A friend who lived in California described how Prop 13 was killing established areas because nobody wanted to be the newcomer in the neighborhood, paying 3X the taxes of everyone else; because CA has so much land, new developments would just sprout up further out, so new homeowners could buy brand-new houses with lower taxes - and the older areas started to crumble.
The situation now in NJ, as Americans (especially younger ones) flee to more affordable areas with better opportunities, has ageing American homeowners paying high property tax bills to fund schools (75% of our property taxes) filled with imported foreign students. The American homeowners had children in the schools decades ago, and their grandchildren (if they have any) are often no longer living in NJ.
I suspect CA has a similar problem to NJ in that it is dominated by public employee unions; they want the open borders to ensure a steady stream of “clients”, and couldn’t care less when we are taxed to death to pay for them. They enjoy benefits packages and above-market salaries paid for courtesy of the people they “serve”, and younger people have realized they have their hooks in you when you buy a home - so few young Americans want them. So, we import a middle class from Asia (taking American jobs - not just in tech - for which there are no shortages of skilled Americans) to buy homes and put some kids in the schools, and import a lower class from Latin America to replace the rest of the missing American student bodies (that aren’t being born, or are born in other states).
We haven’t seen the blight that you describe here, at least not yet. The problem here is that housing is too expensive for the bulk of our “illegal population” to afford.
We had a niece move to Sonoma from North Carolina to take a marketing job in the wine industry. This was right when the 2007 “downturn” was occurring. She bought a really nice ranch style 3 bedroom, two bath home with a pool out of foreclosure for about $350k. Prior to the downturn it had been worth double that figure and had been “owned” by what appeared to be multiple illegal alien families.
Inside the place had been completely trashed. They had divided the living room ( beam ceiling) in half to create more bedroom space, put in windows and had not finished them ( you could see daylight around them). The place was so filthy, that rather than wash down the walls, I just used an airless to spray the whole interior of the place with a white primer to cover the dirt. I cannot tell you how disgusting the place was, but this sort of problem has been an artifact of illegal immigration here. And now, we have huge encampments of “homeless” that have taken up residence for miles under our elevated freeways. The “Tijuana Caravan” has nothing on what we are seeing here despite the fact that they are building apartment complexes all over the place which is adding immeasurably with traffic congestion.
We’ve even given some thought to moving to Nevada somewhere in the Reno down to Minden area, but all of our family is here in the Bay Area, along with our two homes; and we are old enough that living where you have to deal with harsh winters isn’t all that palatable.
Your comments about the RAT unions are spot on, the only thing that’s keeping CA afloat financially is that we do have a good economy. If the twin economic drivers of High Tech and Agriculture every go belly up, we will end up just like Illinois is today. Also due to our size we are not nearly as monolithic as perhaps New Jersey is. Most of CA is not liberal! It is subjugated though by the voters of our large coastal cities, so guess there is a long shot at divvying it up to provide places for decent people to live. New Jersey, owing to it’s small size, probably doesn’t have that option.
Have a good 2019! At least we have hope so long as Trump is President.