Posted on 02/17/2014 7:20:42 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Detroit isn’t a monster — it’s just ahead of the curve. Or it is a monster, in the classical sense of that word: a warning of things to come. We should all be paying attention, but those Americans who should be paying the closest attention are those who are unfortunately least inclined to do so: the happy inhabitants of the gilded communities of Northern California.
I have written a great deal about Detroit as the inevitable endgame of progressive politics and economics, and those who are disinclined to be persuaded by such analysis as I have to offer respond as with one voice: “San Francisco!” The case bears some examination.
Though its charms are wasted on me, San Francisco obviously is enormously appealing to a great many people, as is the Bay Area in its entirety. There are some rough spots, to be sure, but the great swath of territory that runs from San Francisco to San Jose before taking a U-turn up to Berkeley contains a great deal to recommend itself: untold high-tech wealth, a stimulating intellectual climate, world-class educational and cultural institutions, beautiful waterfront properties, and municipal infrastructure that is much better than the American average. As one of my progressive correspondents put it, the high price of San Francisco real estate should communicate to a market-oriented critic such as myself that the city is doing something right. And there is something to that, but there is an important limitation to that analysis. California is a great place to live if you are rich.
And California is not very rich.
The median income for a three-member household is only $67,401 in California. That is not a terrible figure, but it is a bit less than the considerably less glamorous Commonwealth of Pennsylvania ($68,848), only about 30 venti frappuccinos per year ahead of Nebraska ($67,235). That figure is considerably lower than in, say, Wyoming, where the median three-member household takes in nearly 10 percent more each year, and it is far, far behind Alaska, where the median three-member household could buy a new Ford every year and still have as much left over as its California counterparts.
Of course, California has some very poor spots, and your typical Silicon Valley grandee does not spend very much time so much as downwind of one of them. But there is trouble in the happy valley, too. San Jose boasts one of the nation’s highest median household incomes at $81,000 a year — pretty heavy money for a midpoint. But the median price of a single-family house in San Jose is $775,000, or just over nine and a half times the median income. By way of comparison, in Austin, San Jose’s high-tech Texas cousin, the ratio is only 4 to 1 — even as the Texas capital sees record housing prices. In San Francisco, the ratio is 10.2 to 1; in Houston, it’s only 4.3 to 1.
That means that the median family in San Jose could never responsibly purchase the median house in San Jose: Saving ten years’ pre-tax wages and betting it all on a single investment — in California real estate, no less — would be enormously risky. No responsible mortgage lender (if there is such a thing) would approve that loan.
Similar ratios have held up for a long time in New York City, which is arguably a special case. But even if it isn’t, there is an important difference: Expanding the calculation into the greater metropolitan region, New York City still does not look great, but it looks a lot better. Compare the San Jose metro with the Austin metro, and the comparison looks even worse for California than it does on a city-to-city basis. When housing prices are nine or ten times family incomes, there are basically two ways that distance can be crossed — and, high as incomes are in Northern California, do not bet on seeing them multiplied in short order.
But what happens between now and then?
Places like San Francisco and San Jose have become the economic and cultural equivalent of the Southern California phenomenon most loathed by good progressives everywhere: the gated community. The cities of Silicon Valley are not organized around golf courses, tennis courts, and clubhouses on the traditional gated-community model, but that is merely a difference in taste and recreational interest. The barriers between them and the water-starved California inland — or the poor sections of Oakland — are not physical, but they are nonetheless ruthlessly patrolled, a fact not lost on Silicon Valley’s less-well-off, who recently have taken to breaking the windows of the hated “Google buses,” the private coaches that spare California’s tech royalty the indignity of a ride on the BART. The vandals’ manifesto reads: “You are not innocent victims. You live your comfortable lives surrounded by poverty, homelessness and death, seemingly oblivious to everything around you, lost in the big bucks and success.”
San Francisco, the world capital of progressive piety, has a population that is barely 6 percent black, but its population of persons arrested for drug felonies is 60 percent black. More than 40 percent of those arrested for homicide are black. In this bastion of well-heeled progressive governance, about half of the black households make less than $25,000 a year. And this isn’t in Laramie, Wyo., where you can rent a three-bedroom home for less than $800 a month. This is less than 25 grand a year in one of the most expensive places in the country.
In 1950, nobody thought Detroit — by many measures then the world’s most prosperous city — would end up a half-abandoned, bankrupt, violent basket case. Nobody thought that U.S. automakers would be so inept as to fail to keep up with Japanese and European competitors, that their unions would be so corrupt and rapacious, or that the city of Detroit would slide into Third World standards of municipal governance. But bear this in mind: The automakers had large, expensive factories in Detroit. Their capital was physical. Sure, Google and Apple have real estate and physical infrastructure in California, but high-tech firms are much less tied to the land than were their industrial-age competitors. California’s cities are falling to bankruptcy and fiscal crisis like water dripping in a sink. Meanwhile, the local radicals, driven by envy and ideology, have taken to accosting Silicon Valley engineers at their homes. The companies are responding with increased reliance upon private security forces. But there are other possible responses, such as relocating to where they are more welcome.
Is San Francisco the progressives’ best counterexample to the devastation in Detroit? Ask again in 20 years.
— Kevin D. Williamson is a roving correspondent for National Review.
Yes, and I’ve always been fascinated by the lack of effort in “unionizing” the programmers and other professionals at high-tech firms. Obviously, a lot of factors work against it; for starters, the guys who founded Oracle, Apple, Google, Yahoo and the rest understood that a unionized workforce is nothing but trouble, so they provided wages, benefits and perks that were far beyond anything a union could extract from the company.
Secondly, the workers understood that they were far better off without a union, so any attempt at organizing a software engineers local would be laughed into oblivion. But there are still clerical and services employees at many of those firms who would (appear) to be prime candidates for a union.
So why isn’t the AFL-CIO pounding on the door at Apple, demanding the right to organize the downtrodden in the high tech world? Take a look at where Barack Obama got a lot of his campaign donations; it came from the same Silicon Valley enclaves that donate generously to Democratic candidates every election cycle. And in return, the unions stay out of Silicon Valley and other tech enclaves.
But it won’t be enough to keep them in California forever. As Mr. Williamson notes, tech firms are not rooted to the land the way the car companies were. Let the Dims keep raising taxes while municipal services decline and tech workers are targeted for harassment and attacks. The tech exodus from northern California will be measured in weeks and months, not years and decades.
Too bad.
Birmingham was once a very beautiful city. One of the prettiest I ever saw.
Too bad the streets are little more than public toilets.
The liberals there will not enforce vagrancy laws, panhandling laws...or any other law for that matter.
However if you look at the riot history of the Bay Area, the riots are in Oakland. There's just not enough primitives in SF to actually RIOT. The residents will watch the smoke rising from across the Bay.
San Jose and the areas surrounding Silicon Valley may present a different calculus. The population surrounding Silicon Valley is easily 60% Hispanic, and at least 1/2 of those illegal. The majority of the rest born to illegals.
The dominant theme being poor, "uneducated" and ENVIOUS.
To top it off, most white residents of the Bay Area consider it uncool to own a firearm.
A slaughter just waiting to happen.
LIBs deserve what they get. Reap what you sow.
RE: San Francisco is arguably the prettiest city in the USA. Stunning.
When was the song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” written and what was the city like back then?
I think "ethnic cleansing" would be a more appropriate way of putting it.
Interesting numbers on Cali as a whole.
I assumed Cali was wealthy because they can afford to pay their state employees so much and have so many retirees making over 100 grand a year.
Instead of “white flight”, think “taxpayer flight” - that is what kills these places (in part because they have to support so many “gibsmedats”. It is killing CA, and in my area it is killing NJ and NY. The taxpayers may be individuals or corporations; in the end, when too few people are supporting so many, a race starts to get out.
“I assumed Cali was wealthy because they can afford to pay their state employees so much...”
It has been in the news for years that they can’t in fact pay them so much; that is what saddled them with the debt that is now killing them. Like NJ, you have a situation where people are paying taxes today to pay for benefits/retirement of people who stopped working decades ago; moving to a state like that simply gives you a piece of a massive IOU.
But it didn't go to ruin until the late 80's.
The song you mention is likely from the late 50's.
If they'd actually enforce the laws on the books it could be, again, the finest city on the West Coast, with Seattle a close second.
As it is, Seattle reigns.
When I first started going there in the early 70's it was an amazing place. Still is.
If you like the arts, from Rock, Jazz, Opera...to the culinary arts...to the visual arts, it has but one rival. NYC.
I really don’t care whether or not someone is upset by the comment. I consider “white flight” in itself to be a “politically correct” term that liberals WANT to use. They are the ones who want to inject race into everything. They use the term the same way they use the terms “white guilt” and “white privilege.” In other words, “you white people need to feel guilty about leaving the cities for the priveleged suburbs only because you see black people in your neighborhood. So give us money to feel better about your racist selves.”
The phenomenon liberals label as “white flight” is better characterized as the flight of affluent, productive achievers from urban areas due to concerns of personal safety and family safety (crime) as well as the desire to have their children succeed (schools). To call it “white flight” implies that whites are racist and are leaving just because they don’t want to be around “colored people.”
The fact remains that most of the people who fled to the suburbs are and were white. The fact remains that most of the people who caused the problems with crime and deteriorating schools are black. But there are successful black people who leave the cities for the suburbs for exactly the same reasons that white people do. Those reasons are only ancillarily racial.
Liberals claim to stand for something that only they can see because they are more intelligent than everyone else.
The reverse is true. Liberals stand for nothing and they’re too stupid to see that what they are doing will destroy them.
Leftists run liberals. Leftists are sadistic parasites. They not only want to take everything, they want to enjoy the destruction and suffering as they do so. And they’ve chosen the most naive and stupid to be their tools.
The Left brings death - that’s it, that’s all they’ve got. That’s why they claim Every Good Thing, because to see them as they are is to see a grinning skull.
Seattle also has people sleeping in the streets. Poverty isn’t the only reason for this—mental health policies have a lot to do with it. Also tolerance for panhandling. Also “harm reduction” policies such as needle exchanges and the mentality that goes with them may actually cause some harm. Street people gravitate to the cities for a variety of reasons.
I would not engage in a spitting contest with SF, but when I lived in Seattle, it wasn’t unusual to get panhandled 2 or 3 times just going a few blocks to the store.
You said a mouthful. I will add that forced busing, while well-intentioned, played a part. Destroying the neighborhood schools concept helps destroy the sense of neighborhood, and other horrors follow. Sane people of all colors will flee a place when the schools turn to crap.
Speaking of California, what happened with the proposed fitted sheet law for hotels down there? As somebody who used to work in the industry and also hates fitted sheets, I was curious about it.
This also proved to me that no matter what dire problems were facing their state, the Californians never let it stop them from obsessing over minutiae.
bfl
Written in Brooklyn in 1953 and recorded by Tony Bennett in 1962.
Yes, Seattle still has a lot to recommend it, but the politics are vile. You have to admit that a Socialist city council member is not a comfort.
Since I can’t afford a lot of the pastimes you mention, Everett suits me now.
I will however be in Seattle for Rain City Blues at the end of the month.(paying my way by working) And I might mention, if you like blues dancing, there is still time to register. Many blues dance luminaries will be there.
I’m not familiar with the fitted cheet issue, but not long after 9/11 NYC decided that smokers were the biggest threat to them (after letting business owners spend billions fitting their areas with smoking/nonsmoking areas).
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