I recently moved to California. Before i moved, people asked me “why are you moving there, its so bad?”. Now that I’m here, i understand it less. The state is beautiful. There is so much to do.
I know the cost of living is high, and people think the gun control laws are ridiculous (I actually think they are reasonable, for the most part). There is a guy I work with here that says “the policies are dumb” but can’t give me a solid answer on what is so bad about it.
So, what is it that California does (policy-wise) that people hate so much?
I think California is an okay place, but there are several things that annoy me about it, and here are some:
The houseless problem seems extremely poorly managed. I lived in NYC for six years and have visited California a few times. From my experiences, both SF and LA appear to have much larger populations living outdoors (I checked and this is true, 75% of LA’s population vs 6% in NYC, and the cities are comparable in both population and houseless population). Additionally, I’ve had more issues interacting with houseless people in CA than in NYC despite having lived in Manhattan many times longer than I’ve spent in CA. My guess is this is due to worse services/mental health services in CA. I would frequently buy food or coffee for houseless individuals in NYC and never had an issue. I once gave a couple of dollars to someone CA for bus money. They yelled at me because they needed a couple more for the bus. Another time I was followed for several blocks.
California as a state and population seems to be at least as much bluster as action. I don’t want to detract from some real actions, like car electrification requirements, but for example, prop 65, the “known to the state of California to cause cancer” labels. A) California seems to “know” many things that science does not. B) no one pays any attention to these labels, but they sure cost a lot to produce C) if anything, this will cause people to ignore future warnings for real things or even current ones like on cigarettes.
As a longtime resident of Hawaii, this one just annoys me. California claimed it was the first state to plastic bags. This is false; As of May 11, 2014, they were banned across Hawaii. https://www.surfrider.org/news/hawaii-becomes-the-first-state-in-the-u.s.-to-ban-plastic-bags. This did not stop California from claiming the victory when a law was signed later that year that didn’t go into effect until July 2015. https://www.ca.gov/archive/gov39/2014/09/30/news18742/index.html. California doesn’t just not know what causes cancer, they don’t know how to use google despite it being from their state. I suppose you could argue semantically that Hawaii’s ban was not statewide, as it was technically four bans, one in each of the counties, but that’s splitting hairs.
The biggest issue with Prop 65 is that the lost of chemicals includes things that cause cancer under specific conditions that consumers aren’t likely to encounter and chemicals only known to cause cancer in animals. Ceramic fiber is a listed chemical, which means you need a Prop 65 label on ceramic mugs, even though ceramic fiber exposure would only occur upon breaking the mug and the effects would be negligible unless you’re crushing mugs up into powder and railing the lines like Tony Montana.
Yes, this is essentially what I mean about the difference between science and california’s knowledge. The warning labels are directed at humans using the products, so one would hope that the warnings would be for things that would have some reasonable chance of causing cancer to humans using the product but that’s usually not true.
Don’t forget industry purposely overusing the tag to both a) water down it’s effectiveness and b) try to weasel out of any future lawsuits with that particular product.
Truth be told, the law needs to be rewritten now that loopholes/exploits have been found. Humans make mistakes when writing the laws. We just need to do some tuning.
I’ve lived outside NYC and in SoCal. I don’t think fair to only consider the total numbers (especially “living outdoors”) when one place is freezing and inhospitable for a few months every year while the other is relativity (and in some parts, actually) a tropical paradise. People are going to migrate from all around the country to the most comfortable places to live outside. Not to mention cities literally bussing their homeless out- NYC was actually the first and still has the largest program:
There we go. This is what I was looking for.
Prop 65 is definitely useless. But I don’t see that as a reason to move out of the state.
The whole thing that prompted me to ask was that I was told some people left the state for Montana because of the “policies” but I couldn’t get a good answer on which policies they disagreed with.
Homelessness is certainly a problem here that’s worse than most places. But it’s still a problem everywhere you go.
Yeah, I don’t think anything I said would be a good reason to move away, but then again, CA is probably one of the top 5ish states I would live in.