Posted on 02/04/2005 2:47:02 PM PST by television is just wrong
SoCal's report card not golden
By Kerry Cavanaugh, Staff Writer
With soaring housing costs, bad schools, horrendous traffic jams and a dearth of well-paying jobs, Southern California's once-golden lifestyle continues to dim, a scorecard released Thursday by the regional planning agency shows.
The seventh annual State of the Region report by the Southern California Association of Governments ranks the quality of life in the region as a D-plus --potentially failing.
Housing and air quality worsened in 2003, while the grades for traffic, education, household income and public safety remained static. And while the number of jobs in the six-county region rose by 14,000, personal income for its 17.7 million residents stayed flat.
"The fundamental issue this region faces ... is the income issue. Without an increase in wages and per capita income we're not going to have the resources to deal with these issues," said Mark Pisano, executive director of SCAG.
The report details a slate of interconnected problems plaguing Southern California.
Students perform below the national median on reading and math test scores, while 76 percent of residents do not have a college degree -- elements that limit their ability to get high-paying jobs.
Meanwhile, an exodus of well-paying manufacturing jobs to less-expensive areas have been replaced by lower-paying service jobs. With less wealth, residents have to travel to far-flung suburbs to be able to afford a home, which then worsens congestion and pollution.
"How do you get out of this Catch-22?" asked Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Burke. "We need better schools (in urban areas) so people won't have to move so far away and housing people can afford so they don't have to move so far away."
Southern California's housing earned a D: the worst score since the SCAG report card was launched.
The value of construction permits hit $15.5 billion in 2003, but still didn't keep up with growth and demand. From 2000-03, the region issued 200,000 building permits, but the population grew by 1 million.
That led to dramatic increases in the cost of housing, with prices jumping up to 30 percent in 2003. The median price at the end of that year was $417,500, according to the California Association of Realtors, and had soared to $474,480 by December 2004.
Only 26 percent of households in Los Angeles and 20 percent of households in Orange County could afford a median-priced home in 2003. Even the Inland Empire became more pricey, with only 38 percent of households able to buy a median-priced home compared with 43 percent in 2002.
"The issue of housing affordability, availability and accessibility goes to the core of our long-term economic health and quality of life," said Toni Young, who sits on the Port Hueneme City Council and is SCAG's first vice president.
"Virtually nothing is more sacred than the home, which in Southern California, is becoming more and more difficult to attain each year."
SCAG officials said they are trying to tackle housing and related issues of traffic and air quality with the "2 percent strategy" -- a planning vision adopted last year that calls for more condominiums, townhouses and denser development close to transit lines.
analyzing development opportunity along major bus and train corridors, SCAG officials estimate they could build 400,000 more units.
Their goal is to move jobs closer to homes and homes closer to jobs. So far the cities of Ontario, South Pasadena and communities along the Gold Line have expressed interest in adopting that plan, Pisano said.
-- Kerry Cavanaugh can be reached at (818) 713-3746 or by e-mail at kerry.cavanaugh@dailynews.com
Thanks for the excerpt. As a quantitative type I do appreciate the numbers. As a life long resident, I can remember what things were like when the population was under 20 million. Now the number is about 38 million. It is crowded (by my tastes), and I hope we don't love the place to death.
yes. yes. i. i . i. i. i. live in the... a little oasis in los agneles, where it's full... wealthy liberals, and green trees from latino migrant, but even here it's, like, hard ... yu know. ok butg if u go out of the "oasis" of beverly higlls etc. it's rather difficult to live, WHy?
Tejas is fine, if you like hot weather in summer and snow in winter. I am taking my kids on a trip to Colorado this summer.
Yes, but you can see flowers and do some outdoor BBQ during winter, or so I'm told fairly frequently.
All of these “interconnected” problems all at once! The report doesn’t state why this is happening to Southern California specifically. I wonder if there is some factor not mentioned in the report?
Plutarch, I just LOVED your "picture is a thousand words" response. LOL!
Tejas is fine, if you like hot weather in summer and snow in winter.
This is spreading throughout the nation. America is due to become a third world nation. It is impossible to stop since our politicians lack spine to defend our founding principles.
Simple formula: Fewer and fewer taxpayers + larger and larger numbers of nontaxpayers = regression into third world status.
What that verse? "That's right, you're not from Texas, but you welcome just the same".
You might like Colorado Springs. I have spent quite a bit of time there on business. A view of the front range makes up for the snowy winter IMHO. It won't have the nightlife of Austin, but then you might learn to like fishing and shooting.
Southern California is special, but conditions (not the weather) have changed in the past couple of decades. You can never return to the past, but you can have valid concerns about the future.
I can never return there. I'd have to give up too much of a chunk of my net worth just to get housing.
From the Report:
As to the sources of population growth, 48 percent was due to natural increase, an estimated 41 percent from foreign-immigration, and 11 percent from domestic immigration.
According to the Report, if it is too crowded, only 11% is due to “we” loving it too much by migrating from the U.S. The growth is from foreign-immigration and their subsequent fecundity.
The Central Valley, Orange County and San Diego County remain Republican, though. The odd thing is, the Central Valley is more Latino than the Bay area, although it is also more Republican. A dirty secret about California politics is that Latinos do not vote in as large margins as whites or Asians.
The ranking of schools in California of the other 50 states, last I heard was #49. Now that's something to talk about. (sarcasm)
Every state is a swing state by that definition. We even elect some Democrats to Congress here in Texas.
New York State Politics in a Nutshell: Republicans = Democrats, Democrats = Socialists.
Yes, but we are a blue state. went to Mr. kerry with electorates. Hope it changes soon. I am ashamed. I do realize when you get away from the coast and out of L.A. county it is Republican. But we still ended up a Blue state
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