I spent a gorgeous day in Smoky Mountain National Park yesterday, just a short drive from my East Tennessee home. Such glorious days need to be balanced with a dose of reality and so my thoughts return to the California I left a couple of years ago – the California I thought for many years I would never leave. As unbelievably beautiful as the Smokies are, California really does have greater natural beauty. The eastern Sierra, Yosemite, the beaches (where they are not overrun) are just amazing. Such beauty and the weather are what keep people in California despite the exodus that has been apparent for the last five years or so. I always have a stack of stuff around my desk of California news and as I reviewed it this morning and with the perspective of yesterday’s Smoky Mountain glory, I found another reason why I left California behind. California does not glory in its beauty; it amplifies its ugly.

In 2009 Ed Driscoll noted, “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s.” Meanwhile it was noted about a week ago that, “Homeless alcoholics in San Francisco are getting vodka, wine, and beer at the expense of taxpayers, thanks to a crazy program that claims to provide health benefits and save lives.” See what I mean? Rather than fix a problem detected more than a decade ago, they double down on it, they make it worse. That’s California in a nutshell.

Then there is the whole dueling mayors thing. So, to deal with a pro-Palestinian protest in Orange County, two neighboring cities invoke a mutual assistance deal with their police forces. So, while the cops are trying to work together to keep things under control, the mayors end up in a X (Twitter) flame war. There’s California – when we are trying to bring peace and calm, let’s send exactly the opposite message.

But nothing gets to the heart of the problem like money. Earlier this week, an article syndicated out of the LA Times, examined the California exodus and particularly the role housing costs play in it. By LA Times standards it is actually reasonable. Quoting Sarah Karlinsky, research director for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, the article says:

When the state adds to its housing stock, she said, it shouldn’t just be adding high-rises, but also “more affordable multifamily housing options” that might be smaller and cheaper.

Cities may begin to boost their population as businesses end work-from-home policies, but Karlinsky cautioned that “if everybody is driving back into their jobs, then that is going to be incredibly unpleasant.”

Driving? Unpleasant in California? Isn’t that interesting. The first thing I note is that it is not just the immense traffic volume that makes driving in so much of California a nightmare, it’s the actual state of the roads. Rather than spend their money on things like roadways, they spend it giving vodka to the homeless and the roads are miserable, even if you were driving on it alone. This is also silly because it is the land that makes housing prices so freaking high in California, not the type of housing. For its size, the population centers of California have nowhere to go but up – they are landlocked. San Francisco on a fully overbuilt peninsula – LA surrounded by mountains and ocean, San Diego likewise.

Now, think about the cost of housing in California and consider this:

On Wednesday, the country hit a sad milestone: Inflation under President Biden hit a cumulative 20 percent. The dollar’s value has plummeted under his watch. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also confirmed that the consumer price index is resurgent and growing faster than average wages. Combined with weak GDP growth, this data shows the U.S. economy is reentering stagflation.

So, here again, California takes awful economic news and amplifies it. Inflation is making every house, everywhere more expensive, so a place like California with all sorts of natural barriers to building housing, where housing will naturally be more expensive than the rest of the country, it simply skyrockets.

Why are people leaving California? It’s simple – people are moving to places where they solve problems, not places where they amplify them.

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