The Hollowing-Out of the California Dream

The Hollowing-Out of the California Dream
Joel Kotkin, City Journal

For minorities in the Golden State, opportunity and upward mobility are hard to come by.

Progressives praise California as the harbinger of the political future, the home of a new, enlightened, multicultural America. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill has identified California Senator Kamala Harris as the party leader on issues of immigration and race. Harris wants a moratorium on construction of new immigration-detention facilities in favor of the old “catch and release” policy for illegal aliens, and has urged a shutdown of the government rather than compromise on mass amnesty.

Its political leaders and a credulous national media present California as the “woke” state, creating an economically just, post-racial reality. Yet in terms of opportunity, California is evolving into something more like apartheid South Africa or the pre-civil rights South. California simply does not measure up in delivering educational attainment, income growth, homeownership, and social mobility for traditionally disadvantaged minorities. All this bodes ill for a state already three-fifths non-white and trending further in that direction in the years ahead. In the past decade, the state has added 1.8 million Latinos, who will account by 2060 for almost half the state’s population. The black population has plateaued, while the number of white Californians is down some 700,000 over the past decade.

Minorities and immigrants have brought much entrepreneurial energy and a powerful work ethic to California. Yet, to a remarkable extent, their efforts have reaped only meager returns during California’s recent boom. California, suggests gubernatorial candidate and environmental activist Michael Shellenberger, is not “the most progressive state” but “the most racist” one. Chapman University reports that 28 percent of California’s blacks are impoverished, compared with 22 percent nationally. Fully one-third of California Latinos—now the state’s largest ethnic group—live in poverty, compared with 21 percent outside the state. Half of Latino households earn under $50,000 annually, which, in a high-cost state, means that they barely make enough to make ends meet. Over two-thirds of non-citizen Latinos, the group most loudly defended by the state’s progressive leadership, live at or below the poverty line, according to a recent United Way study.

This stagnation reflects the reality of the most recent California “miracle.” Historically, economic growth extended throughout the state, and produced many high-paying blue-collar jobs. In contrast, the post-2010 boom has been inordinately dependent on the high valuations of a handful of tech firms and coastal real estate speculation. Relatively few blacks or Latinos participate at the upper reaches of the tech economy—and a recent study suggests that their percentages in that sector are declining—and generally lack the family resources to compete in the real estate market. Instead, many are stuck with rents they can’t afford.

Even as incomes soared in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco after 2010, wages for African-Americans and Latinos in the Bay Area declined. The shift of employment from industrial to software industries, as well as the extraordinary presence—as much as 40 percent—of noncitizens in the tech industry, has meant fewer opportunities for assemblers and other blue-collar workers. Many nonwhite Americans labor in the service sector as security guards or janitors, making about $25,000 annually, working for contractors who offer no job security and only limited benefits. In high-priced Silicon Valley, these are essentially poverty wages. Some workers live in their cars, converted garages, or even on the streets, largely ignored by California’s famously enlightened oligarchs.

CityLab has described the Bay Area as “a region of segregated innovation.” The Giving Code, which reports on charitable trends among the ultra-rich, found that between 2006 and 2013, 93 percent of all private foundation-giving in Silicon Valley went to causes outside of Silicon Valley. Better to be a whale, or a distressed child in Africa or Central America, than a worker living in his car outside Google headquarters.

For generations, California’s racial minorities, like their Caucasian counterparts, embraced the notion of an American Dream that included owning a house. Unlike kids from wealthy families—primarily white—who can afford elite educations and can sometimes purchase  houses with parental help, Latinos and blacks, usually without much in the way of family resources,  are increasingly priced out of the market. In California, Hispanics and blacks face housing prices that are approximately twice the national average, relative to income. Unsurprisingly, African-American and Hispanic homeownership rates have dropped considerably more than those of Asians and whites—four times the rate in the rest of the country. California’s white homeownership rate remains above 62 percent, but just 42 percent of all Latino households, and only 33 percent of all black households, own their own homes.

In contrast, African-Americans do far better, in terms of income and homeownership, in places like Dallas-Fort Worth or greater Houston than in socially enlightened locales such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. Houston and Dallas boast black homeownership rates of 40 to 50 percent; in deep blue but much costlier Los Angeles and New York, the rate is about 10 percentage points lower.
Rather than achieving upward class mobility, many minorities in California have fallen down the class ladder. This can be seen in California’s overcrowding rate, the nation’s second-worst. Of the 331 zip codes making up the top 1 percent of overcrowded zip codes in the U.S., 134 are found in Southern California, primarily in greater Los Angeles and San Diego, mostly concentrated around heavily Latino areas such as Pico-Union, East Los Angeles, and Santa Ana, in Orange County.

The lack of affordable housing and the disappearance of upward mobility could create a toxic racial environment for California. By the 2030s, large swaths of the state, particularly along the coast, could evolve into a geriatric belt, with an affluent, older boomer population served by a largely minority service-worker class. As white and Asian boomers age, California increasingly will have to depend on children from mainly poorer families with fewer educational resources, living in crowded and even unsanitary conditions, often far from their place of employment,  to work for low wages.

Historically, education has been the lever that gives minorities and the poor access to opportunity. But in California, a state that often identifies itself as “smart,” the educational system is deeply flawed, especially for minority populations. Once a model of educational success, California now ranks 36th in the country in educational performance, according to a 2018 Education Week report. The state does have a strong sector of “gold and silver” public schools, mostly located in wealthy suburban locations such as Orange County, the interior East Bay, and across the San Francisco Peninsula. But the performance of schools in heavily minority, working-class areas is scandalously poor. The state’s powerful teachers’ union and the Democratic legislature have added $31.2 billion since 2013 in new school funding, but California’s poor students ranked 49th on National Assessment of Education Progress tests. In Silicon Valley, half of local public school students, and barely one in five blacks or Latinos, are proficient in basic math.

Clearly, California’s progressive ideology and spending priorities are not serving minority students well. High-poverty schools are so poorly run that disruptions from students and administrative interruptions, according to a UCLA study, account for 30 minutes a day of class time. Teachers in these schools often promote “progressive values,” spending much of their time, according to one writer, “discussing community problems and societal inequities.” Other priorities include transgender and other gender-related education, from which parents, in some school districts, cannot opt out. This ideological instruction is doing little for minority youngsters. San Francisco, which the nonprofit journalism site Calmatters refers to as “a progressive enclave and beacon for technological innovation,” also had “the lowest black student achievement of any county in California,” as well as the highest gap between black and white scores.

Ultimately, any reversal of this pattern must come from minorities demanding a restoration of opportunity. Some now see the linkage between state policy and impoverishment, which has led some 200 civil rights leaders to sue the state Air Resources Board, the group that enforces the Greenhouse Gas edicts of the state bureaucracy. But perhaps the ultimate wakeup call will come from a slowing economy. After an extraordinary period of growth post-recession, California’s economy is clearly weakening, as companies and people move elsewhere. Texas and other states are now experiencing faster GDP growth than the Golden State. Perhaps more telling, the latest BEA numbers suggest that California—which created barely 800 jobs last month—is now experiencing far lower income growth than the national average, and scarcely half that of Texas, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona, Missouri, or Florida. Out-migration of skilled and younger workers, reacting to long commutes and high prices, seems to be accelerating, both in Southern California and the Bay Area.

One has to wonder what will happen when the California economy, burdened by regulations, high costs, and taxes, slows even more. Generous welfare benefits, made possible by taxing the rich, could be threatened; conversely, the Left might get traction by pushing to raise taxes even higher. The pain will be relatively minor in Palo Alto, Malibu, or Marin County, the habitations of the ruling gentry rich—but for those Californians who have already been left behind, and for a diminishing middle class,  it might be just beginning.

Joel Kotkin serves as Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (COU).

The American Character At A Crossroads

The American Character At A Crossroads

Here is the question:

When the going gets tough and real peril exists do you want to flee with those seeking safe spaces…

or

…join with those who have the mettle and presence of mind to wade into the killing ground and end the peril?

I will wade in because I lived and still live amongst the best of best in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Michael M. Walker, 

Col, USMC (Ret)

Obama Decries the Political Habits That Drove His Career

Famed double talker....

Obama Decries the Political Habits That Drove His Career
Jim Geraghty, National Review


Yesterday, President Obama stood in a cricket stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa, and said a lot of things that could, or should, get conservatives nodding in agreement. But as he offered a grim assessment of both modern American politics and the broader geopolitical scene, you had to wonder when, if ever, he would confront the fact that he had a lot to do with the shaping of modern American politics and the broader geopolitical scene. He certainly had more influence on it than you or I did.

Obama pointed out that history’s many horrific systems of oppression can’t be simplified to a simple narrative of racism: “Whites were happy to exploit other whites when they could. And by the way, blacks were often willing to exploit other blacks. And around the globe, the majority of people lived at subsistence levels, without a say in the politics or economic forces that determined their lives.”

And he took a shot at identity politics: “You can’t [change minds] if you insist that those who aren’t like you — because they’re white, or because they’re male — that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.”

Of course … this is the president who made Al Sharpton his “go-to man on race” and who said Latinos needed to “punish” their “enemies.” It’s great that Obama realizes that identity politics can be corrosive to civil society and that they can Balkanize a once-thriving, relatively harmonious society. It just would have been good to hear this wisdom from a president instead of an ex-president.

Obama offered a nostalgic look at the close of the Reagan-Bush era, when a wave of freedom and liberation swept the globe in the aftermath of the Cold War:
As a law student, I witnessed [Nelson Mandela] emerge from prison, just a few months, you’ll recall, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I felt the same wave of hope that washed through hearts all around the world.

Do you remember that feeling? It seemed as if the forces of progress were on the march, that they were inexorable. Each step he took, you felt this is the moment when the old structures of violence and repression and ancient hatreds that had so long stunted people’s lives and confined the human spirit — that all that was crumbling before our eyes.

For Americans and the rest of the world, life in the ’90s was better and safer than it was at the beginning of the 1980s — which is why it is unwise for adults who should know better to say things like, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country” in 2008. Some might even say comments like that are “strikingly ungracious.” Perhaps “Make America Great Again” and “American Carnage” are unduly dark and pessimistic assessments of the country — but they simply echoed the apocalyptic perspective of Democrats in the latter years of the Bush presidency.

Obama said yesterday, “For once solidly middle-class families in advanced economies like the United States, these trends have meant greater economic insecurity, especially for those who don’t have specialized skills, people who were in manufacturing, people working in factories, people working on farms.” Had he focused on this more during his presidency, would Hillary Clinton have lost?

Obama lamented, “In the West, you’ve got far-right parties that oftentimes are based not just on platforms of protectionism and closed borders, but also on barely hidden racial nationalism.” Would those parties have flourished if the Barack Obamas and Angela Merkels of the world had taken citizens’ demands for border security and carefully scrutinized immigration more seriously? How much faith was lost in U.S. immigration controls when the 9/11 hijackers, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the San Bernardino terrorists entered the country legally? Is anyone surprised that many Germans bristled when Merkel decided, unilaterally, to allow in more than 1 million migrants — many of them fleeing the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan?

Former United Kingdom prime minister Gordon Brown was caught on a hot mike calling one of his own supporters a “bigoted woman” because she lamented people staying on public assistance for too long and asked where all of the recent immigrants were coming from. If you’re wealthy and powerful, your life is insulated from a lot of problems in society. Among those problems is illegal immigration, and because you’re not dealing with any crime, any overcrowded schools, any language barriers, you see it as harmless, or even as an economic benefit.

Later in his speech, Obama added, “In the West’s current debate around immigration, for example, it’s not wrong to insist that national borders matter; whether you’re a citizen or not is going to matter to a government, that laws need to be followed; that in the public realm newcomers should make an effort to adapt to the language and customs of their new home.”

How different would the Obama era look if he had emphasized that message at every opportunity?

Obama said progress requires “laws that root out corruption and ensures fair dealing in business.” Does he think the Clinton Foundation fits into that vision? How about the former Obama Treasury secretary Tim Geithner’s tax evasion? How about former congressman Charlie Rangel’s tax evasion? The six-figure and seven-figure sums of unpaid taxes of Tom Daschle, Claire McCaskill, or Al Sharpton? Does Obama grasp why the public might virulently recoil when those who support higher taxes escape serious consequence for not paying their own?

Obama declared, “It’s not just money that a job provides; it provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose.” Amen, Mr. President! How long have conservatives made this argument in various welfare-to-work proposals?

Some parts of Obama’s speech were great, such as when he directly attacked the idea that human rights, freedom, and pluralism were incompatible with some cultures: “We have to resist the notion that basic human rights like freedom to dissent, or the right of women to fully participate in the society, or the right of minorities to equal treatment, or the rights of people not to be beat up and jailed because of their sexual orientation — we have to be careful not to say that somehow, well, that doesn’t apply to us, that those are Western ideas rather than universal imperatives.”

But in that light, a more generous assessment of the Bush administration’s “freedom agenda” is warranted. It wasn’t naïve or unrealistic or happy talk; it was principled.

Discussing partisanship and division, Obama said, “Maybe we can change their minds, but maybe they’ll change ours. And you can’t do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponents have to say from the start.” That’s a great message. But this is the man who responded to GOP criticism of his stimulus package with, “I won.”

And when Obama complained, “Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up,” a lot of Americans no doubt heard, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, and if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” ringing in our ears. Obamacare was passed with the necessary assistance of a pack of lies, with its architect gloating about the “stupidity” of the American voter and boasting that the “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.” Obama hates cynical, dishonest politics — up until the moment he needs it.

Identity politics, cynicism, tolerance of corruption, hardline partisanship, shameless dishonesty, a shallow obsession with celebrities, an appetite for utopian slogans instead of serious and realistic proposals, demagoguery … if all of these forces play bigger roles in American politics in 2018 than they did in 2008, whose fault is that?

Is Phony Appreciation of America’s Intelligence Agencies Better Than an Honest Disregard?

Look, if President Trump thinks that the meddling in the 2016 election was committed by the Russian government but “could be other people also — a lot of people out there,” as he ad-libbed during his press conference at the White House yesterday, then he doesn’t really “accept our intelligence community’s conclusion.”

Yes, it’s great that this administration has been tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush, or Clinton. But no one worries about the Russia stance of Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, or James Mattis. None of them have ever said nice things about Putin, or talked repeatedly about how well they think they would get along with the Russian dictator, or had a lot of business dealings with Russians, or offered moral equivalence along the lines of, “Do you think our country is so innocent?”

It’s not surprising that an administration filled with Pence, Haley, Pompeo, Mattis, and the likes of John Bolton, Rick Perry, Dan Coats, and John Kelly would be tough on Russia. But none of them can speak for the country the way the president of the United States can and does. What we’ve seen is that when given the opportunity to confront Putin and Russia about issue after issue, President Trump whiffs or holds back. The lone exception I can think of came in April of this year, when Trump tweeted, “Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!”


JIM GERAGHTY — Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent of National Review. @jimgeraghty