Even before it became a state, people migrated to California in search of a better life: for jobs, the chance to become rich and famous, or simply the comfortable climate and beautiful landscape.
Your example of fishery crashes are actually mostly due to things other than fishing (although it certainly didn't help). Salmon population crashes are almost entirely due to dams/destruction of freshwater spawning habitats and Anchovy/Sardine populations, to quote McClatchie et al, 2012:
"The mechanisms driving these fluctuations are poorly understood. Abundance of modern sardine is affected by environment, biological interactions, and by commercial fishing. Modern data show that forces driving abundance fluctuations are primarily environmental and strongly influenced by ENSO"
Another factor was logging and stream sediments as well as increased water temperatures from lose of canopy. If more fish ladders has been planned things might of been bette at the dans.
One clarification: I do not think that it is accurate to say that Proposition 13 was anti-growth. It was more anti-property tax. California taxes kept going up, and little of the resulting revenue was devoted to infrastructure construction. As you show in your graph, the shift in spending away from infrastructure preceded Proposition 13 by a decade.
Would you like to support your assertion with evidence or at least an argument of some kind? Or did you just want to express an opinion? Not sure how anyone benefits there?
I’m wondering what your impression of low-quality roads is in comparison to? When I moved to California, I was impressed by the extensive highway system - so much grander and more sensible than the northeast US. (Often because it’s newer.)
Yep. When I moved to LA from Minneapolis I couldn’t believe all the complaining about the roads. There was this bumper sticker that said “LA is killing my car.” I guess the motoring standards here are absolute and not relative. In MN the roads crack in the winter and buckle in the summer, and there are more jokes than complaints. Different cultures, as if that weren’t obvious enough otherwise…
The challenge of the Ca highway system was money meant for it got moved to other areas with more vocal lobbies. So highway expansion and maintenance was starved for funds. Jerry Brown in his first term with his Caltrans director Adriana Gianturco was anti Auto and pro mass transit. It has gotten better last couple of years, my gut feeling is a failed recall on a gas tax has made Ca Government afraid to raid the transportation budget.
La’s streets are in horrible shape because maintenance is an easy target for raiding. The water infrastructure is a ticking time bomb. UCLA flood was an example of this.
The optimistic take here is that we may now finally be in a good position to restart the growth machine by taking advantage of technological and social advances that didn't exist 50 years ago, and that can address the legitimate concerns about downsides of growth that made the tide turn in the 1970s.
Growth no longer has to mean increased air pollution: electric vehicles and clean power generation have decoupled those. It no longer has to mean increased congestion either, if we can combine remote work with better mass transit design and congestion pricing. Smartly planned "gentle density" urbanism can create more residential units without sacrificing open space. We can even make new construction more beautiful at lower cost than ever before-- see that recent Works in Progress article about how brutalist/modernist architecture isn't actually less expensive and we could choose to revitalize the beautiful architectural styles of the past.
Those new capabilities, combined with a reduction in racism and nativism, could make ours the generation that restarts Californian growth. And pro-growth advocacy ought to be coupled with engineering and research effort geared toward making growth even greener.
California's power grid is already faltering. Newsom recently asked residents not to recharge the electrical grid during periods of peak demand. California hates pretty much all types of energy--that is really the control factor. They are blowing up hydroelectric dams, shutting down nuclear plants, and shaming oil producers. Thus, it has become insanely expensive. People are voting with their feet now. I think California is destined to become a sort of Americanized Venezuela, with the very poor and the very rich and little in between.
Thank you for this thorough summary. As you point out, there are no real villains in this story. All concerned seem to be acting in rational ways to accomplish reasonable goals, from individual and local community perspectives. I hope you will give future attention to solutions to this conundrum.
One response is for the state ( residents, government, and buisness) to build massive infrastructure improvements that can be used for the next 100 years. Like quadrupling state energy production and distribution. Comes at significant environmental cost, but it could be mindfully done.
California's infrastructure accomplishments of the 1950s and 1960s, especially the freeways, are an amazing achievement. The new infrastructure of that era, particularly the freeways and universities, was the gold standard for quality and propelled growth, as this article explains in detail.
Growth will occur where infrastructure and housing can be built. And it modern California, it can't be built. Texas offers little or none of California's inherent assets (beautiful landscapes, ideal climate, abundant recreation opportunities), but Texas is able and willing to build vast quantities of new housing, so Texas grows quickly and mostly remains affordable. Other states that build new housing, especially Arizona, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia, also grow quickly.
Prop 13 didn't centralize CA education spending. Court decisions had already started doing that, redistributing money from rich school districts to poor ones. Prop 13 was in backlash against that, so that rich school districts' taxes wouldn't go up to pay for schools in poor districts.
Another factor left out of your analysis is that CA real estate prices skyrocketed due to inflation, which led to huge increases in property tax revenue, to be paid for by homeowners whose incomes weren't going up as much, if at all. That's why the assessments were reset to the pre-inflation assessments, which were in 1973, not 1975 as you mistakenly wrote.
Overall CA education spending never went down. Some things were cut as non-essential, but others went way up, mainly teacher salaries, benefits, and administrative overhead.
So I used to rent from an old hippie in Brisbane ("City of Stars!") CA. He said the day they stopped handing out water meters in the 70s, house prices went nuts.
He also liked to walk thru town on the 1st visiting his rentalks, a joint in one hand, rent checks in the other.
1) Keep planning for 10% population growth annually in cities. 2) Abolish zoning. 3) Don't refuse to issue water permits to restrict growth. 4) Abolish rent control.
Good article, you might could say population of non native was….prior to gold rush. The estimated population of native prior to the rush was over 100k. I came out via the military in the 70s and stayed for the beaches!
The same phenom that occurred to Ca. early last century, is currently happening to our entire country. Basically, a growing population is looking for greener pastures.
World pop increased 4 fold from 1920 to 2020, to 8 billion. Improved mass transit is now flooding our southern border much like mid 1900’s into Ca. The difference?
Calif citizens dealt with it by voting in regulations to limit development. Today…. One of our two political parties still wish to pass regulatory measures to limit the flood. While the opposing party invites the new voters for unlimited growth and slurbs that will drain tax coffers to provide sustenance.
There are serious issues you failed to mention in the slant of this article. First, as property values have increased upon sales, the counties were/are able to assess at the new much higher values and are now once again, rolling in local tax revenues, just like prior to Prop 13. Second, you fail to mention that with the influx of illegal and legal migrants often of low skill, low wage potentials, the county and state have shifted huge amounts of funding at all levels to supporting the welfare state, rather than fixing infrastructure. Third, the takeover and political power wielded by public labor unions who's earnings are always higher than their counterparts in the private sector, make sure that an ever increasing share of tax dollars go to them, not for improving or maintaining infrastructure. As for road maintenance, while overcrowded freeways are in relatively good shape, all one has to do is get off those and drive around on dismally maintained county roads and city streets to understand this serious problem. One more issue is that CA state law requires 40% of the state budget to go to public schools, so there is plenty of money, and the per-pupil spending in CA is much higher than anywhere else, even if it is not reflected in student achievements and performance.
How do we reconcile today’s drive to fill in every block with multi-family housing with water and electricity rationing? If we don’t have enough for the existing population, how can we continue this frenetic building? It seems like we need to halt construction until the infrastructure catches up.
Just my observation of being a Realtor and contractor for 47yrs. During which time I helped literally thousands of people buy, finance and build their homes.
While land use and adjacent policies undoubtedly play a major part in the turn, what do you make of Orlando & Redfearn's (2024) paper that suggests that even places traditionally seen as growth-friendly (such as Texas) are on a similar trajectory? They argue that cities tend to expand outwards until they become limited by the transport system, which gives way to a regime of slower growth by infill, which is just a lot harder to do at scale.
Nope. Then they start growing up, as elevators are the most efficient form of transport there is, unless prevented from going up by zoning. Houston has no zoning, and has been growing up for decades.
That's true, but also besides the point that growing up is harder than growing out. As the abstract states:
"In particular, we examine how housing provision has evolved for the largest four metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in California and Texas. Despite differences in their topographies and regulatory environments, we find several common dynamics. As these MSAs grow, we see that fewer new net units are built at the periphery and a smaller share of the new units are built as single-family detached houses. As a greater share of new net units are built in infill locations, more units are built using higher-density—and more costly—multifamily housing construction techniques. Interestingly, we see these housing supply patterns in both “pro-growth” MSAs and “highly regulated” MSAs."
Minor quibble:
Your example of fishery crashes are actually mostly due to things other than fishing (although it certainly didn't help). Salmon population crashes are almost entirely due to dams/destruction of freshwater spawning habitats and Anchovy/Sardine populations, to quote McClatchie et al, 2012:
"The mechanisms driving these fluctuations are poorly understood. Abundance of modern sardine is affected by environment, biological interactions, and by commercial fishing. Modern data show that forces driving abundance fluctuations are primarily environmental and strongly influenced by ENSO"
Good catch, amended this to mention the effects of damming rivers and streams on fish populations.
Another factor was logging and stream sediments as well as increased water temperatures from lose of canopy. If more fish ladders has been planned things might of been bette at the dans.
*better at the dams
Excellent overview.
One clarification: I do not think that it is accurate to say that Proposition 13 was anti-growth. It was more anti-property tax. California taxes kept going up, and little of the resulting revenue was devoted to infrastructure construction. As you show in your graph, the shift in spending away from infrastructure preceded Proposition 13 by a decade.
Without proposition 13 there would have been even less homeowners.
Larger government and taxes is what is killing California and the middle class.
Would you like to support your assertion with evidence or at least an argument of some kind? Or did you just want to express an opinion? Not sure how anyone benefits there?
Right. California is notable for both high taxes and low quality roads. I doubt repelling prop 13 would change that.
I’m wondering what your impression of low-quality roads is in comparison to? When I moved to California, I was impressed by the extensive highway system - so much grander and more sensible than the northeast US. (Often because it’s newer.)
Yep. When I moved to LA from Minneapolis I couldn’t believe all the complaining about the roads. There was this bumper sticker that said “LA is killing my car.” I guess the motoring standards here are absolute and not relative. In MN the roads crack in the winter and buckle in the summer, and there are more jokes than complaints. Different cultures, as if that weren’t obvious enough otherwise…
The challenge of the Ca highway system was money meant for it got moved to other areas with more vocal lobbies. So highway expansion and maintenance was starved for funds. Jerry Brown in his first term with his Caltrans director Adriana Gianturco was anti Auto and pro mass transit. It has gotten better last couple of years, my gut feeling is a failed recall on a gas tax has made Ca Government afraid to raid the transportation budget.
La’s streets are in horrible shape because maintenance is an easy target for raiding. The water infrastructure is a ticking time bomb. UCLA flood was an example of this.
Is it about being newer or about getting less weather damage?
Both. When driving around Massachusetts, it’s pretty clear that the layout of city streets predates cars.
The post says it reduced local control over tax revenue, which probably would shift allocation.
The optimistic take here is that we may now finally be in a good position to restart the growth machine by taking advantage of technological and social advances that didn't exist 50 years ago, and that can address the legitimate concerns about downsides of growth that made the tide turn in the 1970s.
Growth no longer has to mean increased air pollution: electric vehicles and clean power generation have decoupled those. It no longer has to mean increased congestion either, if we can combine remote work with better mass transit design and congestion pricing. Smartly planned "gentle density" urbanism can create more residential units without sacrificing open space. We can even make new construction more beautiful at lower cost than ever before-- see that recent Works in Progress article about how brutalist/modernist architecture isn't actually less expensive and we could choose to revitalize the beautiful architectural styles of the past.
Those new capabilities, combined with a reduction in racism and nativism, could make ours the generation that restarts Californian growth. And pro-growth advocacy ought to be coupled with engineering and research effort geared toward making growth even greener.
California's power grid is already faltering. Newsom recently asked residents not to recharge the electrical grid during periods of peak demand. California hates pretty much all types of energy--that is really the control factor. They are blowing up hydroelectric dams, shutting down nuclear plants, and shaming oil producers. Thus, it has become insanely expensive. People are voting with their feet now. I think California is destined to become a sort of Americanized Venezuela, with the very poor and the very rich and little in between.
Thank you for this thorough summary. As you point out, there are no real villains in this story. All concerned seem to be acting in rational ways to accomplish reasonable goals, from individual and local community perspectives. I hope you will give future attention to solutions to this conundrum.
One response is for the state ( residents, government, and buisness) to build massive infrastructure improvements that can be used for the next 100 years. Like quadrupling state energy production and distribution. Comes at significant environmental cost, but it could be mindfully done.
Nothing about how it went from a Red State to a Blue State?
California's infrastructure accomplishments of the 1950s and 1960s, especially the freeways, are an amazing achievement. The new infrastructure of that era, particularly the freeways and universities, was the gold standard for quality and propelled growth, as this article explains in detail.
Growth will occur where infrastructure and housing can be built. And it modern California, it can't be built. Texas offers little or none of California's inherent assets (beautiful landscapes, ideal climate, abundant recreation opportunities), but Texas is able and willing to build vast quantities of new housing, so Texas grows quickly and mostly remains affordable. Other states that build new housing, especially Arizona, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia, also grow quickly.
Prop 13 didn't centralize CA education spending. Court decisions had already started doing that, redistributing money from rich school districts to poor ones. Prop 13 was in backlash against that, so that rich school districts' taxes wouldn't go up to pay for schools in poor districts.
Another factor left out of your analysis is that CA real estate prices skyrocketed due to inflation, which led to huge increases in property tax revenue, to be paid for by homeowners whose incomes weren't going up as much, if at all. That's why the assessments were reset to the pre-inflation assessments, which were in 1973, not 1975 as you mistakenly wrote.
Overall CA education spending never went down. Some things were cut as non-essential, but others went way up, mainly teacher salaries, benefits, and administrative overhead.
So I used to rent from an old hippie in Brisbane ("City of Stars!") CA. He said the day they stopped handing out water meters in the 70s, house prices went nuts.
He also liked to walk thru town on the 1st visiting his rentalks, a joint in one hand, rent checks in the other.
To what extent could California have continued to be pro-growth after the 60s? What would have been some policies or other strategies to achieve this?
1) Keep planning for 10% population growth annually in cities. 2) Abolish zoning. 3) Don't refuse to issue water permits to restrict growth. 4) Abolish rent control.
Good article, you might could say population of non native was….prior to gold rush. The estimated population of native prior to the rush was over 100k. I came out via the military in the 70s and stayed for the beaches!
Excellent 💫🌟⭐
The same phenom that occurred to Ca. early last century, is currently happening to our entire country. Basically, a growing population is looking for greener pastures.
World pop increased 4 fold from 1920 to 2020, to 8 billion. Improved mass transit is now flooding our southern border much like mid 1900’s into Ca. The difference?
Calif citizens dealt with it by voting in regulations to limit development. Today…. One of our two political parties still wish to pass regulatory measures to limit the flood. While the opposing party invites the new voters for unlimited growth and slurbs that will drain tax coffers to provide sustenance.
There are serious issues you failed to mention in the slant of this article. First, as property values have increased upon sales, the counties were/are able to assess at the new much higher values and are now once again, rolling in local tax revenues, just like prior to Prop 13. Second, you fail to mention that with the influx of illegal and legal migrants often of low skill, low wage potentials, the county and state have shifted huge amounts of funding at all levels to supporting the welfare state, rather than fixing infrastructure. Third, the takeover and political power wielded by public labor unions who's earnings are always higher than their counterparts in the private sector, make sure that an ever increasing share of tax dollars go to them, not for improving or maintaining infrastructure. As for road maintenance, while overcrowded freeways are in relatively good shape, all one has to do is get off those and drive around on dismally maintained county roads and city streets to understand this serious problem. One more issue is that CA state law requires 40% of the state budget to go to public schools, so there is plenty of money, and the per-pupil spending in CA is much higher than anywhere else, even if it is not reflected in student achievements and performance.
How do we reconcile today’s drive to fill in every block with multi-family housing with water and electricity rationing? If we don’t have enough for the existing population, how can we continue this frenetic building? It seems like we need to halt construction until the infrastructure catches up.
Hey Dan
Just my observation of being a Realtor and contractor for 47yrs. During which time I helped literally thousands of people buy, finance and build their homes.
While land use and adjacent policies undoubtedly play a major part in the turn, what do you make of Orlando & Redfearn's (2024) paper that suggests that even places traditionally seen as growth-friendly (such as Texas) are on a similar trajectory? They argue that cities tend to expand outwards until they become limited by the transport system, which gives way to a regime of slower growth by infill, which is just a lot harder to do at scale.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6229.12490
Nope. Then they start growing up, as elevators are the most efficient form of transport there is, unless prevented from going up by zoning. Houston has no zoning, and has been growing up for decades.
That's true, but also besides the point that growing up is harder than growing out. As the abstract states:
"In particular, we examine how housing provision has evolved for the largest four metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in California and Texas. Despite differences in their topographies and regulatory environments, we find several common dynamics. As these MSAs grow, we see that fewer new net units are built at the periphery and a smaller share of the new units are built as single-family detached houses. As a greater share of new net units are built in infill locations, more units are built using higher-density—and more costly—multifamily housing construction techniques. Interestingly, we see these housing supply patterns in both “pro-growth” MSAs and “highly regulated” MSAs."