
California’s quality of life is the worst in the country? - masonic
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/28/california-has-the-worst-quality-of-life-study-says/
======
sehugg
Here are the criteria: [https://www.usnews.com/news/best-
states/rankings/quality-of-...](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-
states/rankings/quality-of-life)

 _Among the measures used to evaluate states ' natural environments are
drinking water quality, air quality and total toxic chemical pollution per
square. The ranking also considers how much each state puts its citizens at
risk for long-term, chronic health effects from pollution. Social environment,
on the other hand, investigates how involved people are in their communities.
Two of the measures, community engagement and social support, are based on
surveys where people shared how often they participate in community events and
how often they spend time with family members, friends and work colleagues.
Political involvement was also determined by evaluating average voter turnout
at the 2016 presidential and congressional elections._

North Dakota -- a desolate wind-swept plain littered with fracking wells -- is
#1 for Quality of Life, which makes me _seriously_ question the metrics used
here.

~~~
ars
That says more about you than about the study.

Have you ever lived in a place like that? With real community? Neighbors that
care about you? Who know who you are? Who notice if you are having an issue?
Who go out of their way to help you if you need it?

Could you, right now, walk over to a neighbor and say "I need to go to xxx for
reason xxx, could you watch my kids for 2 days?", and expect them to either
say yes, or help you find someone who can?

~~~
TaylorAlexander
While I don’t have kids, a friend of mine in San Francisco does. She’s good
friends with the neighbors who have a son the same age as hers. If she had to
leave suddenly, I’m certain they’d do anything they could to help.

Outside of Silicon Valley where I grew up, in the Santa Cruz mountains, we
also had neighbors we could trust who would help us if they could.

I do feel that Silicon Valley is less friendly than nearby Santa Cruz, but
anecdotally we do have neighbors who will help.

~~~
urmish
Knowing a few neighbors is different from knowing entire community,
participating in town events, walking around the town and seeing familiar
faces everywhere.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
Certainly. That just isn’t what was discussed in the original comment. If it’s
about knowing lots of your neighbors then I would say I haven’t had that in
California.

------
nodesocket
I've mentioned this a few times here on HN, but I fled California (San
Francisco) in January for Nashville, TN and couldn't be happier. I moved over
my California LLC and businesses to a Tennessee LLC (no state income tax).
People for the most part are super friendly (almost awkward friendly), and
that southern hospitality is really a thing.

Costs are out of control, lawmakers and California state laws are backwards
and anti-business, taxes are high, and open borders / sanctuary cities (my
personal political opinion) are detrimental.

~~~
enraged_camel
Counterpoint: Tennessee is very religious and also backwards as hell[1], and
if you aren’t white you will have a difficult time fitting in.

[1]Just one recent example: [http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/tennessee-
lawmakers-pass-...](http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/tennessee-lawmakers-
pass-god-trust-school-bill-53929916)

~~~
nodesocket
Backwards is relative. Being religious, anti-globalization, or conservative
doesn't make you a horrible person. The bay area is probably the most
intolerant place I've ever been. I've personally seen people unfriend friends
because of politics without even being able to have a thoughtful and educated
discussion about the issues. The bay area is group thinking "madness of
crowds" at its worse.

I encourage watching Peter Thiel explain why he left San Francisco (albeit for
LA):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=5V8YXmkBHok...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=5V8YXmkBHok&app=desktop)

~~~
spicymaki
Let’s be real. Aren’t you just trading one groupthink (liberal west coast) for
another groupthink (conservative south east) that meets your desires? Do you
really think a thoughtful and educated discussion would have really helped?

~~~
freejulian
Wow you’re trapped in a bubble. The valley is the most close minded place I’ve
ever lived. Live in NYC for a bit, it’s the polar opposite.

------
birken
I'll spare you the effort of going through this because I went through the
methodology behind it:

Qualify of life is based on 7 factors:

Natural Environment (50%):

\- Drinking Water Quality (13th)

\- Low Industrial Toxins (20th)

\- Low Pollution Health Risk (45th)

\- Urban Air Quality (50th)

Social Involvement (50%):

\- Community Engagement (44th)

\- Social Support (38th)

\- Voter participation (49th)

The whole Social Involvement section, which is 50% of QOL, is basically
completely bunk. The first two are based off surveys that I'm sure have
methodology issues, and who cares about voter participation? My quality of
life isn't affected by whether or not my neighbor votes in the presidential
election of which your vote in California has no impact. I also have no doubt
if voter participation was adjusted for demographics, named age and race,
California wouldn't do so badly.

The air quality stuff is fair game, but California is a big state and there
are lots of places with better air, in addition to the fact that I can think
of 50 things which impact my "qualify of life" more than the things listed:
Traffic, Parks, Restaurants, Walkability, Bikability, etc.

------
DoreenMichele
I left California last September. Moving someplace cheaper allowed me to get
back into housing. That was all I expected to get out of it. Other than
getting off the street, I didn't expect significant improvement in quality of
life. I moved to a small town that did not have all the stuff I wanted. I
expected to kind of put up with it in order to be able to afford housing.

But after getting here, our mantra has become "Thank god we have moved to
civilization." There is no bag ban here. The library system here is better
than anything I saw in California. Public transit is better. There are
multiple things open 24 hours a day within a short walk from my rental.

Unemployment is high and there is a homeless problem, things I would like to
try do something about. But homelessness was high all over California and I
was one of the homeless there.

I really love the place I moved to and I am just jazzed to be here. At this
point, I can't imagine going back to California.

The problems here look solvable to me. The problems in California look
entrenched and like they can't be solved without some things changing in terms
of state policies. That seems unlikely and it seems to me that even if someone
can figure out how to fix it and somehow pull it off, the transition would be
painful.

I really liked California for a lot of years. It saddens me to feel this way
about the state.

~~~
kumarm
[There is no bag ban here]

Seriously? Single-Use Carryout Bag Ban a concern for you?

~~~
DoreenMichele
Yup.

[http://michelerebooted.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-lawful-
awful...](http://michelerebooted.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-lawful-awful-
california-bag-ban.html)

~~~
kelp
There is also this theory that it's caused a Hepatis outbreak:
[http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/hepatitis-
crisis/sd...](http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/hepatitis-crisis/sd-me-
hepatitis-outbreak-20170624-story.html)

People who are homeless would often use plastic bags as a bathroom, and then
throw it in the trash. No more plastic bags, so they can't do that...

Not sure what real evidence there is for it, but I always love an unintended
consequences story.

~~~
jogjayr
I'm not so sure that's a cautionary tale about unintended consequences as much
as an illustration of the lack of public toilets. Do we really want people
doing their business in plastic bags?

------
paulirish
Slightly amusing that on the Quality of Life Rankings page [0], the hero image
they went with is of.... California.

0: [https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/quality-
of-...](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/quality-of-life)

------
beebmam
I'm 33. Literally no one my age or younger I know owns a home unless they live
in a smaller city somewhere in mid-america.

I'm a senior engineer at a large tech company. I cannot afford a home where I
live unless I want to live in a shitty condo, which I do not. I cannot work
remotely, so moving is not an option unless I want to find another job, which
I'm considering.

Once baby boomers start retiring and moving to assisted living homes, a large
supply of houses will enter the market. This should hopefully alleviate some
of the cost issues. But millennials are a ticking time bomb. So many
millennials have no hope for lucrative careers, unless they're engineers or in
finance, which is a small percent.

~~~
kelp
I suggest lobbying your state and local representatives to allow fast and easy
approval of building more high-density housing and to upzone your
neighborhood. The reason California is so expensive is because the generations
who already own homes have long asked to maintain the status quo with low
height limits (most of San Francisco is 40 feet!) and density limits. This
creates an artificial shortage. And those homeowners have somehow created a
political coalition with lower income renters afraid of gentrification by
offering them things like rent control and token amounts of subsidized
housing. The thing is, if you do the math, it quickly becomes obvious that
there is no world where we create enough subsidized housing to make a dent in
the problem. And rent control works to keep people in their homes but at the
expense of everyone else. Subsidized housing is a lottery, and always will be
in California. We don't suggest buying lottery tickets as a solution for
income inequality; we shouldn't for housing inequality either.

The only viable long-term solution is relax zoning laws, and make new
construction approvals easier and faster.

SB-827 is a start in the right direction.

~~~
jeffbax
This.

If SB-827 doesn't pass, we'll know that California's priorities are not with
the young/it's future - it's with those who were lucky enough to get in the
right place at the right time.

I'm not very hopeful, and the insane cost of living/owning a home is the
primary reason I've pretty much given up on moving there at this point.

------
27182818284
If you are a tech person, I'd say you should seriously consider the Silicon
Prairie.

For example, it doesn't surprise me this article emphasizes Nebraska. Whereas
this article mentions not owning a home in California, you can readily afford
a home out in the Midwest. If you don't want that, grab a two-bedroom
apartment that costs you less than a $9,00 per month. Insane commutes don't
exist.

Places like Kansas City have Google Fiber and other places like Lincoln and
Omaha don't have Google Fiber, but still gigabit Internet or even 300Mbps
Internet plans (for $60/month)

For a while, the fastest growing company in Nebraska was a tech startup called
Hudl ([https://www.hudl.com/)--which](https://www.hudl.com/\)--which) you
really can't even call a startup anymore since they're big enough to be
building their own buildings now.

~~~
enraged_camel
Kansas is awful - don’t move there. Governor Brownback’s insane low-tax plan
has starved government services and thoroughly ruined the state over the past
decade.

~~~
newnewpdro
Citations would be helpful...

~~~
enraged_camel
Here: [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/us/sam-brownback-
kansa...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/us/sam-brownback-kansas-
budget-override.html?referer=https://www.google.com/)

Brownback’s tax plan was so awful for the state that _Republicans_ called him
out on his bullshit and overrode his veto of a tax increase bill. Article has
more details and links.

------
EZ-E
From a foreigner point of view who keeps reading about California, it seems
both like a fascinating and terrifying place. So advanced yet so backward in
some ways

~~~
calinet6
To be clear, it's absolutely not terrible or backward by any stretch. Please
visit and see for yourself.

Expensive, sure. But there's a reason (another word for price in a decent
market is 'value'). And not every city in California is San Francisco in terms
of cost of living.

~~~
closeparen
Our most central and highly-trafficked sidewalks and public transit stations
are _de facto_ public restrooms and homeless shelters. The plaza around our
government and cultural center is densely populated with open drug use and
varying degrees of mental health crisis. Begging and tent encampments abound.
The cyclist-advocacy and homeless-advocacy groups are at each other's throats
over whether the takeover of bike lanes by encampments should be permanent.
Violent mental health breakdowns on the sidewalk are not considered worthy of
the attention of any government service, least of all the police.

You can learn to tune these things out and live with them, but it is
absolutely 100% backwards for place so rich and so ostensibly progressive and
compassionate to blithely incubate such shocking and pervasive displays of
desperation and public neglect in its own backyard. Property values are in a
sustained, meteoric rise and we choose not to tap them to address these issues
in any meaningful way, not from a compassionate perspective, and not from an
enforcement perspective either.

EDIT: more detail.

~~~
newnewpdro
Having seen how places like Chicago treat the homeless in the interests of
keeping the things you're pointing out hidden from sight - I appreciate SF's
more tolerant, somewhat live-and-let-live methods, in lieu of better, more
compassionate solutions.

Hopefully having all this on display in SF will eventually provide enough
impetus for the better solutions to emerge. Until then, I hope they don't
decide to start being agressive and violent towards what is a largely mentally
ill and incredibly vulnerable homeless population.

My admittedly limited understanding is that much of this problem is the result
of mental institutions being closed across the state in the face of federal
funding vanishing in the 80s. [1]

I've also heard numerous anecdotes about mentally ill patients and the
homeless being forcefully bussed to San Francisco from not just other parts of
California but other states, precisely because of the city's tolerance. If
there's a shred of truth to this, it's a trivial to see why it's such a
persistent problem.

[1]
[http://sfist.com/2016/06/27/san_francisco_homeless_history_1...](http://sfist.com/2016/06/27/san_francisco_homeless_history_1982.php)

~~~
closeparen
San Francisco had 3,146 sheltered and 4,353 unsheltered homelesss people in
2017 [0]. Chicago had 4,096 sheltered and 1,561 unsheltered. [1] Despite
having 3x our population and a more centrist political climate, Chicago has
fewer homeless people but provides shelter to both a greater proportion and a
greater absolute number of them.

Your comment is illustrative of why accelerationism doesn't work here: San
Franciscans are much more interested in the social climate and ideological
purity than material conditions and effects. Worsening blight only makes us
congratulate each other more vigorously for tolerating it. People then opt out
quietly when they can (see: private transit) or more openly when they can
frame it as selfless concern for their children (see: the near-universal
social norm of leaving the city, if not the region, to start a family) or
their neighborhood community (see: NIMBYs). Everyone agrees that something
should be done, unless it involves any tradeoffs or taxpayer money.

Lack of federal funds is not an excuse. California cities would have some of
the most enviable property tax revenues in the world (also less insane housing
markets) if California voters would allow Prop 13 reform.

[0] [http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-
Poin...](http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Point-in-
Time-Count-General-FINAL-6.21.17.pdf)

[1]
[https://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/fss/sup...](https://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/fss/supp_info/Homeless/2017PITSummaryReportFinal101817.pdf)

~~~
newnewpdro
The statistics you cite say absolutely nothing of how CPD treats the homeless,
or how many of their homeless are off the streets because they're instead
incarcerated.

If you applied Chicago's policing practices in San Francisco, you would have a
whole lot less homeless people.

Chicago also enjoys the luxury of being relatively unattractive as a
destination for the homeless. San Francisco is a magnet for the homeless,
which certainly contributes to the disproportionately high numbers for its
size.

San Francisco obviously has the resources at its disposal to do good things
about it. I look forward to something positive in the future. I am not an SF
resident, nor do I own property there, though I have spent quite a few years
in the area.

------
neuronexmachina
From the article:

> _In case it makes you feel any better, while California stinks in terms of
> quality of life at least it didn’t rank dead last in the overall rankings.
> We came in at No. 32 overall, although that’s well behind New Jersey (at No.
> 19), Florida (at No. 15), and Nebraska (at No. 7). Ouch._

> _The bottom line? The state performed well in terms of its economy, coming
> in at No. 4 (hello, high tech boom) but it fared terribly in categories such
> as citizen opportunity (No. 46) and fiscal stability (No. 43) in addition to
> the dreaded quality-of-life assessment (that scarring No. 50). Of course, as
> anyone who has tried to buy a house in the Bay Area knows, fiscal
> instability is basically our motto at this point._

I think it's also interesting that Mississippi, Arkansas, and New Mexico were
in the top 10 for "quality of life," but bottom 10 overall:
[https://www.usnews.com/news/best-
states/rankings](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings)

~~~
sdubois
It would be interesting to see the correlation between overall ranking (or
economy) and quality-of-life ranking. Looks like many comments point out that
they're often opposite.

------
almostApatriot1
>The state performed well in terms of its economy, coming in at No. 4

This isn't surprising. The reality is California's good economy, relatively
good school system, attractive West Coast appeal, and high influx of
immigrants make California VERY competitive (i.e. overcrowded), which brings
down the quality of life for all.

This is an end result of sorts of our global society. A California will always
exist.

~~~
sjg007
What does this even mean? Your comment is vague and nonspecific. California
chose its path at the polls.

------
hueving
Unless you're rich of course. Then it's fantastic!

~~~
travoc
Not bad if you’re poor, either.

------
IAmEveryone
This is a bit weird...

"Quality of Life" is, in my understanding, a synonym for happiness. But just
asking people to rate their happiness doesn't really count as research.

So this appears to be a two-step process: Find certain objective factors, such
as time spent with family or environmental factors that are good determinants
of peoples' reported levels of happiness.

Next, rank areas according to these factors.

The first part is obviously useful, because it sets specific goals to inform
policy that otherwise doesn't really know how to make people happy.

But the reverse step seems unnecessary complicated. And while I wouldn't
dismiss the results completely just because they are counter-intuitive, I do
believe people tend to do well on judging their own happiness. And there'd be
a lot of people moving from California to North Dakota if the results are
completely true.

------
purplezooey
The older generations that have owned houses for 20+ years are the problem.
Seen Lafayette or Orinda lately? They oppose _all_ development, call
affordable housing "the ghetto", and are of course protected themselves by
prop 13. Heck they even elected a Republican assemblyperson.

------
mattnewton
Came back from walking along the beautiful Santa Cruz coast this afternoon and
read this. All I can think is this is a genius way to slow down the
immigration rate until legislation and housing developments can catch up :)

~~~
DrScump
I take it that you went nowhere near _downtown_ Santa Cruz.

~~~
mattnewton
I like it weird. ‍️

------
briga
Does this apply to tech workers in the Bay Area? Because it seems like the
quality of life should be very high with what they're getting paid.

~~~
Baeocystin
When you take the cost of living in to account, the QOL on the peninsula
sucks. I live in Gilroy, which is ~40 miles south of SV, and like it a lot.
But I also almost never have to drive north.

------
iambateman
Don’t worry, the #1 quality-of-life state is North Dakota so clearly the
methodology is wack.

Have you ever heard someone say: “man, when I finish my internship, I hope I
can go to North Dakota where there is lots of happiness?”

No. Because it’s -40° there half the year.

~~~
matmo
As much as I'd like to buy a house outside of California, I can't imagine
living in cold weather constantly. I really need sunlight/warmth, and I can't
help but feel like I would miss California's weather.

~~~
jjeaff
Luckily, there are plenty of other states with similarly nice weather.

~~~
ojbyrne
Specifically?

The thing that I like about California is that it’s warmer than the rest of
the country in the winter and cooler in the summer, generally expressed by the
locals as “if the temperature is below 60 or above 80, everyone complains.”

Even inland California is too damn hot.

------
Overtonwindow
Mischaracterization in the title. Actual title, which I think matters, is:
"California’s quality of life is the worst in the country: Says who?"

Perhaps correct? It does change the tone.

~~~
daenz
It does set a tone, but after reading the article, I failed to find a
justification for "says who?" There doesn't seem to be a defense or rebuttal
for the quality of life assessment.

------
newnewpdro
Pure comedy.

Being homeless in coastal California confers a better quality of life than
having an apartment in most other states in USA.

