10 ms·

Then came the police state and the party was over.

blackrock 6y ago
It sounds like the 80s were more fun. We had Miami Vice, MacGyver, The A-Team, Knight Rider, and Battlestar Galactica back then. And homes were still affordable places to live in.
- SftwreEngnr 6y ago
  I think you're talking about pop culture nostalgia.
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  I think this was at least partially a result of the high crime rate in the cities.
  - cleansingfire 6y ago
    When I lived in East Palo Alto, it was the murder capital of the US. With a carjacking attempt 75' from my front door (foiled by returning with a pistol before they could restart my car) I miss that time not at all.
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > When I lived in East Palo Alto, it was the murder capital of the US. With a carjacking attempt 75' from my front door (foiled by returning with a pistol before they could restart my car) I miss that time not at all. Yeah, I remember the Valley in the 90s... a lof of it looked a lot like downtown LA which I'm was never exactly a fan of. But being in San Jose back then in the 90s looked and smelled like Chinatown when it was buzzing, Sunnyvale and Mountain View had a certain feel that is completely gone now it felt electric for reasons I didn't full understand and would only come to realize how significant what was happening there was a decade or so later. I never went to the East bay until recently, but that feels like a very watered down version of what it was back then to me. I guess it's survivor bias guiding my words, especially since I had close encounters with stuff like that growing up too; but having a choice of which one to deal with I'd stay with 90s CA to raise a family then somewhere like modern Geneva with all its amenities and manicured existence.
      - megameter 6y ago
        I think the thing about the Valley is that it was forged in a context where it was the rational mode of development for a high tech urban center: car-centric office parks and factories, big-box stores and malls, vast housing subdivisions with some toxic waste buried here and there. Although the players in SV were all building "next big things", everything still ultimately ran on physical presence - real venues that you could go to and make connections in, and the landscape was eminently suited to that between ~1970-2000. It was with the opening of the commercial Internet in the 90's that it all started changing. The new companies weren't in boxed products destined for retail: they started replacing retail. You didn't go to a users' group to learn, you subscribed to Usenet or email. And so on. So even by the early 2000's, things started to feel hollowed out in SV.
- randmeerkat 6y ago
  > And homes were still affordable places to live in. So does this mean the “crime paradise” was a better more prosperous time for people to live in than tech? If so, what does that say about modern society that our most depraved decade was actually better?
  - chokeartist 6y ago
    You're not wrong. Think deep on this and reflect. Your hatred and anger will guide you.
  - monsieurbanana 6y ago
    Withuot knowing nothing about California in the 80s besides what's in this thread, it seems you're saying gang shootings and bank robberies is an acceptable trade for affordable housing.
    - randmeerkat 6y ago
      Yes, that’s exactly what I’m asking. There’s people literally pooping on the streets in California. Do you think those people would be able to afford a toilet of their own if this was the 80s? Was homelessness then as bad as it is now? In our progress forward in technology has tech actually made California worse for people as a whole?
      - techsupporter 6y ago
        Homelessness has always been a problem in this country; it just wasn't as visible as it is now. That visibility is from a bunch of reasons (the Internet makes all things more visible, cities became more popular instead of "white flight," sprawl in more areas). All the way back in 1995--jesus, that's 25 years ago, I feel old--Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had a two-part episode on "Sanctuary Districts" and staggering wealth inequality. Those were depicted as having gotten particularly bad in the year 2024 (the year our heroes were transported back to) but the episode was commenting on the state of society around the late 80s and early 90s. We've had hobo slums, tent cities, and the like as long as I've been alive. It's not a California-specific problem. Dallas had tent cities in the mid-90s that the local news would occasionally report on. Seattle has had a variety of encampments, from "the Jungle" to "Nickelsville" to "Skid Row" and older. We see the problem more now. We don't like it, but we also don't do much to deal with it. So it festers, because we're too self-centered to spend the tax dollars at the state and federal levels to do programs like Housing First, but too polite to just round up the homeless population and drop them in a woodchipper like most people on Nextdoor seem to want. Instead, we leave cities and counties to work it out for themselves while their suburban neighbors spend tax dollars on luring businesses out of the urban core because it is "so dirty."
- coupdejarnac 6y ago
  Homes were affordable, but interest rates were like 13%.
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    Homes were also much smaller. The median home size has almost doubled since 40 years ago.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    Thats because interest rates and home prices have an inverse relationship.
    - coupdejarnac 6y ago
      Yes, obviously.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  That $40k home isn’t so cheap when you make $13k and interest rates were 11-15%. My entire extended family mostly bailed out of NYC because they bought houses for $10-25k in the 70s and sold for 20x in the late 80s. That profit gave that generation a vault up the ladder and the prime the pump mortgage policy made a few rich.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > That $40k home isn’t so cheap when you make $13k and interest rates were 11-15%. With a decent down payment (lets say ~15%) that's still less than 5 years salary even with interest, which would be completely acceptable terms especially since cost of living was way more affordable back then and the population had ~10 million people less than today in the 90s. Just to give you context that's more in population increase than many US states have in totality! The problem comes from the fact that even with most FHA loans, decent down payments and average(non-FAANG) middle class income wages you're still looking at 15+ years of salary with a home with no repair clauses from banks that bought distressed proprieties on the cheap in the 2008 housing crises, and are selling far above their ATH. And that's assuming you can even get a home into escrow before external demand or Chinese investors fleeing the mainland pay cash for it sight unseen for something they will just at best rent out on Airbnb or let decay as its better than the alternative of keeping it in fiat before the CCP takes it. Personally speaking NY is exactly what I didn't want CA to become, and slowly it started to resemble it more and more in all the negative ways; the recent lockdowns from incompetent politicians with deluded presidential aspirations only highlighted how much they have in common now. I'm not a protectionist and I welcome(d) people to come work and live in CA, by my issue is that in the process it stripped a lot of what was good about it away and enhanced a lot of the worst parts instead. Personally speaking with all of that culture and atmosphere lost I don't think it's worth it. And I think that one guy below was right, California will probably never go back to what it was back in the 90s and I should probably just be satisfied I got to experience it all.
    - toyg 6y ago
      I reckon you can find tons of ex-hippies who would say “California will never go back to what in was in the ‘70s”, when they were already onboard Janis Joplin’s Big Yellow Taxi (written in 1970 and inspired by Hawaii, but massively popular in 1974 California too) and decrying the loss of “Steinbeck’s California”. Places change, and places with little historical roots as most of the US tend to change even faster. That’s just how it is.
- Axsuul 6y ago
  Sounds like rosy retrospection to me.
- gnopgnip 6y ago
  Not in CA
freeflight 6y ago
It's debatable if the police state was actually responsible for that drop in crime. Afaik Canada saw a comparable drop in crime, over the same time-period, without starting to mass incarcerate people [0] [0] https://youtu.be/wtV5ev6813I https://youtu.be/wtV5ev6813I (Relevant stats and discussion start around 6:45, but the whole talk is rather worthwhile to watch)

It sounds like the 80s were more fun. We had Miami Vice, MacGyver, The A-Team, Knight Rider, and Battlestar Galactica back then. And homes were still affordable places to live in.

SftwreEngnr 6y ago
I think you're talking about pop culture nostalgia.
smnrchrds 6y ago
I think this was at least partially a result of the high crime rate in the cities.
- cleansingfire 6y ago
  When I lived in East Palo Alto, it was the murder capital of the US. With a carjacking attempt 75' from my front door (foiled by returning with a pistol before they could restart my car) I miss that time not at all.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > When I lived in East Palo Alto, it was the murder capital of the US. With a carjacking attempt 75' from my front door (foiled by returning with a pistol before they could restart my car) I miss that time not at all. Yeah, I remember the Valley in the 90s... a lof of it looked a lot like downtown LA which I'm was never exactly a fan of. But being in San Jose back then in the 90s looked and smelled like Chinatown when it was buzzing, Sunnyvale and Mountain View had a certain feel that is completely gone now it felt electric for reasons I didn't full understand and would only come to realize how significant what was happening there was a decade or so later. I never went to the East bay until recently, but that feels like a very watered down version of what it was back then to me. I guess it's survivor bias guiding my words, especially since I had close encounters with stuff like that growing up too; but having a choice of which one to deal with I'd stay with 90s CA to raise a family then somewhere like modern Geneva with all its amenities and manicured existence.
    - megameter 6y ago
      I think the thing about the Valley is that it was forged in a context where it was the rational mode of development for a high tech urban center: car-centric office parks and factories, big-box stores and malls, vast housing subdivisions with some toxic waste buried here and there. Although the players in SV were all building "next big things", everything still ultimately ran on physical presence - real venues that you could go to and make connections in, and the landscape was eminently suited to that between ~1970-2000. It was with the opening of the commercial Internet in the 90's that it all started changing. The new companies weren't in boxed products destined for retail: they started replacing retail. You didn't go to a users' group to learn, you subscribed to Usenet or email. And so on. So even by the early 2000's, things started to feel hollowed out in SV.
randmeerkat 6y ago
> And homes were still affordable places to live in. So does this mean the “crime paradise” was a better more prosperous time for people to live in than tech? If so, what does that say about modern society that our most depraved decade was actually better?
- chokeartist 6y ago
  You're not wrong. Think deep on this and reflect. Your hatred and anger will guide you.
- monsieurbanana 6y ago
  Withuot knowing nothing about California in the 80s besides what's in this thread, it seems you're saying gang shootings and bank robberies is an acceptable trade for affordable housing.
  - randmeerkat 6y ago
    Yes, that’s exactly what I’m asking. There’s people literally pooping on the streets in California. Do you think those people would be able to afford a toilet of their own if this was the 80s? Was homelessness then as bad as it is now? In our progress forward in technology has tech actually made California worse for people as a whole?
    - techsupporter 6y ago
      Homelessness has always been a problem in this country; it just wasn't as visible as it is now. That visibility is from a bunch of reasons (the Internet makes all things more visible, cities became more popular instead of "white flight," sprawl in more areas). All the way back in 1995--jesus, that's 25 years ago, I feel old--Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had a two-part episode on "Sanctuary Districts" and staggering wealth inequality. Those were depicted as having gotten particularly bad in the year 2024 (the year our heroes were transported back to) but the episode was commenting on the state of society around the late 80s and early 90s. We've had hobo slums, tent cities, and the like as long as I've been alive. It's not a California-specific problem. Dallas had tent cities in the mid-90s that the local news would occasionally report on. Seattle has had a variety of encampments, from "the Jungle" to "Nickelsville" to "Skid Row" and older. We see the problem more now. We don't like it, but we also don't do much to deal with it. So it festers, because we're too self-centered to spend the tax dollars at the state and federal levels to do programs like Housing First, but too polite to just round up the homeless population and drop them in a woodchipper like most people on Nextdoor seem to want. Instead, we leave cities and counties to work it out for themselves while their suburban neighbors spend tax dollars on luring businesses out of the urban core because it is "so dirty."
coupdejarnac 6y ago
Homes were affordable, but interest rates were like 13%.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Homes were also much smaller. The median home size has almost doubled since 40 years ago.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  Thats because interest rates and home prices have an inverse relationship.
  - coupdejarnac 6y ago
    Yes, obviously.
Spooky23 6y ago
That $40k home isn’t so cheap when you make $13k and interest rates were 11-15%. My entire extended family mostly bailed out of NYC because they bought houses for $10-25k in the 70s and sold for 20x in the late 80s. That profit gave that generation a vault up the ladder and the prime the pump mortgage policy made a few rich.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > That $40k home isn’t so cheap when you make $13k and interest rates were 11-15%. With a decent down payment (lets say ~15%) that's still less than 5 years salary even with interest, which would be completely acceptable terms especially since cost of living was way more affordable back then and the population had ~10 million people less than today in the 90s. Just to give you context that's more in population increase than many US states have in totality! The problem comes from the fact that even with most FHA loans, decent down payments and average(non-FAANG) middle class income wages you're still looking at 15+ years of salary with a home with no repair clauses from banks that bought distressed proprieties on the cheap in the 2008 housing crises, and are selling far above their ATH. And that's assuming you can even get a home into escrow before external demand or Chinese investors fleeing the mainland pay cash for it sight unseen for something they will just at best rent out on Airbnb or let decay as its better than the alternative of keeping it in fiat before the CCP takes it. Personally speaking NY is exactly what I didn't want CA to become, and slowly it started to resemble it more and more in all the negative ways; the recent lockdowns from incompetent politicians with deluded presidential aspirations only highlighted how much they have in common now. I'm not a protectionist and I welcome(d) people to come work and live in CA, by my issue is that in the process it stripped a lot of what was good about it away and enhanced a lot of the worst parts instead. Personally speaking with all of that culture and atmosphere lost I don't think it's worth it. And I think that one guy below was right, California will probably never go back to what it was back in the 90s and I should probably just be satisfied I got to experience it all.
  - toyg 6y ago
    I reckon you can find tons of ex-hippies who would say “California will never go back to what in was in the ‘70s”, when they were already onboard Janis Joplin’s Big Yellow Taxi (written in 1970 and inspired by Hawaii, but massively popular in 1974 California too) and decrying the loss of “Steinbeck’s California”. Places change, and places with little historical roots as most of the US tend to change even faster. That’s just how it is.
Axsuul 6y ago
Sounds like rosy retrospection to me.
gnopgnip 6y ago
Not in CA

freeflight 6y ago

It's debatable if the police state was actually responsible for that drop in crime. Afaik Canada saw a comparable drop in crime, over the same time-period, without starting to mass incarcerate people [0] [0] https://youtu.be/wtV5ev6813I https://youtu.be/wtV5ev6813I (Relevant stats and discussion start around 6:45, but the whole talk is rather worthwhile to watch)