If you had the ability to read and research you would know California has over 7 million single family detached homes.
Over 80% owner-occupied.
Only Texas comes close with a little over 5 million. Florida has less than 4 million and New York barely over 2 million.
Given home prices in CA, how is that not the largest, most affluent middle class in the nation?
Housing units, July 1, 2016, (V2016) 14,060,525
Housing units, April 1, 2010 13,680,081
Owner-occupied housing unit rate, 2012-2016 54.1%
Median value of owner-occupied housing units, 2012-2016 $409,300
Median selected monthly owner costs -with a mortgage, 2012-2016 $2,157
Median selected monthly owner costs -without a mortgage, 2012-2016 $517
Median gross rent, 2012-2016 $1,297
Large, because the population is large. A smaller proportion of a huge population is still huge.
But the proper metric is proportion, not an absolute number.
In raw numbers, CA may have the largest, most affluent middle class. But that ignores several things: First, as a percentage of the state population and in comparison to the upper and lower classes, where does CA stand when measured against other states?
And as for “affluent”, how affluent are they once you start taking cost-of-living into account? Are those homeowners really that affluent? If you leave out home valuation since buyers are scarce and most don’t have the ability to pay what the market portrays as home values, are any CA residents really flush with cash? Or do they just look “affluent” on paper because they own a house with an unrealistically high “value”?
The article refers to proportion, not absolute numbers.
If you were to look at absolute numbers, you would find that CA has the largest poverty class in the country. This goes hand-in-hand with the proportion.
For CA to be on a par with the national average, another 8% of the population would have to be lifted out of poverty. But CA politicians will do everything they can to grow the poverty class while driving out the middle class.
As I asked, don’t CA schools teach math or deductive reasoning any more?
It’s a real shame to see what has happened to CA. People often ask if I plan to return when I retire, and my answer is always no, because CA is insane now. The cost of living is sky-high, while the quality of life just keeps plummeting. And economic and social illiterates run Sacto.