
My Dark California Dream - samclemens
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/opinion/sunday/my-dark-california-dream.html
======
lemevi
I go to work in San Francisco every day. I'm not an entrepreneur but as an
engineer I am benefiting from the rise of tech. I look around the city as I
walk to the office, seeing all these new condos spring up, seeing the work
done on the new terminals and all the activity around me and it feels like a
city that's alive and growing.

My family and I frequently travel all over California to check out all its
beautiful places and I love this state. I grew up in San Diego so it's not
like I'm a tourist. With the exception of the drought, I think California is
getting better all the time.

~~~
crabasa
_> except, of course, those living the most obvious new California dream, the
technology gold rush. Try telling successful 25-year-old entrepreneurs in San
Francisco that California’s over and you’ll get blank stares as they
contemplate stock options, condos going up all over the city, restaurants
packed nightly and spectacular organic produce at farmers’ markets every day._

If you had read the entire article, you would have noticed the OP was well
aware of your opinion here.

~~~
lemevi
> If you had read the entire article

I read the entire article. Notice I wrote "I'm not an entrepreneur",
implicitly referencing the passage you quoted.

------
klenwell
Interesting personal take on recent California history. But the latent racial
anxiety that is an important part of this story (and is ironically captured by
the title of this piece) would be outrageous if it wasn't so comical. The
author glosses the racial and ethnic diversity that makes California special
and he seems like a good guy. But he ignores the ugly racial politics that
still lurks in a diminishing but active part of the electorate. This headline
from earlier this year, as much as anything, sums up the "darkness" that
colors much of the nostalgia expressed by nostalgic Californians, especially
those of the author's and author's parents' generation:

"It's official: Latinos now outnumber whites in California"

[http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-census-
latinos...](http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-census-
latinos-20150708-story.html)

One of the things I love most about California is its racial and cultural
diversity. But a lot of that transition from the "agreed-upon, commanding"
version of "modernist California" to the "post-modern phase" was embodied
politically by a white flight impulse among people like my grandparents who
beatified FDR then in the 1950s and 1960s started voting for conservative
politicians like Ronald Reagan when he was elected governor and ended up
reliably supporting a Republican establishment that sanctified Prop 13 and
championed funding cuts for the public institutions that formed an important
part of the foundation of the California dream. They got theirs and they were
loathe to pay it forward for a state that they felt was being overrun by
people who didn't share their values and were not like themselves.

With the election of Jerry Brown and the dominance of Democrats in the
legislature, California seems to have turned a corner fiscally and a lot of
the doom-and-gloom headlines that gleefully pointed to the deficits of the
previous decade have faded away. California still faces a lot of challenges.
At least it is facing up to them.

~~~
turar
>> "It's official: Latinos now outnumber whites in California"

These sentiments are ironic, given California's history. E.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Mexic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Mexico#/media/File:Mapa_de_Mexico_1835_1.PNG)

------
danboarder
The author is so focused on lamenting California's demise that he's missing
what is still here.

I fixed up an old '73 VW westy bus and we've been doing all the things he said
can't be done anymore. The cali dream is alive and well, I was out surfing
today. El Nino is predicted this year and may spell the end of the drought.
Things are looking up, and the solution to the sense of loss he's taking about
is to be creative. Go to Kings Canyon or Anza Borrego instead of tourist-trap
Yosemite. Its not that hard.

~~~
brokencog
Only those aren't well versed in the regional history portend a single rainy
season will end this drought. Bring some pleasant relief, which will only help
to slacken regulation/thinking/policy.

However after a year the drought will still be - unmoderated and with even
worse water policies.

But, if you can afford the water, Cali is still the same - although it's
harder to see through the haze of selfie sticks and REI gear.

~~~
eruditely
What about a second rainy season? New extremes are surpassed all the time.

~~~
jjtheblunt
Nope, shouldn't be within years of rainy seasons of being enough.

------
rdtsc
I wanted to like California, but every time I visit (mostly LA) I end up
spending hours stuck in traffic getting places. It kills it for me, it makes
the joy of nice weather, palm trees, the laid back attitude, the views, the
beaches, kind of not worth it. I tried the Metro, but it didn't go where I
wanted to go somehow. I tried the buses, but there were too crowded and they
got stuck in traffic just as much as the cars.

~~~
jerhinesmith
If you're only visiting LA, you're going to run into traffic. LA has arguably
the first or second worst traffic in all of the US. As a counter-anecdote, I
live in what could be considered an Oakland or SF suburb, and I can get
everywhere I need to go by either walking or taking bart. I sit in traffic
maybe two or three times a year.

~~~
mng2
I used to live in Berkeley and did the walk/BART/bus/carshare thing, and it
was wonderful. I miss it a lot.

~~~
jerhinesmith
Having grown up in the midwest where everything is a 10 - 20 minute drive, I
absolutely love it here. It's literally life changing.

------
unclesaamm
Hm, the happy note on the end about the good parts of progress was light on
the massive increase of income inequality. A city with foreign investment and
state of the art medical facilities is good and well, but is unrelated to what
makes San Francisco San Francisco, which is a generosity toward difference,
and a welcoming "come as you are" philosophy. If nobody except the highly
affluent can live here, we've lost our way.

~~~
outis
San Francisco was only ever really tolerant of the _right_ kind of
differences, AFAICT. For example, it appears to be a near-complete political
monoculture. It even has a prominent road in the largest city park named after
a living and active Democratic politician, just to make sure everyone knows
whose turf it is.

More recently, there is the animosity against the tech crowd, which I don't
need to describe.

~~~
unclesaamm
Hm, I thought you were going somewhere different after that first sentence,
because San Francisco history is actually deeply embedded with racism. It is
often egregiously racist, in the late 1800s so much so to the point of the
entire justice system being supplanted by vigilante mobs (composed of the
white merchant class) that tried and hung Australian, Chinese, and Mexican
immigrants. There are countless stories of SF being the first state to defeat
some racist law or another, like how the city outlawed wooden laundromats for
fire code reasons, but only used it to enforce on Asian laundromats (and not
white ones). IANAL but that ended up being a Supreme Court case that more or
less said laws had to be enforced equally, irrespective of race.

It's a deep history, and in interpreting it you have to be careful who you
decide is "San Francisco" \-- is it the institutions at the time, or the
citizens who act up against it?

I agree though that it's important not to take progressive politics for
granted.

~~~
outis
Thanks, I was not aware of that aspect of San Francisco's history. It does not
seem to have much of a connection to the present situation, though - or maybe
it does? The Democrats used to be the slavery party, after all.

Is there a good source for the political history of San Francisco that does
not automatically take the point of view of the current incumbents?

------
milge
I'm a guy living on the east coast. I've wanted to move to Cali for almost a
decade now. As a developer, there are 4 times as many job prospects in
California. The weather doesn't hurt either. I bought into the American dream.
Go to school. Get a job. Buy a house. Now I'm seeing if I can break even on my
investment. I'm hoping the authors opinion is biased.

------
Animats
Don't worry, it's about time for another dot-com crash. After the last dot-com
crash, traffic in SF dropped so much that rush hour disappeared. Half the
twentysomethings moved out. Downtown San Jose emptied out. Just be patient.

Which big company will be the first to go? Twitter? (And why is Zynga still
around at all?)

~~~
raldi
The booms last so long, and are so big, and the busts are reversed so swiftly
and completely, that the latter should really be thought of as the bubbles.

If you long at the long-term trend (like the last 20 or 40 years), it's clear
that the rising generations want to live in cities much moreso than previous
ones did, there's a steady exodus from snowy states to warmer ones, tech isn't
going away (except for occasional brief setbacks), and San Francisco and
Silicon Valley are going to be the center of that world deep into the
foreseeable future.

In other words, yes, a tech crash will happen once or twice every decade, but
if you're counting on them to scare everyone else away and let you have the
Bay Area all to yourself forevermore, you're in for a rude awakening.

[http://my.paragon-
re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Case-...](http://my.paragon-
re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Case-Shiller_Simpl-Percentages.jpg)

~~~
douche
> it's clear that the rising generations want to live in cities much moreso
> than previous ones did

I don't know that it's necessarily that we want to, but we kinda have to. When
you're starting off out of college with the kind of debt that your parents
didn't have until they bought their first home, you've got to go where the
money is. For some reason, it's been decided that packing people into open-
office cattle cribs in a handful of cities across the country is the only way
to do business... So we pack up and go live in shitty apartments in the city
for a few years until we get out of debt-slavery and become skilled enough and
connected enough that we can work from the places we actually want to live and
raise a family.

It pisses me off a little bit. In my home town, I've got two hundred-year-old
graves of relatives in the town cemetery, and I grew up in a house built on
land that was part of a farm my great-great grandfather owned before the Great
Depression. There are the hills and woods I stalked deer and turkeys in, the
little mountain ponds I caught trout in, the garden I grew beans and corn and
potatoes in with my family. The elementary and high school gyms I shot
thousands of hoops in and poured out uncounted gallons of sweat on. I know
every tree, every rock that sticks up out of the lawn enough to dull the
lawnmower if you don't go around. It's _home_ , in a way that the other places
I've had to live and work since then will never be. It just sucks, because
there is no work, and so I, along with everyone else in my generation, has had
to leave and go out into these concrete jungles and lifeless suburbs to make a
living.

Someday, I'll have made enough money, and the world will move on enough that I
can write software from my living room, and teach my kids how to grow tomatoes
in that same patch of dirt.

------
powera
TLDR: you kids get off my lawn.

I mean the author admits this multiple times, that he's nostalgic for "1960s
California" out of nostalgia rather than any actual reasons it was better.

------
brokencog
Article has the wrong title ... "Same as it ever was. Same as it ever will
be."

Only, much more of everything. This is, inevitably, for the worse.

~~~
zyxley
> This is, inevitably, for the worse.

Why?

------
epa
Now he knows how the Native Americans feel.

------
turkishrevenge
What can I say about this article?

I recently moved here, like many other people in tech. I didn't come for the
draw of nature--which I love--but for a higher paying job and a chance to
escape a poor, decaying, east coast city that increasingly felt like an urban
hell. The whole undertaking was supposed to be a leg up, moving to that next
level of adulthood (whatever that means in 2015). I am a well-paid, well-
educated engineer in my early 30's. I am not a founder, nor do I intend to be,
at least around these parts. California was a promised land, and I was glad to
buy a one-way ticket there.

Now that I am here and a "resident," I faced with an ugly truth: the utter
impossibility for me to ever buy any kind of property in the city, however
modest or dilapidated, even if my salary somehow doubled overnight. The very
thought of what it takes to "make it" here borders on the obscene. I'm lucky
to pay $1,300 (which is cheap) for a one-bedroom in the city with 3 other
people; outside, the prospects aren't much better.

The SF (and sadly the bay area in general) of now is a place where boomers
made the rules. I can't help but feel impotent when thinking about the long-
term political changes that will need to be effected in order to benefit
newcomers and the working classes that are trying to make a home here. The old
guard has such a stranglehold on the political machinations of this place and
the chips are overwhelmingly stacked in their favor. I'm registered to vote--
and I plan on it--but I know deep down, nothing will truly change until the
Daniel Duane's of the city finally flush down the bowl and don't resurface.
People like him had the great luck to be born during an era where places like
this weren't fully exploited yet. I can't fault people like him for taking
advantage of the opportunity to buy when housing was cheap and relatively
plentiful. Anyone with aspirations to own a home and have a family would do
the same without a second thought.

The NIMBYism and political blockading of the old guard is unconscionable. The
housing crisis plaguing not only SF, but the peninsula as well, is directly
related to their shortsighted, self-serving political ends. It's as if
they--"they" in this case are my generational bogeyman--never even considered
how their children would live. Short of inheriting a property, "tough shit" is
the answer to the housing question.

My choices now are to stay, make some money, and take it back with me to
somewhere cheaper, or hope for a simultaneous bubble-burst and earthquake
which will depress home prices and maybe scare some alte kakas to leave.

I want to stay here, but it's really damn near impossible.

So let the Daniel Duane's lament about their California dream of the past. I
only know about what we've been left by the legacy of his ilk, and it ain't
good.

~~~
raldi
Join the resistance:
[http://www.sfbarf.org/pages/vote.html](http://www.sfbarf.org/pages/vote.html)

~~~
drdeadringer
Here's the subreddit I found for those interested:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/SFBARF](https://www.reddit.com/r/SFBARF)

------
geebee
This was a good article, and a lot of it resonates with me, since I did grow
up in SF in the 70s and 80s. It occurred to me, reading the article, that
Northern Californians may be unusually ill prepared to handle the changes that
occurred in the State. People often say to me "well, you grew up here, so you
aren't as shocked by the prices", but it actually may be the opposite. Someone
who grew up outside SF sees moving here as a choice, a decision to accept the
outrageously high real estate prices as the cost of living here. But the truth
is, the high prices in SF are just as much of a shock to people who grew up
here. Of course, this is a slight of hand, as it actually is just as much of a
choice to stay here as it is to move here, but it is more jarring to have to
leave your hometown due to a fairly sudden stratospheric rise in housing
prices than it is to decide not to move to a place you've never lived
(especially if it involves leaving family or lifelong friends behind).

Another factor is that the very low prices may have instilled a lack of
materialism in California kids that left them, as I said, unusually unprepared
for what was to follow. When a school teacher, humanities professor, or social
worker can afford a 3 bedroom house in palo alto with a nice sized backyard In
that sort of environment, their children will often grow up believing that it
wasn't really worth chasing the money, that in fact, you _shouldn_ , that this
would be to waste a gift. Yes, you'll still need an income, but why would you
sacrifice a life where you enjoy your work and do good, if all that requires
is that you live in a modest house in middle class Palo Alto or Noe Valley
than a mansion in Pacific Heights or Hillsborough? What none of these people
were prepared for is the reality that living in "middle class" Palo Alto
(long, long gone) or Noe Valley will be complete off limits, and that a house
in the Excelsior may even be just out of reach.

One thing that did make me cringe was the old, tired trope that doctors and
lawyers are priced out, and that "only techies need apply". Rank and file
"techies" were an integral part of the old SF that Dan Duane says he misses -
hell, programming was even discussed as path to find the serene focus in "Zen
and the article of motorcycle maintenance." Programmers and other techies were
types who had renounced the big salaries of corporate law or banking to do
something more creative and interesting. This view of tech was alive and well
in the late 90s, and shows up in a lot of PG's early essays.

C'mon, Dan, the median salary for lawyers and doctors is waaay higher than for
your typical "techie".

------
wtbob
The thing is, California died a long time ago. The state which elected Ronald
Reagan as governor is long, long gone. I have family there, and every time I
visit I'm struck by what a bureaucratic nightmare it is: everything is
regulated, registered, taxed, adjusted, but most of all _controlled_.

As far as I can tell, from my visits, California is dystopia. A different sort
of dystopia than Washington, D.C. or Boston, but a dystopia nonetheless.

There's enough money in the world to pay me to live in California, but no-one
would pay it to me.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>As far as I can tell, from my visits, California is dystopia. A different
sort of dystopia than Washington, D.C. or Boston, but a dystopia nonetheless.

Stop being a melodramatic, spoiled American. Current-day California is nothing
like:

* Present-day Russia

* Present-day China

* Present-day Mexico

* Pinochet's Chile

* Nazi Germany

* Soviet Russia

* Anywhere else in the Eastern Bloc

* present-day ISIS territory

Besides which, plenty of people hated Reagan.

~~~
dang
> _Stop being a melodramatic, spoiled American_

As I think you know, this isn't allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong someone
is. Please don't do it here.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Calling people out for dramatizing their First World Problems into the
collapse of society isn't allowed?

------
andyl
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

