10 ms·

My Dark California Dream

77 points by samclemens 11y ago

lemevi 11y ago
I go to work in San Francisco every day. I'm not an entrepreneur but as an engineer I am benefiting from the rise of tech. I look around the city as I walk to the office, seeing all these new condos spring up, seeing the work done on the new terminals and all the activity around me and it feels like a city that's alive and growing. My family and I frequently travel all over California to check out all its beautiful places and I love this state. I grew up in San Diego so it's not like I'm a tourist. With the exception of the drought, I think California is getting better all the time.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- crabasa 11y ago
  > except, of course, those living the most obvious new California dream, the technology gold rush. Try telling successful 25-year-old entrepreneurs in San Francisco that California’s over and you’ll get blank stares as they contemplate stock options, condos going up all over the city, restaurants packed nightly and spectacular organic produce at farmers’ markets every day. If you had read the entire article, you would have noticed the OP was well aware of your opinion here.
  - lemevi 11y ago
    > If you had read the entire article I read the entire article. Notice I wrote "I'm not an entrepreneur", implicitly referencing the passage you quoted.
  - raldi 11y ago
    No true Scotsman disagrees with the article.
danboarder 11y ago
The author is so focused on lamenting California's demise that he's missing what is still here. I fixed up an old '73 VW westy bus and we've been doing all the things he said can't be done anymore. The cali dream is alive and well, I was out surfing today. El Nino is predicted this year and may spell the end of the drought. Things are looking up, and the solution to the sense of loss he's taking about is to be creative. Go to Kings Canyon or Anza Borrego instead of tourist-trap Yosemite. Its not that hard.
- brokencog 11y ago
  Only those aren't well versed in the regional history portend a single rainy season will end this drought. Bring some pleasant relief, which will only help to slacken regulation/thinking/policy. However after a year the drought will still be - unmoderated and with even worse water policies. But, if you can afford the water, Cali is still the same - although it's harder to see through the haze of selfie sticks and REI gear.
  - eruditely 11y ago
    What about a second rainy season? New extremes are surpassed all the time.
    - jjtheblunt 11y ago
      Nope, shouldn't be within years of rainy seasons of being enough.
- vvanders 11y ago
  Anza Borrego is it's own unique place. I spent many weekends poking around the various parts with my dad in a old 2-door toyota pickup truck. Many fond memories.
- gragas 11y ago
  Did you finish the article? In the end it seems like the author decides that every generation perceives California that way as they grow old. He only says the dream is dead for him. Not the new generations.
dlsx 11y ago
NEW YORK CITY
brokencog 11y ago
Article has the wrong title ... "Same as it ever was. Same as it ever will be." Only, much more of everything. This is, inevitably, for the worse.
- zyxley 11y ago
  > This is, inevitably, for the worse. Why?
andyl 11y ago
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
milge 11y ago
I'm a guy living on the east coast. I've wanted to move to Cali for almost a decade now. As a developer, there are 4 times as many job prospects in California. The weather doesn't hurt either. I bought into the American dream. Go to school. Get a job. Buy a house. Now I'm seeing if I can break even on my investment. I'm hoping the authors opinion is biased.
powera 11y ago
TLDR: you kids get off my lawn. I mean the author admits this multiple times, that he's nostalgic for "1960s California" out of nostalgia rather than any actual reasons it was better.
rdtsc 11y ago
I wanted to like California, but every time I visit (mostly LA) I end up spending hours stuck in traffic getting places. It kills it for me, it makes the joy of nice weather, palm trees, the laid back attitude, the views, the beaches, kind of not worth it. I tried the Metro, but it didn't go where I wanted to go somehow. I tried the buses, but there were too crowded and they got stuck in traffic just as much as the cars.
- jerhinesmith 11y ago
  If you're only visiting LA, you're going to run into traffic. LA has arguably the first or second worst traffic in all of the US. As a counter-anecdote, I live in what could be considered an Oakland or SF suburb, and I can get everywhere I need to go by either walking or taking bart. I sit in traffic maybe two or three times a year.
  - mng2 11y ago
    I used to live in Berkeley and did the walk/BART/bus/carshare thing, and it was wonderful. I miss it a lot.
    - jerhinesmith 11y ago
      Having grown up in the midwest where everything is a 10 - 20 minute drive, I absolutely love it here. It's literally life changing.
- aklemm 11y ago
  Exactly. I've lived in and visited so many amazing places that are just ruined by the traffic. For the last 1+ years I'm living in a nice (not amazing) place with few traffic problems and it really just seems better. I'll save the amazing places for vacations from now on, I think.
  - bkjelden 11y ago
    I made the opposite move about a year ago, and I think you have it right. Traffic is awful
wtbob 11y ago
The thing is, California died a long time ago. The state which elected Ronald Reagan as governor is long, long gone. I have family there, and every time I visit I'm struck by what a bureaucratic nightmare it is: everything is regulated, registered, taxed, adjusted, but most of all controlled. As far as I can tell, from my visits, California is dystopia. A different sort of dystopia than Washington, D.C. or Boston, but a dystopia nonetheless. There's enough money in the world to pay me to live in California, but no-one would pay it to me.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- saryant 11y ago
  I grew up in California (north, south and central). I highly doubt I will ever move back. California, in my experience, was filled with hatred and intolerance. Not on the surface, but dig a little deeper, disagree with the hivemind just a little bit and you'll find its friendly veneer quickly fades away to a grim reality. Beyond its never-ending bureaucracy is a politics of the personal that becomes inescapable. All that was left was to leave.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >As far as I can tell, from my visits, California is dystopia. A different sort of dystopia than Washington, D.C. or Boston, but a dystopia nonetheless. Stop being a melodramatic, spoiled American. Current-day California is nothing like: * Present-day Russia * Present-day China * Present-day Mexico * Pinochet's Chile * Nazi Germany * Soviet Russia * Anywhere else in the Eastern Bloc * present-day ISIS territory Besides which, plenty of people hated Reagan.
  - dang 11y ago
    > Stop being a melodramatic, spoiled American As I think you know, this isn't allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong someone is. Please don't do it here.
    - 11y ago
Animats 11y ago
Don't worry, it's about time for another dot-com crash. After the last dot-com crash, traffic in SF dropped so much that rush hour disappeared. Half the twentysomethings moved out. Downtown San Jose emptied out. Just be patient. Which big company will be the first to go? Twitter? (And why is Zynga still around at all?)
- raldi 11y ago
  The booms last so long, and are so big, and the busts are reversed so swiftly and completely, that the latter should really be thought of as the bubbles. If you long at the long-term trend (like the last 20 or 40 years), it's clear that the rising generations want to live in cities much moreso than previous ones did, there's a steady exodus from snowy states to warmer ones, tech isn't going away (except for occasional brief setbacks), and San Francisco and Silicon Valley are going to be the center of that world deep into the foreseeable future. In other words, yes, a tech crash will happen once or twice every decade, but if you're counting on them to scare everyone else away and let you have the Bay Area all to yourself forevermore, you're in for a rude awakening. http://my.paragon-re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Case-Shiller_Simpl-Percentages.jpg http://my.paragon-re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Case-...
  - douche 11y ago
    > it's clear that the rising generations want to live in cities much moreso than previous ones did I don't know that it's necessarily that we want to, but we kinda have to. When you're starting off out of college with the kind of debt that your parents didn't have until they bought their first home, you've got to go where the money is. For some reason, it's been decided that packing people into open-office cattle cribs in a handful of cities across the country is the only way to do business... So we pack up and go live in shitty apartments in the city for a few years until we get out of debt-slavery and become skilled enough and connected enough that we can work from the places we actually want to live and raise a family. It pisses me off a little bit. In my home town, I've got two hundred-year-old graves of relatives in the town cemetery, and I grew up in a house built on land that was part of a farm my great-great grandfather owned before the Great Depression. There are the hills and woods I stalked deer and turkeys in, the little mountain ponds I caught trout in, the garden I grew beans and corn and potatoes in with my family. The elementary and high school gyms I shot thousands of hoops in and poured out uncounted gallons of sweat on. I know every tree, every rock that sticks up out of the lawn enough to dull the lawnmower if you don't go around. It's home, in a way that the other places I've had to live and work since then will never be. It just sucks, because there is no work, and so I, along with everyone else in my generation, has had to leave and go out into these concrete jungles and lifeless suburbs to make a living. Someday, I'll have made enough money, and the world will move on enough that I can write software from my living room, and teach my kids how to grow tomatoes in that same patch of dirt.
klenwell 11y ago
Interesting personal take on recent California history. But the latent racial anxiety that is an important part of this story (and is ironically captured by the title of this piece) would be outrageous if it wasn't so comical. The author glosses the racial and ethnic diversity that makes California special and he seems like a good guy. But he ignores the ugly racial politics that still lurks in a diminishing but active part of the electorate. This headline from earlier this year, as much as anything, sums up the "darkness" that colors much of the nostalgia expressed by nostalgic Californians, especially those of the author's and author's parents' generation: "It's official: Latinos now outnumber whites in California" http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-census-latinos-20150708-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-census-latinos... One of the things I love most about California is its racial and cultural diversity. But a lot of that transition from the "agreed-upon, commanding" version of "modernist California" to the "post-modern phase" was embodied politically by a white flight impulse among people like my grandparents who beatified FDR then in the 1950s and 1960s started voting for conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan when he was elected governor and ended up reliably supporting a Republican establishment that sanctified Prop 13 and championed funding cuts for the public institutions that formed an important part of the foundation of the California dream. They got theirs and they were loathe to pay it forward for a state that they felt was being overrun by people who didn't share their values and were not like themselves. With the election of Jerry Brown and the dominance of Democrats in the legislature, California seems to have turned a corner fiscally and a lot of the doom-and-gloom headlines that gleefully pointed to the deficits of the previous decade have faded away. California still faces a lot of challenges. At least it is facing up to them.
- turar 11y ago
  >> "It's official: Latinos now outnumber whites in California" These sentiments are ironic, given California's history. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Mexico#/media/File:Mapa_de_Mexico_1835_1.PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Mexic...
unclesaamm 11y ago
Hm, the happy note on the end about the good parts of progress was light on the massive increase of income inequality. A city with foreign investment and state of the art medical facilities is good and well, but is unrelated to what makes San Francisco San Francisco, which is a generosity toward difference, and a welcoming "come as you are" philosophy. If nobody except the highly affluent can live here, we've lost our way.
- outis 11y ago
  San Francisco was only ever really tolerant of the right kind of differences, AFAICT. For example, it appears to be a near-complete political monoculture. It even has a prominent road in the largest city park named after a living and active Democratic politician, just to make sure everyone knows whose turf it is. More recently, there is the animosity against the tech crowd, which I don't need to describe.
  - WildUtah 11y ago
    a near-complete political monoculture Not true at all. The Green Party is welcome to compete respectfully with the Democratic machine sometimes and even Libertarians are not complete exiles And I always suspected the animosity against the tech crowd is mostly aimed at non-white techies more than techies in general. It's just phrased as anti-techie out of political correctness.
    - unclesaamm 11y ago
      ...what? The vast majority of techies are whites and affluent Asian Americans. Are there even non-white techies to protest?
      - WildUtah 11y ago
        A deep study of the technicalities of race and its sociobiological construction reveals a shocking result: asians aren't white.
  - 11y ago
turkishrevenge 11y ago
What can I say about this article? I recently moved here, like many other people in tech. I didn't come for the draw of nature--which I love--but for a higher paying job and a chance to escape a poor, decaying, east coast city that increasingly felt like an urban hell. The whole undertaking was supposed to be a leg up, moving to that next level of adulthood (whatever that means in 2015). I am a well-paid, well-educated engineer in my early 30's. I am not a founder, nor do I intend to be, at least around these parts. California was a promised land, and I was glad to buy a one-way ticket there. Now that I am here and a "resident," I faced with an ugly truth: the utter impossibility for me to ever buy any kind of property in the city, however modest or dilapidated, even if my salary somehow doubled overnight. The very thought of what it takes to "make it" here borders on the obscene. I'm lucky to pay $1,300 (which is cheap) for a one-bedroom in the city with 3 other people; outside, the prospects aren't much better. The SF (and sadly the bay area in general) of now is a place where boomers made the rules. I can't help but feel impotent when thinking about the long-term political changes that will need to be effected in order to benefit newcomers and the working classes that are trying to make a home here. The old guard has such a stranglehold on the political machinations of this place and the chips are overwhelmingly stacked in their favor. I'm registered to vote--and I plan on it--but I know deep down, nothing will truly change until the Daniel Duane's of the city finally flush down the bowl and don't resurface. People like him had the great luck to be born during an era where places like this weren't fully exploited yet. I can't fault people like him for taking advantage of the opportunity to buy when housing was cheap and relatively plentiful. Anyone with aspirations to own a home and have a family would do the same without a second thought. The NIMBYism and political blockading of the old guard is unconscionable. The housing crisis plaguing not only SF, but the peninsula as well, is directly related to their shortsighted, self-serving political ends. It's as if they--"they" in this case are my generational bogeyman--never even considered how their children would live. Short of inheriting a property, "tough shit" is the answer to the housing question. My choices now are to stay, make some money, and take it back with me to somewhere cheaper, or hope for a simultaneous bubble-burst and earthquake which will depress home prices and maybe scare some alte kakas to leave. I want to stay here, but it's really damn near impossible. So let the Daniel Duane's lament about their California dream of the past. I only know about what we've been left by the legacy of his ilk, and it ain't good.
epa 11y ago
Now he knows how the Native Americans feel.
geebee 11y ago
This was a good article, and a lot of it resonates with me, since I did grow up in SF in the 70s and 80s. It occurred to me, reading the article, that Northern Californians may be unusually ill prepared to handle the changes that occurred in the State. People often say to me "well, you grew up here, so you aren't as shocked by the prices", but it actually may be the opposite. Someone who grew up outside SF sees moving here as a choice, a decision to accept the outrageously high real estate prices as the cost of living here. But the truth is, the high prices in SF are just as much of a shock to people who grew up here. Of course, this is a slight of hand, as it actually is just as much of a choice to stay here as it is to move here, but it is more jarring to have to leave your hometown due to a fairly sudden stratospheric rise in housing prices than it is to decide not to move to a place you've never lived (especially if it involves leaving family or lifelong friends behind). Another factor is that the very low prices may have instilled a lack of materialism in California kids that left them, as I said, unusually unprepared for what was to follow. When a school teacher, humanities professor, or social worker can afford a 3 bedroom house in palo alto with a nice sized backyard In that sort of environment, their children will often grow up believing that it wasn't really worth chasing the money, that in fact, you shouldn, that this would be to waste a gift. Yes, you'll still need an income, but why would you sacrifice a life where you enjoy your work and do good, if all that requires is that you live in a modest house in middle class Palo Alto or Noe Valley than a mansion in Pacific Heights or Hillsborough? What none of these people were prepared for is the reality that living in "middle class" Palo Alto (long, long gone) or Noe Valley will be complete off limits, and that a house in the Excelsior may even be just out of reach. One thing that did make me cringe was the old, tired trope that doctors and lawyers are priced out, and that "only techies need apply". Rank and file "techies" were an integral part of the old SF that Dan Duane says he misses - hell, programming was even discussed as path to find the serene focus in "Zen and the article of motorcycle maintenance." Programmers and other techies were types who had renounced the big salaries of corporate law or banking to do something more creative and interesting. This view of tech was alive and well in the late 90s, and shows up in a lot of PG's early essays. C'mon, Dan, the median salary for lawyers and doctors is waaay higher than for your typical "techie".

77 points by samclemens 11y ago

I go to work in San Francisco every day. I'm not an entrepreneur but as an engineer I am benefiting from the rise of tech. I look around the city as I walk to the office, seeing all these new condos spring up, seeing the work done on the new terminals and all the activity around me and it feels like a city that's alive and growing. My family and I frequently travel all over California to check out all its beautiful places and I love this state. I grew up in San Diego so it's not like I'm a tourist. With the exception of the drought, I think California is getting better all the time.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
crabasa 11y ago
> except, of course, those living the most obvious new California dream, the technology gold rush. Try telling successful 25-year-old entrepreneurs in San Francisco that California’s over and you’ll get blank stares as they contemplate stock options, condos going up all over the city, restaurants packed nightly and spectacular organic produce at farmers’ markets every day. If you had read the entire article, you would have noticed the OP was well aware of your opinion here.
- lemevi 11y ago
  > If you had read the entire article I read the entire article. Notice I wrote "I'm not an entrepreneur", implicitly referencing the passage you quoted.
- raldi 11y ago
  No true Scotsman disagrees with the article.

danboarder 11y ago

The author is so focused on lamenting California's demise that he's missing what is still here. I fixed up an old '73 VW westy bus and we've been doing all the things he said can't be done anymore. The cali dream is alive and well, I was out surfing today. El Nino is predicted this year and may spell the end of the drought. Things are looking up, and the solution to the sense of loss he's taking about is to be creative. Go to Kings Canyon or Anza Borrego instead of tourist-trap Yosemite. Its not that hard.

brokencog 11y ago
Only those aren't well versed in the regional history portend a single rainy season will end this drought. Bring some pleasant relief, which will only help to slacken regulation/thinking/policy. However after a year the drought will still be - unmoderated and with even worse water policies. But, if you can afford the water, Cali is still the same - although it's harder to see through the haze of selfie sticks and REI gear.
- eruditely 11y ago
  What about a second rainy season? New extremes are surpassed all the time.
  - jjtheblunt 11y ago
    Nope, shouldn't be within years of rainy seasons of being enough.
vvanders 11y ago
Anza Borrego is it's own unique place. I spent many weekends poking around the various parts with my dad in a old 2-door toyota pickup truck. Many fond memories.
gragas 11y ago
Did you finish the article? In the end it seems like the author decides that every generation perceives California that way as they grow old. He only says the dream is dead for him. Not the new generations.

dlsx 11y ago

NEW YORK CITY

brokencog 11y ago

Article has the wrong title ... "Same as it ever was. Same as it ever will be." Only, much more of everything. This is, inevitably, for the worse.

zyxley 11y ago
> This is, inevitably, for the worse. Why?

andyl 11y ago

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

milge 11y ago

I'm a guy living on the east coast. I've wanted to move to Cali for almost a decade now. As a developer, there are 4 times as many job prospects in California. The weather doesn't hurt either. I bought into the American dream. Go to school. Get a job. Buy a house. Now I'm seeing if I can break even on my investment. I'm hoping the authors opinion is biased.

powera 11y ago

TLDR: you kids get off my lawn. I mean the author admits this multiple times, that he's nostalgic for "1960s California" out of nostalgia rather than any actual reasons it was better.

rdtsc 11y ago

I wanted to like California, but every time I visit (mostly LA) I end up spending hours stuck in traffic getting places. It kills it for me, it makes the joy of nice weather, palm trees, the laid back attitude, the views, the beaches, kind of not worth it. I tried the Metro, but it didn't go where I wanted to go somehow. I tried the buses, but there were too crowded and they got stuck in traffic just as much as the cars.

jerhinesmith 11y ago
If you're only visiting LA, you're going to run into traffic. LA has arguably the first or second worst traffic in all of the US. As a counter-anecdote, I live in what could be considered an Oakland or SF suburb, and I can get everywhere I need to go by either walking or taking bart. I sit in traffic maybe two or three times a year.
- mng2 11y ago
  I used to live in Berkeley and did the walk/BART/bus/carshare thing, and it was wonderful. I miss it a lot.
  - jerhinesmith 11y ago
    Having grown up in the midwest where everything is a 10 - 20 minute drive, I absolutely love it here. It's literally life changing.
aklemm 11y ago
Exactly. I've lived in and visited so many amazing places that are just ruined by the traffic. For the last 1+ years I'm living in a nice (not amazing) place with few traffic problems and it really just seems better. I'll save the amazing places for vacations from now on, I think.
- bkjelden 11y ago
  I made the opposite move about a year ago, and I think you have it right. Traffic is awful

wtbob 11y ago

The thing is, California died a long time ago. The state which elected Ronald Reagan as governor is long, long gone. I have family there, and every time I visit I'm struck by what a bureaucratic nightmare it is: everything is regulated, registered, taxed, adjusted, but most of all controlled. As far as I can tell, from my visits, California is dystopia. A different sort of dystopia than Washington, D.C. or Boston, but a dystopia nonetheless. There's enough money in the world to pay me to live in California, but no-one would pay it to me.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
saryant 11y ago
I grew up in California (north, south and central). I highly doubt I will ever move back. California, in my experience, was filled with hatred and intolerance. Not on the surface, but dig a little deeper, disagree with the hivemind just a little bit and you'll find its friendly veneer quickly fades away to a grim reality. Beyond its never-ending bureaucracy is a politics of the personal that becomes inescapable. All that was left was to leave.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>As far as I can tell, from my visits, California is dystopia. A different sort of dystopia than Washington, D.C. or Boston, but a dystopia nonetheless. Stop being a melodramatic, spoiled American. Current-day California is nothing like: * Present-day Russia * Present-day China * Present-day Mexico * Pinochet's Chile * Nazi Germany * Soviet Russia * Anywhere else in the Eastern Bloc * present-day ISIS territory Besides which, plenty of people hated Reagan.
- dang 11y ago
  > Stop being a melodramatic, spoiled American As I think you know, this isn't allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong someone is. Please don't do it here.
  - 11y ago

Animats 11y ago

Don't worry, it's about time for another dot-com crash. After the last dot-com crash, traffic in SF dropped so much that rush hour disappeared. Half the twentysomethings moved out. Downtown San Jose emptied out. Just be patient. Which big company will be the first to go? Twitter? (And why is Zynga still around at all?)

raldi 11y ago
The booms last so long, and are so big, and the busts are reversed so swiftly and completely, that the latter should really be thought of as the bubbles. If you long at the long-term trend (like the last 20 or 40 years), it's clear that the rising generations want to live in cities much moreso than previous ones did, there's a steady exodus from snowy states to warmer ones, tech isn't going away (except for occasional brief setbacks), and San Francisco and Silicon Valley are going to be the center of that world deep into the foreseeable future. In other words, yes, a tech crash will happen once or twice every decade, but if you're counting on them to scare everyone else away and let you have the Bay Area all to yourself forevermore, you're in for a rude awakening. http://my.paragon-re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Case-Shiller_Simpl-Percentages.jpg http://my.paragon-re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Case-...
- douche 11y ago
  > it's clear that the rising generations want to live in cities much moreso than previous ones did I don't know that it's necessarily that we want to, but we kinda have to. When you're starting off out of college with the kind of debt that your parents didn't have until they bought their first home, you've got to go where the money is. For some reason, it's been decided that packing people into open-office cattle cribs in a handful of cities across the country is the only way to do business... So we pack up and go live in shitty apartments in the city for a few years until we get out of debt-slavery and become skilled enough and connected enough that we can work from the places we actually want to live and raise a family. It pisses me off a little bit. In my home town, I've got two hundred-year-old graves of relatives in the town cemetery, and I grew up in a house built on land that was part of a farm my great-great grandfather owned before the Great Depression. There are the hills and woods I stalked deer and turkeys in, the little mountain ponds I caught trout in, the garden I grew beans and corn and potatoes in with my family. The elementary and high school gyms I shot thousands of hoops in and poured out uncounted gallons of sweat on. I know every tree, every rock that sticks up out of the lawn enough to dull the lawnmower if you don't go around. It's home, in a way that the other places I've had to live and work since then will never be. It just sucks, because there is no work, and so I, along with everyone else in my generation, has had to leave and go out into these concrete jungles and lifeless suburbs to make a living. Someday, I'll have made enough money, and the world will move on enough that I can write software from my living room, and teach my kids how to grow tomatoes in that same patch of dirt.

klenwell 11y ago

Interesting personal take on recent California history. But the latent racial anxiety that is an important part of this story (and is ironically captured by the title of this piece) would be outrageous if it wasn't so comical. The author glosses the racial and ethnic diversity that makes California special and he seems like a good guy. But he ignores the ugly racial politics that still lurks in a diminishing but active part of the electorate. This headline from earlier this year, as much as anything, sums up the "darkness" that colors much of the nostalgia expressed by nostalgic Californians, especially those of the author's and author's parents' generation: "It's official: Latinos now outnumber whites in California" http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-census-latinos-20150708-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-census-latinos... One of the things I love most about California is its racial and cultural diversity. But a lot of that transition from the "agreed-upon, commanding" version of "modernist California" to the "post-modern phase" was embodied politically by a white flight impulse among people like my grandparents who beatified FDR then in the 1950s and 1960s started voting for conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan when he was elected governor and ended up reliably supporting a Republican establishment that sanctified Prop 13 and championed funding cuts for the public institutions that formed an important part of the foundation of the California dream. They got theirs and they were loathe to pay it forward for a state that they felt was being overrun by people who didn't share their values and were not like themselves. With the election of Jerry Brown and the dominance of Democrats in the legislature, California seems to have turned a corner fiscally and a lot of the doom-and-gloom headlines that gleefully pointed to the deficits of the previous decade have faded away. California still faces a lot of challenges. At least it is facing up to them.

turar 11y ago
>> "It's official: Latinos now outnumber whites in California" These sentiments are ironic, given California's history. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Mexico#/media/File:Mapa_de_Mexico_1835_1.PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Mexic...

unclesaamm 11y ago

Hm, the happy note on the end about the good parts of progress was light on the massive increase of income inequality. A city with foreign investment and state of the art medical facilities is good and well, but is unrelated to what makes San Francisco San Francisco, which is a generosity toward difference, and a welcoming "come as you are" philosophy. If nobody except the highly affluent can live here, we've lost our way.

outis 11y ago
San Francisco was only ever really tolerant of the right kind of differences, AFAICT. For example, it appears to be a near-complete political monoculture. It even has a prominent road in the largest city park named after a living and active Democratic politician, just to make sure everyone knows whose turf it is. More recently, there is the animosity against the tech crowd, which I don't need to describe.
- WildUtah 11y ago
  a near-complete political monoculture Not true at all. The Green Party is welcome to compete respectfully with the Democratic machine sometimes and even Libertarians are not complete exiles And I always suspected the animosity against the tech crowd is mostly aimed at non-white techies more than techies in general. It's just phrased as anti-techie out of political correctness.
  - unclesaamm 11y ago
    ...what? The vast majority of techies are whites and affluent Asian Americans. Are there even non-white techies to protest?
    - WildUtah 11y ago
      A deep study of the technicalities of race and its sociobiological construction reveals a shocking result: asians aren't white.
- 11y ago

turkishrevenge 11y ago

What can I say about this article? I recently moved here, like many other people in tech. I didn't come for the draw of nature--which I love--but for a higher paying job and a chance to escape a poor, decaying, east coast city that increasingly felt like an urban hell. The whole undertaking was supposed to be a leg up, moving to that next level of adulthood (whatever that means in 2015). I am a well-paid, well-educated engineer in my early 30's. I am not a founder, nor do I intend to be, at least around these parts. California was a promised land, and I was glad to buy a one-way ticket there. Now that I am here and a "resident," I faced with an ugly truth: the utter impossibility for me to ever buy any kind of property in the city, however modest or dilapidated, even if my salary somehow doubled overnight. The very thought of what it takes to "make it" here borders on the obscene. I'm lucky to pay $1,300 (which is cheap) for a one-bedroom in the city with 3 other people; outside, the prospects aren't much better. The SF (and sadly the bay area in general) of now is a place where boomers made the rules. I can't help but feel impotent when thinking about the long-term political changes that will need to be effected in order to benefit newcomers and the working classes that are trying to make a home here. The old guard has such a stranglehold on the political machinations of this place and the chips are overwhelmingly stacked in their favor. I'm registered to vote--and I plan on it--but I know deep down, nothing will truly change until the Daniel Duane's of the city finally flush down the bowl and don't resurface. People like him had the great luck to be born during an era where places like this weren't fully exploited yet. I can't fault people like him for taking advantage of the opportunity to buy when housing was cheap and relatively plentiful. Anyone with aspirations to own a home and have a family would do the same without a second thought. The NIMBYism and political blockading of the old guard is unconscionable. The housing crisis plaguing not only SF, but the peninsula as well, is directly related to their shortsighted, self-serving political ends. It's as if they--"they" in this case are my generational bogeyman--never even considered how their children would live. Short of inheriting a property, "tough shit" is the answer to the housing question. My choices now are to stay, make some money, and take it back with me to somewhere cheaper, or hope for a simultaneous bubble-burst and earthquake which will depress home prices and maybe scare some alte kakas to leave. I want to stay here, but it's really damn near impossible. So let the Daniel Duane's lament about their California dream of the past. I only know about what we've been left by the legacy of his ilk, and it ain't good.

epa 11y ago

Now he knows how the Native Americans feel.

geebee 11y ago

This was a good article, and a lot of it resonates with me, since I did grow up in SF in the 70s and 80s. It occurred to me, reading the article, that Northern Californians may be unusually ill prepared to handle the changes that occurred in the State. People often say to me "well, you grew up here, so you aren't as shocked by the prices", but it actually may be the opposite. Someone who grew up outside SF sees moving here as a choice, a decision to accept the outrageously high real estate prices as the cost of living here. But the truth is, the high prices in SF are just as much of a shock to people who grew up here. Of course, this is a slight of hand, as it actually is just as much of a choice to stay here as it is to move here, but it is more jarring to have to leave your hometown due to a fairly sudden stratospheric rise in housing prices than it is to decide not to move to a place you've never lived (especially if it involves leaving family or lifelong friends behind). Another factor is that the very low prices may have instilled a lack of materialism in California kids that left them, as I said, unusually unprepared for what was to follow. When a school teacher, humanities professor, or social worker can afford a 3 bedroom house in palo alto with a nice sized backyard In that sort of environment, their children will often grow up believing that it wasn't really worth chasing the money, that in fact, you shouldn, that this would be to waste a gift. Yes, you'll still need an income, but why would you sacrifice a life where you enjoy your work and do good, if all that requires is that you live in a modest house in middle class Palo Alto or Noe Valley than a mansion in Pacific Heights or Hillsborough? What none of these people were prepared for is the reality that living in "middle class" Palo Alto (long, long gone) or Noe Valley will be complete off limits, and that a house in the Excelsior may even be just out of reach. One thing that did make me cringe was the old, tired trope that doctors and lawyers are priced out, and that "only techies need apply". Rank and file "techies" were an integral part of the old SF that Dan Duane says he misses - hell, programming was even discussed as path to find the serene focus in "Zen and the article of motorcycle maintenance." Programmers and other techies were types who had renounced the big salaries of corporate law or banking to do something more creative and interesting. This view of tech was alive and well in the late 90s, and shows up in a lot of PG's early essays. C'mon, Dan, the median salary for lawyers and doctors is waaay higher than for your typical "techie".