https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/07/california-dreamers/307484/

It was a magnificent run. From the end of the Second World War to the mid-1960s, California consolidated its position as an economic and technological colossus and emerged as the country’s dominant political, social, and cultural trendsetter. … In 1959, wages paid in Los Angeles’s working-class and solidly middle-class San Fernando Valley alone were higher than the total wages of 18 states.

It was a sweet, vivacious time: California’s children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller, and — thanks to that brilliantly clean sunshine — were blonder and more tan than kids in the rest of the country. For better and mostly for worse, it’s a time irretrievably lost. …

Starr consistently returns to his leitmotif: the California dream. By this he means something quite specific — and prosaic. California, as he’s argued in earlier volumes, promised “the highest possible life for the middle classes.” It wasn’t a paradise for world-beaters; rather, it offered “a better place for ordinary people.” That place always meant “an improved and more affordable domestic life”: a small but stylish and airy house marked by a fluidity of indoor and outdoor space … and a lush backyard — the stage, that is, for “family life in a sunny climate.” It also meant some public goods: decent roads, plentiful facilities for outdoor recreation, and the libraries and schools that helped produce the Los Angeles “common man” who, as that jaundiced easterner James M. Cain described him in 1933,” addresses you in easy grammar, completes his sentences, shows familiarity with good manners, and in addition gives you a pleasant smile.”

Until the Second World War, California had proffered this Good Life only to people already in the middle class — the small proprietors, farmers, and professionals, largely transplanted midwesterners … But the war and the decades-long boom that followed extended the California dream to a previously unimaginable number of Americans of modest means. Here Starr records how that dream possessed the national imagination … and how the Golden State — fleetingly, as it turns out — accomodated Americans’ “conviction that California was the best place in the nation to seek and attain a better life.” …

This dolce vita was, as Starr makes clear, a democratic one: the ranch houses with their sliding glass doors and orange trees in the backyard might have been more sprawling in La Canada and Orinda than they were in the working-class suburbs of Lakewood and Hayward, but family and social life in nearly all of them centered on the patio, the barbecue, and the swimming pool. The beaches were publicly owned and hence available to all — as were such glorious parks as Yosemite, Chico’s Bidwell, the East Bay’s Tilden, and San Diego’s Balboa. Golf and tennis, year-round California pursuits, had once been limited to the upper class, but thanks to proliferating publicly supported courses and courts (thousands of public tennis courts had already been built in L.A. in the 1930s), they became fully middle-class. This shared outdoor-oriented, informal California way of life democratized — some would say homogenized — a society made up of people of varying attainments and income levels. These people were overwhelmingly white and native-born, and their common culture revolved around nurturing and (publicly educating) their children. Until the 1980s, a California preppy was all but oxymoronic. True, the comprehensive high schools had commercial, vocational, and college-prep tracks (good grades in the last guaranteed admission to Berkeley or UCLA — times have definitely changed). But, as Starr concludes from his survey of yearbooks and other school records, “there remained a common experience, especially in athletics, and a mutual respect among young people heading in different directions.”

To a Californian today, much of what Starr chronicles is unrecognizable. (Astonishing fact: Ricky Nelson and the character he played in that quintessential idealization of suburbia, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, attended Hollywood High, a school that is now 75% Hispanic and that The New York Times accurately described in 2003 as a “typically overcrowded, vandalism-prone urban campuse.”) Granted, a version of the California Good Life can still be had — by those Starr calls the “fiercely competitive.” That’s just the heartbreak: most of us are merely ordinary. For nearly a century, California offered ordinary people better lives than they could lead perhaps anywhere else in the world. Today, reflecting our intensely stratified, increasingly mobile society, California affords the Good Life only to the most gifted and ambitious, regardless of their background. That’s a deeply undemocratic betrayal of California’s dream …

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35018449)

Cali is a fallen angel.

It's such a weird place now. Stunning natural beauty but a sense of hopelessness and unease that's almost palpable.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35018491)

I have met multiple people who talk about wanting to move to places like Houston or Waco without really understanding what it is like to deal with that heat and humidity year round.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35019376)

outed as JJC/some other gooklib.

I got into almost every reasonably prominent private school I applied to as a native Californian with a 3.4 GPA and no extracurrics. u mad lib?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35020350)

Californians tax and regulate themselves into oblivion then move in disgust, but then vote in taxes and regulations that make the new place they're infecting into another Californian hellscape. Then they spread to the next area and repeat.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35018495)

the real WALL needs to be around california, not mexico. the commiefornia filth needs to be contained and quarantined. they really are a disease that infects and destroys every host they encounter

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35018532)

California regulated offshore drilling and effluent dumping. Without that regulation, the beaches would be polluted shitholes covered in spilled oil and toxic paper mill waste byproducts, which would cost the state tons in healthcare spending and loss of tourism money.

Californians looked upon clean beaches, and decided regulation was good.

California then demanded asinine bullshit like habitats for the tiger salamander and snowy plover, two faggot animals we wouldn't miss if they disappeared, and happily drove the costs of development through the roof.

Californians looked upon low housing stock and high prices, and decided they would willingly ignore some of the root causes while complaining loudly about the symptoms.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35018550)

NE transplants are going to do something similar to the sunbelt

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35018671)

http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3785862&mc=9&forum_id=2

http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3789045&mc=1&forum_id=2

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35018779)

This doesn't excuse the "lib excesses" everyone is talking about in this thread. But the notion that conservatives built these great cities that are now being ruined by evil liberals is preposterous.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35018786)

as exhibited by no lib ever

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35018804)

You're merely explaining why political leadership would ultimately back policies supporting modern urbanization. If they have a successful economic generator, they're not going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. They are going to foster that growth, with what we would fairly characterize as liberal or at least non-conservative policies. A lot of modern conservatism is turning a blind eye to the benefits of urbanization while bemoaning any negative impacts.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35019066)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35019748)

let me stop you right there, hoss

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35021798)

https://texaspolitics.utexas.edu/blog/californias-conservative-migration

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35018789)

It was literally its own country once.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35018560)

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-politics/2012/08/05/texas-can-no-longer-complain-that-it-gives-more-than-it-gets-from-federal-government

The federal government spent about $9,000 per Texan in 2010. The state spent $2,200 — one of the lowest outlays in the country, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.

“If not for federal money, there just wouldn’t be much provided at all in some public services, and it’s pretty low to begin with,” said Eva De Luna Castro, a budget analyst for the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin, which advocates for poor and middle-income Texans. “We’re at the mercy of whatever happens in D.C.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35018855)

California’s success comes by accessing the common market and currency of the U.S., including vast financial, population, resources, water rights, etc. Once those things are restricted there would be dire financial impact.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3841631&forum_id=2#35020983)