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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Environmentalism adds to inequality"

34 Comments -

1 – 34 of 34
Anonymous Bostonian said...

When Hispanics eventually take power in California, won't they roll back land use regulations?

12/27/12, 2:19 PM

Blogger sunbeam said...

" As more workers moved into higher-income areas, wages there began to fall, and human capital began to even out, while in the areas that were losing workers, wages began to rise, drawing more people into the workforce and increasing average incomes. "

This is the most interesting part of this article.

I think the crux of the question is exactly the mechanics of how the high income areas in question have appropriated a greater share of income earned in the US.

There's not just one reason, nor do I think it is all attributable to "merit," however anyone cares to define it.

I think this portends some serious troubles ahead aside from all the other ones we face.

12/27/12, 2:28 PM

Anonymous Simon said...

Australia is an extreme case, where there are is no escape from left wing land regulation. The median house price of a home in Sydney is $620,000 US.

The social implications of high land prices caused by restrictions combined with high immigration are very rarely discussed in Australia. The banking industry has profited very handsomely from the massive mortgages encouraged by such an arrangement!

12/27/12, 2:44 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

High real estate prices have more to do with land value taxation than environmentalism and land use regulations. Land value taxation is very low, and this encourages speculation, absentee ownership, landlords, etc. and drives up prices. If land rents were largely taxed away, being a middle-man would no longer be worth the bother. Prices would fall to what more people can afford.

12/27/12, 3:22 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's amazing to me that some Cal State university doesn't hire Steve as a lecturer or professor. He is far more intellectually productive than 99% of the CS faculty and I bet his courses would pack in students and auditors. Think about those Chicano dumbos taking up space at Cal State Chico who can't defend even a simple point of their scholarship, that America was founded by white savages who committed genocide, with an undergraduate, so they feel the need to file a harassment complaint against a polite well mannered student (Neil O'Brien) who showed up during office hours. One of those salaries could be lining Steve's pocket.

In fact, Steve would make an absolutely fabulous Chicano Studies professor who would actually do significant research into the lives and history of Latinos living in America.

12/27/12, 3:25 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Property Tax Shift Successes

WHERE THE PROPERTY TAX SHIFT HAS WORKED:
26 CASE SUMMARIES"

http://www.progress.org/archive/geono05.htm

"California, 1890s. Back then, many farmers and miners went without water because cattlemen like Henry Miller owned 1,000,000 acres of land. Miller could drive his herds from Mexico to Oregon and spend every night on his own land. In 1886 Miller won full rights to the water of the Kern River.

Some people concerned with justice figured the cattlemen had gone far enough. The state government passed the 1887 Wright Act which allowed communities to create by popular vote irrigation districts to build dams and canals and pay for them by taxing the resultant rise in land value. Once irrigated, land was too valuable to use for grazing, and the tax made it too costly for hoarding. So cattlemen sold off fields to farmers and at prices the farmers could afford.

In ten years, the Central Valley was transformed into over 7,000 independent farms. Over the next few decades, those tree-less, semi-arid plains became the "bread basket of America", one of the most productive areas on the planet."

12/27/12, 3:28 PM

Blogger sunbeam said...

Didn't Henry George have something about that? I think I've read about him, or at least his ideas referenced in some odd places, though I've never understood what his idea was.

12/27/12, 4:00 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

no country for naked men

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Castro-naked-guys-have-gone-too-far-3867094.php#ixzz26YwSB2PW

12/27/12, 4:41 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

When Hispanics eventually take power in California, won't they roll back land use regulations?

No, but it will be possible to circumvent them, e.g., bribery, influence, organized squatter movements.

Cennbeorc

12/27/12, 4:50 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, the most equal state is Vermont heavily into the enviromental movement. Some of the least equal are Texas not as much into the enviroment. Immirgation not much more so than enviromental caused inequality.

12/27/12, 5:38 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...






































Housing prices maybe at the most 50,000 thru enviromental control. Most caused by loose lending. Orange County would only cost 250,000 average if it was just enviromental. The 450,000 average came because of the loose lending of the 2002 to 2008 period.




12/27/12, 5:41 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"When Hispanics eventually take power in California, won't they roll back land use regulations?

No, but it will be possible to circumvent them, e.g., bribery, influence, organized squatter movements."

I agree that Hispanics will not abolish regulations or regulatory authorities. There is nothing a person with Spanish blood enjoys more than sitting at a desk and imposing convoluted and nonsensical rules -- it gives them joy and a sense of potency sending you to the back of the line with vague instructions on how to properly fill out a ten page form to get your lawn clippings picked up from the front of your house on Tuesday.

12/27/12, 8:06 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"In ten years, the Central Valley was transformed into over 7,000 independent farms. Over the next few decades, those tree-less, semi-arid plains became the "bread basket of America", one of the most productive areas on the planet."

It may still be the most productive area on the planet, but there is now another interesting side of the story:



"Census shows Central Valley areas among poorest in nation"

"In California, one in six residents lived in poverty. ...

"We have an issue of skills mismatch,"..."





http://www.economist.com/node/15331478

"California's Central Valley: The Appalachia of the West"

"California’s agricultural heartland threatens to become a wasteland...

A big problem is that the workforce in the Central Valley is badly educated...

These demographic trends, combined with the water shortage, are causing worry."


This is somewhat related to the "17 people living in one house." There seem to often be scandals in the Central Valley and Monterey Bay areas over migrant ag workers living in caves:

Farm Workers Claim They Must Live in Caves, File Suit, September 24, 1985

No news here, just more of same:

Authorities Find Squalid Migrant Camps, Caves, Sep. 10, 1991

What say the good professors about the cost of a good cave, dugout, soddy, or lean-to?

12/27/12, 8:51 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, South Texas is one of the poorest regions in the Us, houses are shacks or old mobile homes. Some parts didn't have sewer or electricity similar to living in Mexico. In fact a lot of the workforce of Brownsville Texas comes from the otherside in Mexico. No enviromential regulations like Ca but similar to California Imperial Valley. Rural with few paying jobs about 25,000.Unemployment lower than Imperial Valley. There are 500,000 in the Texas Colony area of South Texas and almost all of them are Mexcians.

12/27/12, 9:35 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Not all but some of south Texas still has difficulty with sewage and electricity.

12/27/12, 9:57 PM

Blogger JR said...

I think this all adds up to saying: Land use regulations are used to keep the poor out -- which is nearly self-evident

12/28/12, 12:26 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Land usage doesn't always keep the poor out, La had lots of apartments and older tract houses that rent to more than one family. In fact, zoning is not enforce in California since the ACLU sue the cities in La County and Orange County over it 30 years ago saying you can't force poor people to only house 10 people or less. However, the good needs for La rent is skyhigh so more Hispanics are moving to the Inland empire whose rent is closer to the national average. La would probably now be 60 percent hispanic if the rent didn't go up as much its now only 48 percent.

12/28/12, 6:43 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, outside of the Bay Area most of the high rent and housing took place under George W Bush. In the 1990's La and Orange and San Diego cost of living was above the national average but less than the eastcoast and the Bay area, once George W Bush became president and lowered the downpayment requiremnts tract housing cost exploded from houses in La around 250,000 to 550,000. Rent currently I think average is 1,700, granted it can be under 1,000 in the barrio for studios and one bedrooms but it can be well in the 2,000's in a half nice place.

12/28/12, 6:58 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Another thing that wasn't always considered in pricing of housing driven up by foreign buyers, in the late 1980's or early 1990's Japan had several people with foreign investment now its people from China mainly for California and people from Canada for Arizona.

12/28/12, 10:44 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

High real estate prices have more to do with land value taxation than environmentalism and land use regulations. Land value taxation is very low, and this encourages speculation, absentee ownership, landlords, etc. and drives up prices. If land rents were largely taxed away, being a middle-man would no longer be worth the bother. Prices would fall to what more people can afford.

Yeah, that is right. Taxes on a $1 million house in California are lower than taxes on a $250k house in Texas. California has income tax which is easier to avoid than property tax. Property tax also gets those in the cash economy because even if they pay their rent in cash, the owner still passes on the taxes. So an illegal in Texas is paying far more tax than an illegal in California.

12/28/12, 12:56 PM

Blogger Anthony said...

Lower property taxes from Prop 13 explain California's housing price boom of the early 80s. Housing price booms since then can't be blamed on lowering property taxes.

12/28/12, 1:21 PM

Blogger pat said...

Forty years ago when I was in school and read a lot of Science Fiction, the future of real estate looked very different.

We are all living in the future that we had read about when we were younger. Often this realization elicits the question - Where are all the personl helicopters?. My question is - Where are the arcologies?

No one really ever thought that we could use helicopters or planes to commute to work. That whole notion only lived on "Popular Science" magazine covers. It doesn't survive even the most cursory contemplaion. But arcologies were in many serious Sci Fi novels and stories. People took the idea seriously.

The idea was that all humnans would be jammed into these mountain size buildings and the land would be human free. The world would look empty everywhere.

No more. Not only are there no arcologies but there are not even any arcology stories. It's an idea that came and went.

Albertosaurus

12/28/12, 3:38 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"My question is - Where are the arcologies?"

Weren't these often dystopias? I can't think of arcologies without recalling Asimov's The Caves of Steel. To me these seemed really unpleasent. The sort of thing that a New Yorker might think of as attractive, but I found like the description of a prison. Of course, that may have just been my bias reading Asimov. I never did like his ultra-PC characters with no names that could be traced to ethnicity; his characters seemed cardboard.

If not near-prisons, these arcologies often seemed "last survivor" redoubts. SF authors liked those. For instance, the one in Arthur Clarke's The City and the Stars.

12/28/12, 7:08 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anon 7:08, try Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty. A bit more positive about arcologies.

12/29/12, 5:57 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, illegals tend to not own property compared to whites, looking at the most illegal immirgation area of Santa Ana 69 percent are now renters since the housing bust. Now in Texas property is cheaper so yes they may be more likely to be property owners.

12/29/12, 12:30 PM

Anonymous ben tillman said...

Thorstein Veblen explained this already in 1899.

12/29/12, 12:42 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, I do think you have a point Texas has no income tax, so property tax is heavily while California is the opposite and taxes tend to be progressive. on the other hand, Florida and Nevada with no state income did get hit. I try to get folks in California to shift from income tax to propety taxes as an idea but they benefit a lot from prop 13 but they are also the types that move to Texas.

12/29/12, 2:55 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Grover Norqust encourages legalizaton for cheap labor and in 2020 Welfare state grows more than ever.

12/29/12, 4:46 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's been nearly 20 years since California Gov. Pete Wilson won re-election by tying his campaign to the anti-illegal immigrant measure Proposition 187. Ads featuring grainy images of presumably young Hispanic males crossing the border energized a largely white electorate terrified of being overwhelmed, financially and socially, by the incoming foreign hordes.

Essentially, immigration into the L.A. Basin fell 27.5 percent while immigration nationwide remained essentially stable; the numbers of Houston, Dallas, Seattle, Washington and New York, in contrast, remained level or grew.

12/30/12, 11:16 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Particularly troubling has been the relative decline in Asian immigrants, whose numbers (http://tiny.cc/4z3xpw) now surpass Hispanics, and who also tend to be better educated than other newcomers. An analysis of migration of Asians (http://tiny.cc/x13xpw) conducted by demographer Wendell Cox, shows Asians heading increasingly to places like Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Raleigh, N.C., and Nashville, Tenn. Still home to the largest concentration of Asian-Americans, the L.A. Basin's growth rate is now among the lowest in the nation, 24 percent in the past decade, compared with 39 percent in New York, and more than 70 percent in Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.

Some, like USC's Dowell Myers (http://tiny.cc/ba3xpw), suggest slowing migration and population growth may actually be a positive, and claims "the demographic picture is brighter than it is has been in decades." He suggests that, rather than depend on the energy of newcomers, we now ride on "the skills of homegrown Californians."

Certainly, slower growth may help with our traffic problems and even provide a break on housing inflation, but the contours of our demographics appear less than favorable. Over the past decade, for example, virtually all the largest metropolitan areas – including Silicon Valley – have seen slower percentage growth in college graduates than the national average. The big exception has been Riverside-San Bernardino, which started from a low base but has appeared to attract some college-educated people from the more expensive coastal regions

12/30/12, 11:18 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

In contrast, largest rate of growth in educated people has taken place in regions such as Raleigh, N.C.; Austin, Texas, Phoenix and Houston; all these cities have increased the number of bachelor's degrees at least one-third more quickly than the major California cities. Although California retains a strong educational edge, this is gradually eroding (http://tiny.cc/c93xpw), particularly among our younger cohorts. In the population over age 65, California ranks an impressive fourth in terms of people with bachelor's or higher degrees; but in the population under 35 our ranking falls to a mediocre 28th. If we are becoming more reliant on our native sons than in the past, we may be facing some serious trouble.

This pattern can also be seen in those with graduate educations, where we are also losing our edge, ranking 19th among the younger cohort. More worrying still is the dismal situation at our grade schools, where California now ranks an abysmal 50th in high school attainment. Our students now rank among the worst-performing in the nation (http://tiny.cc/lj3xpw) in such critical areas as science and math.

If these issues are not addressed forcefully, what then is our demographic trajectory? One element seems to be a decline in the numbers of children, particularly in the expensive coastal areas. Over the past decade, according to the Census, the Los Angeles-Orange County region has suffered among the most precipitous drops in its population under age 15 – more than 12 percent – than any large U.S. metropolitan area.

The numbers are staggering: in 2010 the region had 363,000 fewer people under age 15 than a decade earlier, while competitors such as Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston increased their youngsters by over 250,000 each. Orange County alone suffered an 8 percent decline in its under-15 population, a net loss of 54,000.

12/30/12, 11:18 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...


If current trends continue, we may not be able to rely on immigrants to make up for an nascent demographic or vitality deficit. In fact, demographer Ali Modarres (http://tiny.cc/5c3xpw) notes that L.A.'s foreign born-population is now older than the native-born, as their offspring head off for opportunities in lower-cost, faster-growing regions.

Ultimately the state's political and economic leadership needs to confront these demographic shifts, and the potential threat they pose to our prosperity. We can't just delude ourselves that we attract the "best and brightest" from other states without creating improving the basics critical to families, from other states and abroad, such as education, reasonable housing costs and business climate. California 's beauty, great weather and a bounteous legacy remain great assets, but the state can no longer rest on its laurels if it hope to attract, and retain, a productive population capable of rebuilding our state's now-faded promise.

Joel Kotkin is a Register editorial writer and a Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University. He is the executive editor of www.newgeography.com.
Joel is a big supporter of lots of immirgation maybe the regulation isn't all bad.

12/30/12, 11:20 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...


1. New Mexico

1. New Mexico



2. Arizona

2. California



3. California

3. Georgia



4. Georgia

4. Mississippi



5. New York

5. Arizona



6. Louisiana

6. New York



7. Texas

7. Texas



8. Massachusetts

8. Oklahoma



9. Illinois

9. Tennessee



10. Mississippi

10. Louisiana



Greatest Increases in Income Inequality Between the Top and the Bottom
It doesn't matter Red versus Blue usually it seems to have to do with a large minority population or high costs in a few states.

12/30/12, 12:22 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"California 's beauty, great weather and a bounteous legacy remain great assets, but the state can no longer rest on its laurels if it hope to attract, and retain, a productive population capable of rebuilding our state's now-faded promise."

In many places these days, no longer empty frontiers, the idea of creating prosperity by attracting "high-class immigrants" seems like prostitution logic. Ultimately you need to pull your own weight in the world.

12/30/12, 8:24 PM

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