We have a housing, teacher, energy, water, job, health care and restaurant workers shortage. In each case it can be traced back to government action or policy. California is being depopulated because we do not have a shortage of crime, homeless or government.
“California once led the nation in developing large-scale water impoundment and conveyance projects as a hedge against its very seasonal and very unpredictable precipitation. But very little has been built in the last half-century as the state’s population doubled and farmers shifted to more water-intensive crops such as grapes and almonds.
The politics of water became ossified — multiple interests fighting over shares of the current supply, which has become even less predictable due to climate change, and politicians going AWOL, seeing it as a no-win political quagmire.
Now the Feds, under the demented Biden, have joined the corrupt Newsom and cut off our farmers from needed Federal water. Wait till you see the inflated prices for food at the grocery store.
California faces a ‘big short’ in vital commodities
BY DAN WALTERS, CalMatters, 2/27/22
IN SUMMARY
California sees itself as a land of abundance, but faces critical shortages in the elements critical to a healthy society.
“The Big Short” was a 2015 film about how some financial whizzes, realizing that the nation’s overheated housing market was on the verge of collapse, made billions of dollars by betting on failure.
California played no small role in the housing debacle during the first decade of the century. Housing construction had surpassed 200,000 units a year, more than the market could prudently absorb, and to fill them, mortgage lenders radically lowered their credit standards for would-be homebuyers.
When the unstable market collapsed, nearly 800,000 California families lost their homes and 10 of the 20 cities with the nation’s highest foreclosure rates were in California.
After the implosion, housing construction plummeted to as little as 10% of the pre-crisis boom and has never fully recovered, even though foreclosed houses eventually became rentals or were resold to new buyers.
Construction is now scarcely half of the 180,000 units a year state officials say is necessary, creating a severe housing shortage, particularly for moderate- and low-income families, that fuels the nation’s highest poverty rate.
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The “big short” in housing is not alone. California, which has always seen itself as a land of abundance, faces critical shortages in other commodities vital to a healthy economy and society.
One is particularly obvious this year — water.
California once led the nation in developing large-scale water impoundment and conveyance projects as a hedge against its very seasonal and very unpredictable precipitation. But very little has been built in the last half-century as the state’s population doubled and farmers shifted to more water-intensive crops such as grapes and almonds.
The politics of water became ossified — multiple interests fighting over shares of the current supply, which has become even less predictable due to climate change, and politicians going AWOL, seeing it as a no-win political quagmire.
Another big short is less stark than water, but still looms large — electrical energy.
California’s officialdom is bent on making the state carbon-free by converting power generation to wind and solar, by replacing gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles with electric cars and trucks, and by phasing out natural gas in homes and businesses.
This massive conversion would impose huge new demands on an electrical grid that already comes up short on some hot summer days when air conditioning systems run at full tilt — days that climate change will make more frequent, by the way.
