitalism, it’s unlikely to have many buyers in 2028.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: GetArchive in Public Domain.

Ways Out of California's Forest of Problems: Part 2

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The second of two reported essays on the issues facing California. Read the first installment here.

California’s wide range of problems – including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market – show the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there is the will to change.

Although the state’s remarkable entrepreneurial economy has kept it afloat, a growing number of residents are concluding that the progressive agenda, pushed by public unions and their well-heeled allies, is failing. Most Californians have an exceptional lack of faith in the state’s direction. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature, and almost two-thirds have told pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. That helps explain why California residents – including about 1.1 million since 2021 – have been fleeing to other states.

Unhappiness with the one-party state is particularly intense in the inland areas, which are the only locales now growing and may prove critical to any resurgence. More troubling still, over 70% of California parents feel their children will do less well than they did. Four in 10 are considering an exit. By contrast, seniors, thought to be leaving en masse, are the least likely to express a desire to leave.

In some ways, discontent actually erodes potential support for reform. Conservative voters, notes a recent study, are far more likely to express a desire to move out of the state; the most liberal are the least likely. “Texas is taking away my voters,” laments Shawn Steel, California’s GOP National Committee Member.

New Awakenings

Given the demographic realities, a successful drive for reform cannot be driven by a marginalized GOP. Instead, what’s needed is a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents (now the state’s second-largest political grouping), and most critically, moderate Democrats.

Remarkably, this shift has already begun in an unlikely place: the ultra-liberal, overwhelmingly Democratic Bay Area. For years, its most influential residents – billionaires, venture capitalists, and well-paid tech workers – have abetted or tolerated an increasingly ineffective and corrupt regime. Not only was the area poorly governed, but the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and other cities have become scenes of almost Dickensian squalor.

Over the past two years, tech entrepreneurs and professionals concerned about homelessness and crime worked to get rid of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin. Last year, they helped elect Dan Lurie, scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, as mayor, as well as some more moderate members to the Board of Supervisors. Lurie, of course, faces a major challenge to restore San Francisco’s luster against entrenched progressives and their allies in the media, academia, and the state’s bureaucracy.

Similar pushbacks are evident elsewhere. Californians, by large majorities, recently passed bills to strengthen law enforcement, ditching liberalized sentencing laws passed by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Progressive Democrats have been recalled not only in San Francisco but also in Oakland (Alameda County) and Los Angeles, with voters blaming ideological-driven law enforcement for increasing rates of crime and disorder.

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Photo: Redwood National and State Parks/California.

Climate Change Is Driving California’s Golden Road to Decline: Part 1

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

This is the first of two essays on issues facing California.

“From the Beginning, California promised much. While yet barely a name on the map, it entered American awareness as a symbol of renewal. It was a final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”

— Kevin Starr, “Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915”

California’s economic, academic, media, and political establishment still embraces the notion of the state’s inevitable supremacy. “The future depends on us,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at his first inauguration, “and we will seize this moment.” Others see California as deserving and capable of nationhood, a topic that has resurfaced with Trump’s presidency as it reflects, as a New York Times column put it, “the shared values of our increasingly tolerant and pluralistic society.”

Critics say this vision is at odds with the facts on the ground. Rather than the exemplar of a new “progressive capitalism” and a model for social justice, California both accommodates the highest number of billionaires and the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate. It has the third highest gap, behind just Washington, D.C., and Louisiana, between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state. Nearly one in five Californians – many working – lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) estimates another one-fifth live in near-poverty – roughly 15 million people in total.

“California” is a model that no longer delivers. To be sure, California has a huge GDP, paced largely by high real estate prices and the stock value of a handful of huge tech firms. It retains the inertia from its glory days, particularly in technology and entertainment, but that edge is evaporating as tech firms flee the state and Hollywood productions are shot around the world. For all its strengths, California has the nation’s second-highest rate of unemployment with lagging job growth, particularly in comparison to its neighbors and chief rivals, notably Texas, Arizona, and Nevada.

The signs of failure are evident on the streets. Roughly half the nation’s homeless population lives in the Golden State, many concentrated in disease- and crime-ridden tent cities in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Barely one in three state residents – and only one in four younger voters – now considers California a good place to achieve the American dream. Increasingly, California is where this dream goes to die.

‘San Francisco Gentry Liberalism’

The roots of California are long and deep. In August, for example, the New York Times reported how its development into a one-party state controlled by progressive Democrats has made it the country’s center of political corruption. “Over the last 10 years,” the Times reported, “576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois.”

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Photo: Jill Siegrist via Flickr under CC 2.0 License

Does Gavin Newsom Believe In Anything?

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

Gavin Newsom’s new podcast reveals not only a media-savvy politico seeking more exposure to a bigger audience. It also reflects a concerted drive by the onetime self-anointed leader of the #Resistance to reinvent himself as the unique progressive breaking through to MAGA World, as evidenced by his decision to invite Right-wing firebrands like Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage, and Steve Bannon as his initial guests.

This shift away from liberal orthodoxy has shocked Newsom’s long-time progressive allies, who see it as an act of treachery. Yet if they had been paying attention to Newsom’s career — above all, his willingness to morph into whatever identity best serves his quest for power — this wouldn’t be so surprising.

Conservatives, too, will discover that Newsom isn’t a tool of the progressive Left, or a typical California progressives with “communistic” policies, as one conservative outlet described them. On the contrary, Newsom, unlike his predecessor, Jerry Brown, has been a committed, shameless sniffer of political winds throughout his career.

That’s not to say that Newsom doesn’t have a lodestar. He does: namely, the monied elite of the Bay Area, particularly the Getty family. It explains his ease in discarding Left-of-centre dogmas on law and order, and likewise why he has emerged as an unofficial political spokesman for the “abundance” agenda, which is how neoliberal Democrats are rebranding themselves these days. (In a display of virtuoso flexibility, however, Newsom in his conversation with Bannon called out Trump for his closeness with the tech oligarchs — talk about the pot calling the kettle black.)

His oligarchic allegiance has funded, and shaped, Newsom’s career. He projected himself as a relative moderate as mayor of San Francisco. Later in 2011, as lieutenant governor, he challenged the rigid Brown, suggesting pro-business reforms. That year, amid a weakening Golden State economy, he travelled to arch-rival Texas to discover the secrets of the Lone Star State’s boom — much to the consternation of progressives.

Then, as the winds shifted to the Left, Newsom decided to re-centre his appeal to progressives in California and nationwide. He became a fervent advocate of such things as early transgender treatments and banning schools from informing parents about their own kids’ sexual identity issues. His heiress wife, Jennifer Siebel, made a documentary film embracing the transgender cause.

As governor, he could dispense the blessings of full-spectrum progressivism thanks to a massive accumulation of capital-gains revenue during the tech boom. The economy, about which he repeatedly bragged, may have hurt the middle and working classes, but it allowed Newsom and his legislative allies to build a vote-catching “blue welfare state”, as The Nation magazine enthused.

Read the rest of this piece: UnHerd.

Photo: California Governor via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.