Showing posts with label California. Show all posts
Showing posts with label California. Show all posts

June 20, 2012

California v. Texas: U2 property rights

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
The struggles of even the best-connected California celebrities to nail down every last one of the permits they need to build on their own property helps demonstrate why differences in topography drive Californians toward voting for environmentalist Democrats and Texans toward pro-business Republicans. ... 
In Southern California, U2 guitarist The Edge (born David Evans) has been battling for a half-dozen years to build five mansions on his 156 acres of ridgeline overlooking Malibu’s Surfrider Beach, an average of one home per 31 acres. His well-heeled neighbors have gone to war to prevent him from taking such liberties with their view. 
California and Texas are the two largest states in the Electoral College, so it’s worth considering the bedrock reasons they vote the way they do. Having lived in both California and Texas, my guess is that their divergent politics are shaped by the shape of their land.

Read the whole thing there.

June 11, 2009

"Benjamin Schwarz's laments the end of California's modest dream"

In the new July-August Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz reviews the latest volume of Kevin Starr's history of California: Golden Dreams: California in the Age of Abundance: 1950-1963. It makes me nostalgic for what once was. Schwarz is a half-decade younger than me and, I would guess from this, had a similar San Fernando Valley upbringing:
It was a magnificent run. From the end of the Second World War to the mid-1960s, California consolidated its position as an economic and technological colossus and emerged as the country's dominant political, social, and cultural trendsetter. ... In 1959, wages paid in Los Angeles's working-class and solidly middle-class San Fernando Valley alone were higher than the total wages of 18 states.

It was a sweet, vivacious time: California's children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller, and -- thanks to that brilliantly clean sunshine -- were blonder and more tan than kids in the rest of the country. For better and mostly for worse, it's a time irretrievably lost. ...

Starr consistently returns to his leitmotif: the California dream. By this he means something quite specific -- and prosaic. California, as he's argued in earlier volumes, promised "the highest possible life for the middle classes." It wasn't a paradise for world-beaters; rather, it offered "a better place for ordinary people." That place always meant "an improved and more affordable domestic life": a small but stylish and airy house marked by a fluidity of indoor and outdoor space ... and a lush backyard -- the stage, that is, for "family life in a sunny climate." It also meant some public goods: decent roads, plentiful facilities for outdoor recreation, and the libraries and schools that helped produce the Los Angeles "common man" who, as that jaundiced easterner James M. Cain described him in 1933," addresses you in easy grammar, completes his sentences, shows familiarity with good manners, and in addition gives you a pleasant smile."

Until the Second World War, California had proffered this Good Life only to people already in the middle class -- the small proprietors, farmers, and professionals, largely transplanted midwesterners ... But the war and the decades-long boom that followed extended the California dream to a previously unimaginable number of Americans of modest means. Here Starr records how that dream possessed the national imagination ... and how the Golden State -- fleetingly, as it turns out -- accomodated Americans' "conviction that California was the best place in the nation to seek and attain a better life." ...

This dolce vita was, as Starr makes clear, a democratic one: the ranch houses with their sliding glass doors and orange trees in the backyard might have been more sprawling in La Canada and Orinda than they were in the working-class suburbs of Lakewood and Hayward, but family and social life in nearly all of them centered on the patio, the barbecue, and the swimming pool. The beaches were publicly owned and hence available to all -- as were such glorious parks as Yosemite, Chico's Bidwell, the East Bay's Tilden, and San Diego's Balboa. Golf and tennis, year-round California pursuits, had once been limited to the upper class, but thanks to proliferating publicly supported courses and courts (thousands of public tennis courts had already been built in L.A. in the 1930s), they became fully middle-class. This shared outdoor-oriented, informal California way of life democratized -- some would say homogenized -- a society made up of people of varying attainments and income levels. These people were overwhelmingly white and native-born, and their common culture revolved around nurturing and (publicly educating) their children. Until the 1980s, a California preppy was all but oxymoronic. True, the comprehensive high schools had commercial, vocational, and college-prep tracks (good grades in the last guaranteed admission to Berkeley or UCLA -- times have definitely changed). But, as Starr concludes from his survey of yearbooks and other school records, "there remained a common experience, especially in athletics, and a mutual respect among young people heading in different directions."

To a Californian today, much of what Starr chronicles is unrecognizable. (Astonishing fact: Ricky Nelson and the character he played in that quintessential idealization of suburbia, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, attended Hollywood High, a school that is now 75% Hispanic and that The New York Times accurately described in 2003 as a "typically overcrowded, vandalism-prone urban campuse.") Granted, a version of the California Good Life can still be had -- by those Starr calls the "fiercely competitive." That's just the heartbreak: most of us are merely ordinary. For nearly a century, California offered ordinary people better lives than they could lead perhaps anywhere else in the world. Today, reflecting our intensely stratified, increasingly mobile society, California affords the Good Life only to the most gifted and ambitious, regardless of their background. That's a deeply undemocratic betrayal of California's dream ...

Basically, that was my quite lovely childhood in the San Fernando Valley 1958-1980: ping-pong on the screened-in porch, swimming, backyard barbecues at my relatives' houses, Yosemite, long hours at the library two blocks away, tennis at the park three blocks away, golf on municipal courses, and UCLA (for my MBA). The only minor differences from the picture Starr and Schwarz paint are that I went to Catholic grade school and high school, and away to Rice for college.

If you want to understand where I'm coming from politically, this is a good start.

That reminds me: Bill James once wrote a book about the politics of getting elected to baseball's Hall of Fame. He wound up focusing on two statistically marginal members of the HoF: shortstop Phil Rizzuto of the New York Yankees and pitcher Don Drysdale of the Los Angeles Dodgers. James concluded that Rizzuto is in the Hall of Fame because New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s was seen as a magical place, the newly undisputed capital of the world.

I think the same argument could be made about Drysdale. LA in the early 1960s was something special, and the huge fame of Drysdale, a 6'6" blond surfer born in the San Fernando Valley in 1936, was because he was the exemplar of this national notion that life in Los Angeles was better. (One of Drysdale's teammates at Van Nuy High School in the 1950s was Robert Redford.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 18, 2009

California

California's top political columnist, Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee, writes:

Memo to Californians from everyone else in the world: You folks out there in sunshine land caused this historic global recession, and it's time for you to mend your ways.

Farfetched? Not really.

A very good case can be made that California's developers, mortgage lenders and house-hungry but income- deficient residents, with state and local officials as enablers, created an unsustainable housing bubble. And when that bubble burst, leaving holders of mortgage bundles – many of them overseas banks – with little more than toilet paper, it created a banking crisis that spread to virtually every other segment of the global economy.

No, it was not confined to California. It happened in a few other high-growth states such as Florida, Arizona and Nevada. But nine of the 10 top issuers of subprime and no-documentation mortgages were headquartered in California, and the state has been ground zero for the collapse of those mortgages as adjustable interest rates "reset" upward, having recorded more than a half-million foreclosures and other symbols of distress.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 5, 2009

George Will almost gets it

George Will writes:
California is exporting talent while importing Mexico's poverty. The latter is not California's fault; the former is.

But the rest of his column doesn't acheive that level of insight.

I think there could be a case made that a high level of Mexican immigration is only manageable under a Texas Republican-style system of low government spending, low taxes, and low environmental regulation. But there are a couple of problems with that. It assumes a Texas-size supply of habitable land so that land prices don't go through the roof and there will be enough resource extraction jobs, which California really doesn't have even before all the environmental regulations that the beauty of California inspires. And it assumes that there will be enough Republican voters to keep voting against the new poor people's urge to vote for tax and spend programs. And how much longer will Texas have that?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 5, 2009

The Great California Pyramid Scheme Mania of May 1980

An almost-forgotten incident in American economic history was the pyramid scheme that swept Southern California during the stagflation of May 1980. Yet, now that we know that about 2/3rds of the Housing Bubble of 2000-2007 took place just in California, it's worth reviewing incidents from California's long history of financial manias.

I missed out on the late May 1980 climax of LA's Pyramid Fever because I got back to LA on May 16, 1980 after graduating from Rice, then left on May 20 for Europe. I recall reading about the early days in the local newspaper with amazement.

When I got home a couple of months later, nobody ever spoke of it again.

The difference between a pyramid scheme and a Ponzi scheme is mostly that the machinations of the pyramid scheme are out in the open. Time Magazine's June 16, 1980 issue describes the mechanics of the Great LA pyramid scheme:

For $1,000 each, 32 newcomers buy slots on the bottom row of a pyramid-shaped roster. Each new player pays half of his $1,000 to the person at the pinnacle, who ends up with $16,000. The new player also pays his remaining $500 to the person directly above him on the next tier, which contains 16 people. Since each person on that tier gets paid by two of the newcomers, he ends up with $1,000, thus recouping his original investment. As more people buy in, the players move up the chart. In time, theoretically, each person reaches the top—and $16,000.

The scheme caught on as only a California hustle can. Pawnshops did a booming business, as players hocked stereos to raise the initial fee. Most players, however, were middle-class suburbanites out to fight inflation. Everyone seemed to know someone who had indeed won $16,000. There were runs on local banks for $50 and $100 bills to be used in the night's gaming. Dentists reported patients, even with mouths full of cotton, soliciting them to join the club. Games were held in unlikely hideaways, including Hollywood sound studios, chartered buses and the Grand Salon of the Queen Mary at anchorage in Long Beach.


The wild thing about this 1980 outburst was that it was the most blatant pyramid scheme imaginable, combining the usual pyramid scheme mechanics with a New Age cult of the Power of the Pyramid.

Back in Gov. Jerry Brown's California, "pyramid power" was a popular New Age concept. (Although there's never anything new about New Age in California -- the lovely coastal mountain village of Ojai has been a New Age center since the 1800s.) In 1977 I went to a fashionable Westwood hair styling salon where for a few bucks extra you could get your hair cut in a special chair under a pyramid dangling from the ceiling. The pyramidal aura was supposed to help you avoid Bad Hair Days or something. (I declined. But, now that I think about it, I did have a lot of BHDs ...)

In May 1980, a vast multi-level cash exchange craze developed in California that explicitly invoked the mystique of pyramids. Every night there were hundreds of house parties hosted by people who had gotten in earlier on this multi-level scam (perhaps the night before). My vague recollection from newspaper reports is that you'd go over to a higher-up's house and sit with him under his pyramid while you gave him cash in return for your very own kit for building a pyramid out of wire and fabric. The Ancient Egyptian emanations from his pyramid would ensure that you'd get even more cash back from the suckers you'd recruit to buy your pyramid kits from you while sitting under your pyramid.

Perhaps I don't have the details right, but pyramid imagery was central to the experience, which made this Pyramid Power pyramid scheme hard to debunk. It was already pre-debunked. Anti-fraud authorities would go on the local TV news to denounce the pyramid schemes as "pyramid schemes," which just served as good advertising. "Well, duh, of course it's a pyramid scheme," participants would laugh. "How do you think those Egyptian pharaohs got so rich that they could afford those giant pyramids? Through tapping the secret energy of Pyramid Power!"

Here are summaries of articles from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner from May 21 to June 1, 1980:

"Get-rich-quick 'chains' multiplying too fast to stop." May 21, p. A3.
[California pyramid schemes. Participants a "cross-section". Los Angeles: hundreds of calls a day asking about legality; at least 100 clubs (c. 30 persons each). Parties busted. Alameda County High school pyramid: ounce of marijuana to buy in, pay-off a pound.

"Pyramids: 'Brother can you spare a dime,' 1980-style." May 22, p. A1+.
About 40,000 attend "pyramid parties" in Los Angeles last night (est. 150 to 400 parties). Accounts of arrests. Most common ante $1000, win $16,000. Studio employee: "Studio people are talking about nothing else." ... Some brought to meetings blindfolded. "I never saw anything like it in all my experience as a bunco detective, completely beyond the scope of my imagination." P. A15: "A pyramid winner tells how she won her money." Elizabeth Kyger, free-lance writer, 24, tells of splitting $16,000. "I've made great business contacts because of this." Says Ventura freeway westbound jammed in evenings because of pyramid parties.

"Mood of pyramid participants turning ugly." May 24, p. A5.
Two accounts of anger at Burbank pyramid party site. Out-of-towners now predominate. State Attorney General's office investigating possible links to organized crime. P. A1+ "Ante goes up to $5,000" Celebrity attendants to day-time pyramid party attempt to deceive or intimidate reporter upon leaving. Photo (p. 1): Policeman holds up "Pyramid Power" T-shirt confiscated in a raid. Letter "A" of "PYRAMID" forms pyramid

"500 rally at Griffith Park to promote money scheme." May 27, p. 1+.
Sign at rally: "Business Concept Power Happening." Attendants defend scheme, claim winnings, exchange pyramid gossip (meeting with 237 buys, a $100,000 ante game). Ventura county brings felony conspiracy charges. Lawyers address crowd - urge no guilty pleas. Petition circulated to DA. Citizen's Individual Rights and Collective Legal Expression (CIRCLE) distributes fliers criticizing police and media. Photo: Bearded man in pyramid power T-shirt, $ sign between the two words.

"I really feel like a sucker." June 1, p. 1.
Young printer's account of collapse of pyramid. Printed 300 pyramid charts. Went in with 3 others at $250 each. Meeting at 8 PM sharp, door locked, a letter was read asking law enforcement and tax collection personnel to admit role. Another person explains pyramid and asks for buy-ins. Last meeting: only people who had lost were present, talk of violence.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 10, 2009

LA in winter


Yes, that's what it looked like Monday. Granted, I wasn't sitting on my yacht at the marina, but that's the same general view I had from my minivan on the Santa Monica freeway.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

January 23, 2009

California unemployment up from 8.4% to 9.3% in one month

From the NYT:

California -- already in danger of running out of money -- reported that its December unemployment rate hit 9.3 percent, up from 8.4 percent in November and waaay up from 5.9 percent in December 2007.

The state shed 78,200 jobs in December, excluding farm workers as the economy is getting hammered by the recession. If California were an independent nation, its Gross Domestic Product would place it among the world's top 10 countries.

California has one of the nation's highest foreclosure rates. It is now tied with Louisiana for the nation's lowest credit-rating. Moody's has warned it may cut the state's debt rating, making much-needed loans harder to get and more expensive.

At the same time, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has been chiding his legislature to plug the state's massive budget shortfalls, projected to be $15 billion this year and $25 billion next year.

This whole bet-the-country-on-diversity experiment is being prototyped in California, which is about four decades ahead of the rest of the country demographically. How's it working out?

By the way, keep in mind that it's been 15 years since a very destructive earthquake in California. (By my count, the big destructive ones were in 1906, 1932, 1971, 1989, and 1994.) So, it's not as if California is overdue ... yet. But there will be another Big One. And there are a lot more buildings in California to fall down than in the past, although they are more sturdily built now than in the past. (My house is, I hope, at the other extreme -- so flimsily built that the main danger in an earthquake is getting conked by a falling 2"x4".)

The point is that eventually there will be a trillion dollar earthquake in California that the whole country will have to pay for. Maybe if Obama's lucky, it will happen soon so he can double his stimulus plan!

And, by another way, that's one more reason construction in California is slower and more expensive than in Texas: more earthquake safety regulations and costs.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 6, 2008

Initiatives

Every year in California, we get to vote on about a dozen initiatives, most of which we voters are completely clueless about. I'm not talking about the much publicized gay marriage one -- everybody is entitled to an opinion on that. It's all the bond issues. Shall we issue $10 billion in bonds for a supertrain from LA to SF? How about $7 billion to removes asbestos from LA schools? (I think they both passed. I'm too depressed to look them up.)

Sure, why not? They're bonds, right, not taxes? So we won't have to pay them. I guess, theoretically, we're supposed to pay them sometime, but no doubt we'll just flip the state to a greater fool before that happens.

Obviously, the initiative system is broken. The state is completely broke, with a predicted illegal shortfall of $25 billion next year in the state budget. Yet voters are continuing to take on debt with no idea how it will be paid. This is the state that sank the world economy. We're too childish to have that kind of spending power.

The way to fix it is to put a dollar limit on spending mandates for initiatives, such as $100 million, say. Then you could still have initiatives about important issues such as racial preferences or redistricting, but big ticket items would have to be hashed out as part of the budget process by the legislature.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 27, 2008

America's Most Hated City

Judging from this poll of 60,000 Americans conducted by Travel & Leisure of visitors' and residents' attitudes toward 25 American cities to find "America's Favorite City," Los Angeles has to be America's Least Favorite City.

Consider the subsets of the "People" category. Seattle came in first in "Most Intelligent People," while Los Angeles came in dead last, worse than Las Vegas, Miami, or San Antonio (perhaps 100-year-old Jacques Barzun raises San Antonio single-handedly?)

Charleston was first in "Most Friendly," while LA was last again.

LA -- surly and stupid, like the cast of "Idiocracy."

LA scored near the top only in "Luxury boutiques," "Shoe-shopping," and "Jewelry-shopping." LA is so hated it only came in sixth in "Weather," behind (besides San Diego and Honolulu) Miami and Charleston (ever hear of this thing called "Summer"?) and 7,000 foot Santa Fe (ever hear of this thing called "not Summer"?).

The only consolation Angelenos can take is that year by year, the rest of the country becomes more like LA (but with lousier weather):

We're the future, your future.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 4, 2008

Why did the housing bubble inflate the most in California?

Why did the housing bubble reach the most ridiculous heights in California? Here are several theories and I'd like to hear your ideas:

1. Californians are too lazy and/or stupid to do some arithmetic before signing gigantic contracts for many hundreds of thousands of dollars. (As a native-born Californian, I'd have to say that this sounds plausible to me.)

2. Immigration raises demand for housing and drives down wages, while stressing out public goods like schools and freeways.

3. Momentum -- Housing prices had been rising in California most years since 1975, so they just had to continue. They had to.

4. Lack of land -- California! is essentially the Mediterranean climate zone, a strip 500 miles long and about 20 miles wide, running from the beach to the first line of mountains in Southern California and the first valley in from the foggy beach north of Santa Cruz. The rest of California is either beautiful but too vertical to be habitable, or is Odessa (TX) West, but with lousier high school football teams. Lots of people bought houses in Bakersfield figuring they had to go up up up because ... they're in California! No, they're in Bakersfield. If you saw "There Will Be Blood," you'll see the sharp difference between the miserable oil town near Bakersfield and the exquisite coast where Daniel Day-Lewis's pipeline winds up. The oil town was actually filmed in West Texas, but it looks a lot like the Central Valley anyway.

5. Zoning / Environmentalism (which are pretty much the same thing in California) -- The land everybody wants is controlled by the California Coastal Commission, so much of it, especially the prime turf between Santa Barbara and Hearst Castle, is unoccupied except by cows.

6. What's your theory?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 7, 2008

Obama's pro-illegal alien ploy flops

In the California primary, Hillary won big among Latinos in California by running as a tax and spend Democrat, while Obama ran as a pro-illegal immigrant. The LA Times article says:

The Obama campaign, by contrast, aired Spanish-language radio ads promoting his support for issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. That was a "classic Northeastern assumption" that licenses were the primary concern of Latinos, according to Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at USC.

"It's not. I think he would have had much more traction on issues like education, or the loss of jobs . . . issues that resonate with Latino homeowners," Pachon said.

Yes, Obama is from the Midwest not the Northeast, but in California, everything beyond Las Vegas is considered "back East."

The thing that people back East like Obama are always forgetting is that illegal immigrants aren't supposed to vote. Granted, a few do vote illegally, but most wouldn't vote even if it was legal. They have more than enough drama in their private lives.

Hispanics who can vote mostly don't really care much about illegal immigrants. They might want legal immigration expanded so they can sponsor more close relatives, but illegals are a pain in the neck -- some third cousin shows up and wants to sleep on your couch for a year until he gets settled.

But most politicians and journalists don't know that because the "experts" they talk to about Hispanics -- such as Hispanic political consultants -- all want more illegal immigrants because it makes them seem more important. They want to be the "voice" of not 45 million people but, of 90 million or 180 million. Think how much business they would get then!

On the other hand, maybe all this dissection of the California voting is premature. Do we even really know who won the California primaries? I noticed this rather disturbing paragraph in the Thursday morning LA Times article:

"Stephen Weir, head of the state association of elections officials, estimated Wednesday that up to 2 million ballots remained uncounted. An additional 450,000 provisional ballots, filed when there is a dispute at a polling place, were also uncounted, according to Weir, the clerk-recorder of Contra Costa County. Elections officials have until March 4 to complete their tally, on which rests the division of party delegates."

Up to two million uncounted votes?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 22, 2007

The LA Apocalypse All Over Again

The weather conditions out here in LA are identical to those of exactly four years ago: a drought year and hot winds off the desert. So, the whole place is on fire once more. The end is nigh, which tends to make a lot of people, many of them Southern Californians, rather pleased. Here's a quote from my UPI article from October 30, 2003 on "Los Angeles and the Apocalyptic Imagination:"

According to journalist Mike Davis, who became L.A.'s favorite prophet of calamity with his foreboding local bestseller "Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster," Southern California is widely seen as "the doom capital of the universe."

He wrote in 1998, "The destruction of Los Angeles has been the central theme or dominating image in more than a hundred and fifty novels, short stories, and films." Davis counts 49 fictional local nuclear attacks, 28 earthquakes, six floods, and 10 hordes of invading creatures that have helped brand "the City of Angels as a theme park for Armageddon."

Davis himself can't resist trumpeting such alarming but trivial threats to residents as tornados, man-eating coyotes, and killer bees. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer