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.
NJ has conservative rural areas, but they are far outvoted by the lib concentrations in cities. I understand much of CA has more conservative views, outvoted in similar circumstances.
Our housing is also too expensive for illegals (and many young Americans), and because our housing stock is too old in the densest areas there isn’t much room to build. When room is available, usually multi-family buildings go up - and those often come with affordable housing requirements that open the door for Section-8 recipients. Our poorest areas have no population contributing for services, and attempts to “whiten” those areas failed miserably (while Jerseyans can be liberal, they aren’t naïve about race hatred); now the focus is on scattering the poor throughout towns populated by taxpaying workers so those “makers” can pay the bills for the “takers”.
The older housing stock becomes a factor as people convert single-family homes into multi-family and even rooming houses (often illegally); people no longer need four- or five-bedroom houses. This makes parking a nightmare as a street with 30 alleged single-family homes has 120 cars fighting for spots. Some wealthier areas fight this trend by simply outlawing overnight parking on the street; any illegal constructed apartments could only accommodate pedestrians.
There is hope with Trump in office; a happy New Year to you as well - FRegards!