The poor are poor because the cost of living is excessively high. In california poverty is relative to earning capacity that is excessively high.
The cost of transforming a desert into a thriving region is beyond the regional ability to pay the bill. On top of that taxes based on a percentage of the excessive living costs automatically create poverty.
Having become shitholes, areas in LA and Oakland become magnets for poor because the cost of living is lower.
That’s part of the California nightmare. But more economical regions don’t need to be slums either.
Indeed, most overlook the high cost of building a massive oasis in a desert.
Having been created, more people want to live there than carrying capacity allows.
Supply-and-demand dictates that SOMETHING provide “friction” to limit the number of people jammed into the relatively small oasis, and that becomes cost of living. The gov’t _CANNOT_ dig people out of poverty there, precisely because there isn’t enough for that many people to live on. Hand every poor person the price of an apartment (be it monthly rent or outright purchase), and prices will shoot up because there is simply not enough units available.
To phrase it a different way, as we’re in need of a linguistic escape from the “help the poor!” trap:
The carrying capacity of the CA ecosystem has been maxed out.