The various land regulations such as Prop 13 and rent control were overtly billed as "ways to stave off all the social change that's been happening" when they w

The various land regulations such as Prop 13 and rent control were overtly billed as "ways to stave off all the social change that's been happening" when they were debated and passed in the 70s and 80s. It's not a guess or some sort of conspiracy theory. Review the newspaper polemics of the time. It was quite openly the goal. You can see exactly that continuous spectrum of decay in California in many places. The state has become ever more polarized into rich and poor, with less and less middle, during that entire time. This is partially a process that was going on everywhere in the US, but all the extra regulation in California that was designed to halt that process actually made it worse. The California middle class has been massively eroding since the '70s. Before that, you could drop out of high school and still get a job that would lead to you owning a house within a few years. Now, owning a house is impossible for almost everyone. The land regulations that restricted supply have made long term housing prices grow far faster than the national average: http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/US-San-Francisco-California-median-home-sales-prices-1971-2015-05.png http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/0... Huge tracts of formerly middle class suburbs near San Francisco and LA have become massive ghettoes -- where you still have to pay half a million dollars or more to buy a house next to thugs who openly sell crack 24 hours a day, where people are shot a couple of times a month. Where else in the US do you pay half a million dollars for a house in the ghetto? The middle class jobs have mostly evaporated -- other than sinecures in California's vast bureaucratic and public employee apparatus, in which case you get a job for life with a powerful, politically-connected union to keep you from ever being fired for any reason. Good luck getting one of those unless you have a friend or relative who's already there. Yes, things are great if you happen to be a high skilled tech worker in San Francisco during the late 90s or from circa 2010 to present, but this is a very small fraction of the population. Most Californians who don't have advanced computer programming skills only got squeezed harder by that influx of new money pushing up real estate prices still further. And we haven't seen anything yet. Just wait till the "smart farm" trend really kicks in: http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-06-09/factory-fresh http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-06-09/fac... Soon, very soon, robots will be picking all the produce in the Central Valley, and there will be millions of newly unemployed low-skilled workers flooding into San Francisco and LA looking for work.