Fire, drought and real estate prices are ending the Californian dream

California has long been America's promised land, tempting frontiersmen to take huge risks for hundreds of years, lured by the promise of gold, oil and lush farmland.

But as climate change leaves towns dry and increases the risk of catastrophic fires, and big cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles become unaffordable, is the "California Dream" coming to an end?

Since the gold rush began in the 1850s, the state has been defined by massive population growth as people from all over the world sought fortune out west.

The population boomed again after World War II as the defence and aerospace industries set up shop.

Then came the tech bonanza of the 1980s and 1990s which put Silicon Valley on the map.

But for the first time in its history, California's population declined last year.

America's most populous state lost 182,000 people in 2020.

It might not sound like much in a state of 39 million people, but it's the equivalent of all the residents of Santa Barbara and all the residents of Santa Monica packing up and heading elsewhere.

More people are now leaving California than those moving in. 

Over the past decade, California's population growth of 6.1 per cent was the slowest in a century and below the national average of 7.4 per cent.

Demographers attribute the decline to several factors, including stricter immigration policies, a declining birth rate and increased deaths as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. It resulted in the state losing a congressional seat for the first time in its 170-year history.

In comparison, Texas, which has fast become a new home for entrepreneurs, young families and Silicon Valley types because of the affordable lifestyle it offers, gained two seats.

Locals will tell you people are leaving the lucky state because of high taxes, its political leaders, and the increasing likelihood of catastrophic weather conditions like bushfires and heatwaves.

And some Californians simply can no longer afford to live here.

San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego have become expensive, with house prices growing in line with Silicon Valley's rise. 

The median house price in San Francisco is $1.8 million. That's even more expensive than Sydney, where the median house price is $1.3 million.

Critics argue that has pushed out and priced out many middle-class Americans, created an ever-widening wedge between the state's poor and the uber-rich.

It has also exacerbated the state's homelessness crisis, with an estimated 161,000 people sleeping rough. That's the highest of any state in the US.

But California's difficulties are not just limited to cities and surrounding suburbs. 

Reaping the spoils of the state's rich agricultural soils has become nearly impossible for many Californians whose families have worked the land for generations.

Francesca Marchini, 32, is the fourth generation of her Italian family to farm in California's Central Valley, the heart of the state's agriculture industry and home to some of the richest soil on the planet.

But even she's not sure if the Californian Dream, which her ancestors travelled from Italy in search of in the 1920s, will be around for her own children.

I'm encouraging them to be diverse because I don't know about farming for my children now or my brother's children," she said.

As a little girl growing up in the San Joaquin valley, Ms Marchini's dream was to stay on the land and raise a family in the middle of an almond farm.

She now does that with her husband, four-year-old son Jeffrey, and two-year-old daughter Maggie. But she worries about the future as the state's water supplies continue to dwindle.

"It is our passion and our heart to keep farming," she said.

"We just want to grow the best product around, but water is the key to growing these products, to ship them domestically and around the world.

"It's an unknown future for us, that's for sure."

The effects of the last severe drought, which lasted around four years until the end of 2015, are still being felt.

Underground aquifers, heavily relied upon by farmers when there's little winter rain or snowpack on the Sierra Nevada mountains, have been severely depleted in recent years.

Many areas, sapped dry by the last drought, haven't replenished, leading farmers to drill new wells, which just go deeper into the water table.

As a result, towns have literally started to sink.

"I definitely think we're going to have to live under this new normal of less water," Ms Marchini said.

"We're not yet in a crisis but 2021 might be a crisis."

About two hours' drive south in the Valley, the signs of drought are even more apparent.

While it's not unusual for the state's landscape to turn dry and parched as the northern hemisphere's summer approaches, it's abnormal in the middle of May.

On John Guthrie's ranch, which has belonged to his family for 150 years, there's about a third of the feed grass on the ground than normal when heading into the dry months.

One of his vital dams at this time of year is usually overflowing and feeding through other tributaries on his property.

In mid-May, it's already bone dry.

"It's warmer than it usually is, it's warmer sooner and it lasts longer, we have these catastrophic wildfires … so something is definitely different," he said.

"The part that I'm worried about is the next 10 years, the next 20 years with my family, I fear we're in a downward trend."

It has forced Mr Guthrie to sell more cattle than he'd like, move his current stock to greener pastures and buy in hay at huge expense.

If it wasn't for the family name, he'd consider packing up.

Nestled in the foothills of the spectacular Sierra Nevada mountains, Tom Mulholland's family has grown citrus fruit in the San Joaquin Valley for 60 years.

He was the largest supplier of mandarins to Australia during the off-season and worked with Woolworths to develop the 'Delight' variety.

His ancestry in the region runs deep. His grandfather was the chief engineer who designed the controversial aqueduct system that delivered water to Los Angeles in the 1900s, paving the way for the city's meteoric rise.

But even his deep roots weren't enough to keep him in the game in a big way.

About a year-and-a-half ago, he made the tough decision to sell out.

"If there's no water, there's no plants. [We need] soil, water and sun," he said.

"We've got the sun, thank you. We've still got the dirt here, but without the water, we're not going to make it here."

Mr Mulholland believes climate change is to blame.

"Denial of that is being written up, but I think science is going to prove that there is in fact warming on this earth," he said.

While he acknowledges the effect the tech industry has brought on less fortunate Californians, he sees it as the next frontier, which could in fact bring about more sustainable farming practices.

"What can we accomplish from here? Elon Musk was able to build rockets and cars from here in California," he said.

"Look at all the significant discoveries coming out of Silicon Valley, those are all new ways of looking at this."

Decades of overdrawing aquifers to feed the state's booming agriculture industry is having a flow-on effect, particularly for low-income communities in the Central Valley.

One day, Carolina Garcia turned the taps on and nothing came out. 

For two weeks, her family went without running water, after the well they relied upon for more than a decade went dry.

"I was sad, I was desperate. I didn't know what to do," Mr Garcia said.

"Water is essential, it was hard to see our kids suffering." 

Unable to afford to pay the tens of thousands of dollars for a new well, Ms Garcia went looking for help.

The family of 10 will now live off two temporary water tanks donated by a local non-profit until the city's piping reaches their home.

The organisation, Self Help Enterprises, has helped 300 other families like Carolina's across the Valley.

Since April, demand has jumped 40 per cent.

Without the donation, they would have been forced to pack up and leave the state.

"We would have probably had to move somewhere else," she said.

But ultimately, Ms Garcia is a California girl. 

"I know I'm probably going to be judged by a lot of people but I don't care, I'm just happy [to stay]." 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-13/california-dream-is-becoming-a-nightmare/100146900

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LOS ANGELES — California has long been a land of firsts, and this year is no exception.

For the first time, the water level in Lake Oroville is expected to fall so low the state’s hydropower plant could shut down, just as electricity demands peak. For the first time, the census numbers showed California will lose a congressional seat. For the first time since it joined the union in 1850, the state historically synonymous with unbridled expansion actually shrank.

These are not the kinds of firsts California is accustomed to. They have sapped the collective sense of zealous optimism that long characterized the state’s seductive appeal. Despite the population loss, there is not enough housing, not enough water, not enough university slots and not enough good jobs.

California is facing limits, and the wrenching process of learning to live within them will test its leaders and redefine the state. The staggering reality of 2020 has demanded a reckoning: to ignore the urgency will condemn Californians to decades of pain, a burden that will fall most heavily on those least equipped to cope.

Too many reckonings have already been shrugged away. The median house price increased 24 percent the past year, while housing production lagged far behind. Internal migration is reshaping the state, as remote work and quarantines sent people out of cities in search of space in rural communities and suburbs. Amid a drought that already dwarfs the last one, politicians have been skittish about imposing restrictions.

Some of the most consequential limits are driven by natural forces not unique to California but particularly severe here: Climate change has fueled both the lack of water and the destructive power of wildfires. Record temperatures coupled with drought are wreaking havoc with agriculture. One fire last year killed about one-tenth of the state’s mature giant sequoias, some thousands of years old. Hundreds more wells are expected to run dry this year, adding to the more than a million people who already lack clean drinking water.

Decades of human decisions intensified the natural limits — failures to develop more public transportation, to regulate or even measure the amount of water drawn out of the earth, to limit development in fragile ecosystems. Every week brings stark choices like this one: hold back water from the Shasta Dam and force farmers to leave even more land unplanted, or release the water early into the Sacramento River and risk killing endangered chinook salmon, which cannot survive spawning season in the warmer water. (The decision last month: release the water.)

The man-made and natural crises are inextricably intertwined. The dire lack of sufficient, affordable housing, a chief culprit in the state’s high poverty rates and a prime factor driving people to move out, stems from decades of zoning and land-use decisions. They can be amended, and some municipalities have acted; a handful even banned single-family zoning. But sweeping statewide change continues to be largely stymied, and even modest proposals, like a state bill that would bar local governments from mandating parking spaces for developments within a half mile of a transit hub, face stubborn resistance.

The need for millions of housing units collides with natural limits. Resistance to increased urban and suburban density has meant more and more construction in the fire-prone areas known as the “wildland urban interface,” now home to about a quarter of the population. Efforts to limit rebuilding in most high-risk areas have been defeated by the construction industry and local officials. In Los Angeles, officials decided housing needs trumped fire danger and approved a subdivision for more than 50,000 units near the fire-prone northern edge of the county (though a judge recently slowed the project down).

With new fires erupting nearly every day, an analysis by The Sacramento Bee found that almost all of the record-breaking four million acres that burned last year were in high-risk areas, most of which had burned before — and been rebuilt. Rather than offer incentives to relocate to safer ground, the state has done the reverse — encouraged rebuilding with financial help to retrofit, create defensible space and develop evacuation plans.

“Wildfire resilience must become a more consistent part of land use and development decisions; however, it must be done while meeting our housing needs,” Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote in vetoing a bill last year that would have imposed new requirements on local governments and limitations on building in areas defined as “very high fire risk.”

The limits have not crept up without warning. “We are misusing our environment and ourselves to the point where amenities are rapidly disappearing, social order gives way to turmoil, and life itself is threatened,” a group of environmentalists argued 50 years ago in “The California Tomorrow Plan,” detailing all too familiar problems: lack of housing, erosion of natural resources, lack of economic stability for struggling workers, lack of public transportation, bad air and unregulated growth.

The authors called for governments to be restructured to coordinate planning; economic growth predicated on a guaranteed income base; and strategies that stabilized population, protected natural resources and guided and controlled growth through public policies. The writer Wallace Stegner, summarizing the plan, wrote: “Physical resources are managed largely to stimulate economic growth; problems are dealt with disconnectedly and only as they become pressing; wasteful and polluting consumption continues; and the old patterns of growth, spreading outward from the uninhabitable city, continue to break up country into suburbs.”

Over the next decades, some progress occurred. The coast was protected. Air quality improved. California was the first state to institute sustainability requirements for buildings. In more recent years, it also adopted landmark energy independence and climate change policies — and ambitious goals that are slipping out of reach. But for the most part, the response to problems has been to engineer a workaround rather than tackle the underlying issue or change behavior.

Rather than reduce the number of miles driven by car owners, the solutions have been to mitigate the damage — build more roads to alleviate congestion (although studies show it does the opposite) or mandate emission controls rather than provide adequate mass transit. Even modest proposals like car pool and bus lanes have been met with contempt: When Gov. Jerry Brown’s transportation chief proposed car pool lanes in 1976, she was effectively run out of office.

Though the slight population decline in 2020 was partly attributable to the pandemic, California has been losing residents to other states for years. Until last year, immigrants, who make up a larger share of the population than in any other state, more than compensated for that out-migration. The birthrate in California has also dropped faster than the national average decline. Most of the people leaving are lower- and middle-income and with less education; those with college degrees and higher incomes can more easily afford to move in.

The state is awash in billions of dollars in surpluses, and yet there is a sense of paralysis. A federal judge, outraged by the number of homeless on the streets of Los Angeles, ordered the city to find homes for them, but after months of hearings, no one has been able to figure out where they can go. For years, millions of people have lacked clean drinking water. The most practical solution: hand out bottled water.

With leadership, crises can be opportunities. The multiyear drought that began in 2012, for example, became the impetus for an order by Governor Brown to reduce consumption by 25 percent, which led to lasting changes (fewer lawns, less water-intensive plants, pricing incentives that reduce water usage). The drought also spurred a law to regulate water pumped out of the ground and move toward restoring damaged water basins.

California, which relies on wells for nearly 40 percent of its water in good years and far more during droughts, was the last Western state to adopt such regulations. The deliberative planning process now underway in local regions is expected to force growers to leave as much as 20 percent of prime agricultural land fallow. The law stands out as a potential model, forcing hard choices, but also innovative ideas for repurposing farmland.

What happens in California matters, and not just here. Because it is the fifth largest economy in the world, and by virtue of its size and character, the state has historically influenced policies across the country, from how cars are manufactured to how property taxes are assessed.

Elected officials are notorious for their propensity to avoid difficult decisions or plans beyond the next election. The former New York governor Mario Cuomo liked to tell a parable to illustrate the propensity of politicians to not grapple with the long-term consequences of their actions: A condemned man was told by the king that he could live if he promised that within a year, he could teach the king’s horse to fly. A fellow prisoner asked why the man accepted such a hopeless deal. In a year, the man said, the king may die. In a year, I may die. Or in a year, who knows — the horse may learn to fly.

In California, the year is almost up.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/opinion/california-drought-housing-prices.html

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According to the law of "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose", California won't go into complete destruction unless there is an earthquake — the big one. Some boffin(s) will find a way to make the horse fly, even if it's made of concrete with a powerful engine or a hot air balloon in the shape of a horse. As well as time goes by, some people might find ways to grow some better organic carrots. And please consider that with a bit of slowing down on burning fossil fuel California's troubles are doing the planet a favo(u)r...

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