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from the need-more-land-where-the-water-is dept.
California's Central Valley is best known for supplying nearly 25% of the country's food, including 40% of the fruit and nuts consumed each year. Yet today, backcountry places such as Patterson, population 22,000, are experiencing an increase in homelessness that can be traced, in part, to an unlikely sounding source: Silicon Valley.
The million-dollar home prices about 85 miles west, in San Francisco and San Jose, have pushed aspiring homeowners to look inland. Patterson's population has doubled since the 2000 census. Average monthly rents have climbed from about $900 in 2014 to nearly $1,600 in recent months, according to the apartment database Rent Jungle, compounding the hardships of the foreclosure crisis, the shuttering of several local agricultural businesses and surging substance abuse rates.
"The rents in Patterson are crazy," said Romelia Wiley, program manager of the local not-for-profit organization Community Housing & Shelter Services. "Why? I-5."
The freeway offers commuters access to high-paying job centers near the coast, and the number of people commuting to the Bay Area from the portion of the Central Valley that includes Patterson more than doubled between 1990 and 2013, to about 65,000 people, or at least 15% of the local workforce, according to an analysis by the University of the Pacific.
Why don't they build up instead of out?
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Tuesday April 18 2017, @02:27PM (5 children)
I grew up in Rancho Cordova in what was in the 1950's and 60's the great Central Valley boonies. and watched it turn into a light rail-connected 'burb of Sacramento. Post-Vietnam immigration earned it the nickname Rancho Cambodia.
Nowadays the whole Sac Metro area is just low-income housing for the masters of the universes' despised underlings and the state burocracy.
People gotta go somewhere, even the homeless. Life may be tough on the streets of Stockton or Modesto, but it probably beats the hell out of roughing it in Detroit or Saint Louis.
Totally predictable, and completely irreversible without a major tech bubble burst.
Governor Moonbeam will probably launch a new assistance program (Cal Flophouse?) replete with tax hikes. That's the California way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @03:36PM (4 children)
Now I get you'd rather solve the problems by making housing affordable and decent jobs available to everyone, but that is not easily legislated. So in the meantime you suggest we let millions of people die in the streets? Tax funded "flophouses" are a part of being civilized now that we no longer live in the jungle... Or we can remove all welfare assistance and watch "the walking dead" become a true parody of reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:12PM
This is what England did. We can send people to Africa, or the Middle East, or South America. Someday we can ship them off to Mars.
The alternative is seen in Futurama and Soylent Green: we set up suicide booths and/or suicide centers. So... how about them colonies?
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:34PM (2 children)
Part of the problem is that the taxes that support California's already very generous welfare system make it even harder for average people to stay housed. If the income tax code was a little more progressive it might help. I don't imagine very many hipsters will bug out for Seattle over a few Starbucks-visits worth of economic impact funding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @11:39PM (1 child)
Fixing the tax code would be a good start. 'Progressive' will not work. Simplification and removal of *all* loopholes will. The states that have been moving towards flat taxes and no loopholes are going cash positive. We have had nearly 40 years of voodoo economics at this point to prove it does not work. Mathematically it should work. In practice those with the money just buy loopholes from their favorite political groups.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @12:03AM
That's true, and being a one-party state, the imbeciles in Sacramento have no impediment to further enriching themselves and their sponsors, or do anything innovative for the governed. Cali voters are so screwed.