Why blue states are crashing, volume one trillion

A reader reports from the front lines - a troubled California city. The awfulness of local Democratic governance has become something of a UT theme of late, but that's only because it has to be.

Seems like only a few hours ago I offered up the bizarre yet only-too-real story of Jahmed Haynes. Haynes is the career criminal who killed an 80-year-old woman in Seattle in broad daylight and has somehow dodged trial for almost two years.

Right. It was only a few hours ago.

But I can’t help myself today. Maybe it’s because tax season has reminded me how deeply New York state is reaching into my bank account, but I find the crisis in blue-city and blue-state governance increasingly hard to tolerate.

States like New York and California are among the richest political jurisdictions in human history. They have stunning natural resources and powerful private universities that help create massive wealth. They have budgets that now rival medium-size countries, far larger per-capita than those of red states like Florida.

Yet they fail to deliver basic services and have become harder and harder places for all but their wealthiest residents to live.

Their decline stretches across every aspect of governance: from criminal justice to social and healthcare programs, urban public schools to public infrastructure, from housing affordability to homelessness, they flail and fail.

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(The madder I get, the more I write. What a deal for you!)

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So I offer this note.

An Unreported Truths reader posted it at the bottom of last week’s piece about the ridiculous Princeton University professor Sean Wilentz, who is protesting a badly needed new apartment complex from his university-subsidized home. I thought it was interesting and asked the reader if I could run it. He agreed.

It offers yet another angle on the blue-state problem, this time from the perspective of land use. He doesn’t name the city in the note, but he did in answer to a question: it’s Davis, California.

I think that makes what he wrote even more interesting.

Davis is very much not Beverly Hills or Palo Alto or Santa Barbara or even a place like Pomona, it’s a hot dusty city of 67,000 a few miles from Sacramento and a nearly 90-minute drive to San Francisco — when traffic is good.

In other words, one would imagine Davis would be happy to get all the new houses and malls and offices it could manage, to be an affordable alternative to places like Marin County and Silicon Valley.

But one would be wrong. The blue-state anti-growth fixation extends even to cities that should very much be competing on the basis of affordability. Older residents benefit from the housing shortage, but in the long run it chokes the vitality even of college towns — driving younger families away.

As he writes:

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I live in a liberal university town in a Democrat-run state.

The liberal community 35 years ago voted for measures that require a majority vote for all peripheral development and also take a supplemental property tax to buy up perimeter land to lock it into forever farm and natural land... basically building a moat around the city that cannot be developed.

The City leaders in their infinite NIMBY wisdom also negotiated with the county to share property tax revenue for any peripheral development that would be done, if the country would agree to honor a border so as to not allow development too close to the liberal college town utopia.

These same liberals run around making NGO money, political careers and progressive status virtue signaling protesting the lack of affordable housing.

The university keeps growing. Rents are through the roof. The average home price is $840,000, and there are a lot of crappy homes because they are student rentals. A one-bedroom apartment of reasonable quality is $2,400 per month. The city is losing young professionals and young families... leaving students and old people on fixed income. Public schools are closing from the lack of students.

Due to the lack of supply, downtown commercial rents are too high to support anything but pizza, coffee and Asian food (because they are family operated) restaurants that have lower labor costs. There are few firms located within the city as there is no land available to develop on.

The lack of residential, retail and other business tax revenue has created massive budget issues.

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Of course the preferred Democratic answer to “massive budget issues” is to raise taxes — never, never to consider cutting services, much less to ask unionized government employees to take benefit cuts.

So the blue-state cycle of high taxes, low growth, and a cost of living guaranteed to away the middle class, continues.

These days it looks more and more like a death spiral.

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(Spiraling up. With your help.)

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This issue isn’t going away. The opposite, in fact.

So, please, if you have a story of local blue-state (or red-state, though that’s more unlikely) political doom, let me know - or share it in the comments.