No newsflash here: San Francisco, after recently beating out Manhattan for both price and scarcity of offerings, has been crowned the worst city in the country for renters. But according to Forbes, the second worst city is not Manhattan. It’s Oakland. And the third worst: San Jose.
The reform of California is a major test of the American system. California has wrecked its middle class even as it has produced plutocratic elites in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The state has serious poverty, too—perhaps the worst in the country. That our largest state is a hopeless muddle, its infrastructure is in disarray, and its cost structure is increasingly uneconomic—this isn’t something that the rest of the country can just slough off. This is a national concern partly because the U.S. economy can’t do really well if California is sick; and partly because many of the same problems now choking California have taken root in other states as well as at the federal level.
The report on state unemployment rates underscores the weakening of a wide set of economic data in recent months. Reports on retail sales, industrial production and home building have all bolstered the case that the economy lost momentum in the first quarter of 2015. The latest report on state employment shows that the weakening occurred across much of the nation.
Japan’s aggressive renewable energy push after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has stalled due to a combination of technical and political factors. And, while energy regulators are taking steps to help increase and more smoothly integrate green power, there are questions of how committed the country is to renewables.
Last month, when the BLS announced revised data for 2014, several economic analysts pointed out that California, which had been clobbered by the Great Recession, had finally surpassed Texas in the creation of new jobs.
To develop a vision and policies for moving a greater share of state transportation dollars to projects and outcomes that are more cost-effective and better aligned with environmental goals, a group of transportation advocates, experts and public officials gathered at the University of California, Los Angeles in October 2014 for a discussion sponsored by the University of California Berkeley and Los Angeles Schools of Law.
If your history of the drought doesn’t extend past April 1, you might be excused for wondering why no additional agricultural water cuts were ordered. But the governor, who has previously been referred to as “the adult in the room,” has played that role again, explaining to people that farmers have endured two years of significant, mandatory cuts in water supplies, and how those cuts have rippled across rural California – land idled, people thrown out of work, communities suffering.
“Sacramento’s economic recovery, slow to emerge, is in full bloom. Unemployment is down, and job growth is catching up to the rest of California. . . Still, thousands of Sacramentans struggle. They can’t find work, or have made do with part-time jobs or work that doesn’t pay as well as their old jobs. For every job opening in electrical engineering, there are 10 times as many jobs available for cashiers. “
As a recent report from the Brookings Institution reveals, income disparities are widest in the nation’s bluest – most liberal – cities and much narrower elsewhere. . . Blue-city politicians claim to help the poor with increases in minimum wages, but the burden of paying them mostly hits small employers, rather than the 5-percenters, and thus may eliminate jobs.
California has met the future, and it really doesn’t work. As the mounting panic surrounding the drought suggests, the Golden State, once renowned for meeting human and geographic challenges, is losing its ability to cope with crises. As a result, the great American land of opportunity is devolving into something that resembles feudalism, a society dominated by rich and poor, with little opportunity for upward mobility for the state’s middle- and working classes.
Anticipating a seasonal spike in summertime water usage, California’s Water Resources Control Board released a modified set of proposed conservation restrictions Saturday that would take effect in June..
“. . . when Gov. Jerry Brown announced mandatory 25 percent water cuts early this month, he exempted both agricultural and environmental water use. That’s despite the fact that those sectors use a combined 90 percent of the state’s overall water in an average year, with the environment receiving the largest share, 50 percent.”
California employers added 39,800 jobs in March, and the state’s unemployment rate fell to 6.5% — its lowest level in seven years.
Olsen’s bill and eight others were part of a package of proposed legislation highlighted Thursday by Assembly Republicans, laws that “will keep California at the leading edge of the modern economy,” backers said.
“Some years back, Soitec Solar arrived in San Diego with the promise of good jobs and the ability to deploy industry-leading solar technology at prospective local solar sites. Yet, these local solar projects – centered in the San Diego County community of Boulevard – were tied up with the county for roughly three years, just receiving approval from the Board of Supervisors this February. Untangling the causes for this outcome after the fact is difficult, but one major issue was the desire to avoid or appease the local planning group’s absolutist opposition. The result was an unnecessarily belabored process under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). “