> People made fun of SF, then it spread to the broader Bay Area, then LA, then other parts of the country. Turns out the effects of income inequality and how it impacts housing are rippling through the US.
These aren't automatic, though. Who's to say they aren't produced by policy that's often done first in SF first?
The policy is usually in response to the problems, not vice versa. California is actually dysfunctionally democratic (with a small "d", not "Democratic"). The state constitution gives ballot initiatives powers that they don't have in many other states, and the state has a tradition of individual rights and political activism that means the citizenry isn't shy about using that.
A lot of people in the rest of the country tend to think "Oh, that's just dysfunctional California politics, we'll vote in different policies and things will go differently for us." Yes, you will vote in different policies. No, things will not go differently for you. California voted in different policies too - remember that it's the source of the Reagan Revolution, the hippie generation, the Chinese Exclusion Act, all sorts of policies that took hold nationally but are now the antithesis of what California stands for.
At the root of this is a misperception of the power of politics. Most ordinary people think that laws are laws and the people who make the laws have ultimate power. California (and U.S. history in general) proves that laws are reactions to specific social and demographic forces, and the laws reflect the shape of those forces. Economics drives politics and technology drives economics.
California is also dysfunctionally Democratic (big "D") in that all elected state level offices have gone to Democrats for the last several election cycles. Because the Republican Party has imploded and third parties have failed to gain traction we now live in a single party state. Politicians are selected by Democratic Party leaders and are no longer accountable to voters in any meaningful way.
This problem isn't particular to the Democratic Party. Other states now have single party Republican governments with similar levels of dysfunction and corruption.
The implosion is because the top two system in California ensures that Republican candidates never even get on the ballot because the GOP is so unpopular.
The top two system by the way was a popular ballot initiative championed by Schwarzenegger to remove the gridlock from the state and remove the power of individual parties.
Ironically Schwarzenegger came to power because of shenanigans the Bush administration and Enron were playing with California’s power grid to remove Gray Davis, a popular up and comer who could be a threat.
So in essence, your complaint that only democrats win in California and somehow that’s because of the Democratic Party is ironic because single party rule in California is due to direct efforts by Republicans to make it thus. It just turned out that the federal politics of the GOP shifted the state very solidly blue and turns out single party rule by Democrats seems to be quite popular given how the state flourished in the years following.
> So in essence, your complaint that only democrats win in California and somehow that’s because of the Democratic Party is ironic because single party rule in California is due to direct efforts by Republicans to make it thus
There was no complaint. I don't see the point in such a partisan way of thinking.
> single party rule by Democrats seems to be quite popular given how the state flourished in the years following
This doesn't seem to be the case now. Lots of people are leaving California, as far as I can tell[0].
> But this trend is now shifting, with a sharp increase in the number of higher-income adults moving to California (up 30% in 2022 versus 2021) and a slight decline in the number moving out. The net effect is a strong rebound from the pandemic years.
Basically the trend of pushing out lower income people is continuing because California still struggles to keep CoL under control.
Be careful trying to draw political conclusions from migration data, because it tells an economic story.
The migration data you cite says that the people leaving California are generally lower-income households without higher education. The people entering California tend to be highly educated and have very well-paying jobs [1]. California's housing stock is more or less fixed; actual housing construction is round-off error to the current population. What's happening is that high-earning immigrants are outbidding lower-income residents for the fixed supply of housing, and then faced with soaring housing costs, those lower-income residents are moving to states where their income places them higher on the social pecking order.
These aren't automatic, though. Who's to say they aren't produced by policy that's often done first in SF first?