Far-Left extremism has turned the Golden State into a dystopic basket case
Residents who call the police to ask for the now permanent camps to be moved from their heavily mortgaged doorsteps are told that there is nothing that the authorities can do
Anyone who has visited San Francisco in recent years will have noticed that one of the world’s most beautifully positioned cities has turned into an American dystopia. Nowhere in the first world is actual inequality more pronounced. The proximity of Silicon Valley has made property unaffordable to anyone below the millionaire class. And when that class comes down from their towers or ventures into the centre of the city they encounter sights rarely seen outside of a zombie movie.
The incentivisation of homelessness, dire provisions for the mentally ill and easy access to legal and illegal drugs have meant that even the city’s boutique shopping streets are crowded with people who have made the streets their home. A portion of the responsibility for this lies with Mayor Gavin Newsom who, having made such a success of San Francisco, became Governor of California, to see if he could make his policies fail on a larger canvas.
Although 2020 has not been good to anyone, California has had an especially bad year. On top of Covid and the lockdowns the state has been ravaged by wildfires, Black Lives Matter protests, anti-police riots and more. And all this has come on top of a state that was already staggering under local, state-induced problems. Thanks to a succession of Democrat administrators California has the highest state income tax in the country as well as the highest base sales tax of any state in the union. Further tax rises now being proposed include not just higher taxes on the wealthy but the introduction of retroactive wealth taxes.
In the middle of all this the state seems to be making it as undesirable as possible to do business. This year California State passed legislation forcing all companies based in the state to comply by next year with a fixed quota system of board representation from “under-represented groups” including trans people and Pacific Islanders. The quota system then mandates higher board representation by the year 2022. Everywhere in the county businesses are trying to work out how they can find a way through this government-imposed assault course.
The Covid crisis has hit the state as badly as any in the union. But as in so many other places, it has also highlighted the problems that already existed. California’s overpriced real estate only makes sense for an era when people had to be in an office: where Silicon Valley’s techies were taken to work in one of their company’s special buses, coding away on the Wi-Fi as they were taken to their hub. Strip away the need to be in any physical locale and you strip away the pretence that there is anything sacred, inspiring or remotely special about the square miles of the Valley. It comes to resemble a disco floor after the lights have come up.
Today even the major streets of the county, like West Hollywood, are filled with shuttered businesses. Perhaps two out of every three businesses in such formerly commercial areas have closed – many of them for good. The streets are as quiet everywhere, and for as long as indoor dining is forbidden and the rich sit in parking lots eating overpriced food under strict mask laws, California’s good times are not coming back.
In even the smartest streets in what used to be America’s most glamorous city, the county’s 150,000 homeless have spilled out everywhere. In broad daylight naked people lie among blankets in the doorways of shuttered businesses. Nearly every underpass has become a tent city. Residents who call the police to ask for the now permanent encampments to be moved from their heavily mortgaged doorsteps are told that there is nothing that the authorities can do.
It is no surprise that the state’s residents are making their reaction to all this felt by their exit. Even before the current concatenation of events the state has been haemorrhaging people. Since 2015 the state has been losing an average net of 100,000 people a year. From 2018-9 the state had a net exodus of almost 200,000 people. Now the trend is accelerating. Prominent Californians like the podcaster Joe Rogan have upped and left, announcing that they can no longer live with the ineptitude, misgovernment and ever-higher taxes that have characterised the state in recent years. At tables the discussion is about where the state’s residents will go, with one giant question mark hanging over it all. This is still Trump’s America, for sure. But California in recent years has been a petri-dish experiment for another America – the Democrats’ America. For those who have lived that experiment up close, the prospect of a Biden victory makes the question of where to run an international, rather than a national, question.