California Housing Market Divide

By: Bloomberg Advantage
With: Kathleen Hays and Vonnie Quinn

Joel recently appeared on the Bloomberg Advantage radio show to discuss the California housing market and the implication of the growing divide between those who can afford to buy a house and those who cannot.

Click the Play button below to listen. (mp3 audio file)

Calling Out the High-Tech Hypocrites

Appearing in:

Real Clear Politics

The recent brouhaha over Indiana’s religious freedom law revealed two basic things: the utter stupidity of the Republican Party and the rising power of the emerging tech oligarchy. As the Republicans were once again demonstrating their incomprehension of new social dynamics, the tech elite showed a fine hand by leading the opposition to the Indiana law.

This positioning gained the tech industry an embarrassingly laudatory piece in the  New York Times, portraying its support for gay rights as symbolic of a “new social activism” that proves their commitment to progressive ideals. Read more

Asian Augmentation

Appearing in:

Orange County Register

California, our beautiful, resource-rich state, has managed to miss both the recent energy boom and the renaissance of American manufacturing. Hollywood is gradually surrendering its dominion in a war of a thousand cuts and subsidies. California’s poverty rate – adjusted for housing costs – is the nation’s worst, and much of the working class and lower middle class is being forced to the exits. Our recent spate of high-tech growth has created individual fortunes, but few jobs, outside the Bay Area. The agricultural heartland is suffering not only from drought, but from green policies that allow a torrent of unused water to flow into the Sacramento Delta and San Francisco Bay while huge parts of the Central Valley go fallow.

But California retains one powerful trump card that our leaders in Sacramento have not yet found a way to squander: Its link to Asia. Read more

California Should Make Regular People More of a Priority

Appearing in:

Orange County Register

California in 1970 was the American Dream writ large. Its economy was diversified, from aerospace and tech to agriculture, construction and manufacturing, and allowed for millions to achieve a level of prosperity and well-being rarely seen in the world.

Forty-five years later, California still is a land of dreams, but, increasingly, for a smaller group in the society. Silicon Valley, notes a recent Forbes article, is particularly productive in making billionaires’ lists and minting megafortunes faster than anywhere in the country. California’s billionaires, for the most part, epitomize American mythology – largely self-made, young and more than a little arrogant. Many older Californians, those who have held onto their houses, are mining gold of their own, as an ever-more environmentally stringent and density-mad planning regime turns even modest homes into million-dollar-plus properties.

What about California society as a whole? The Chapman University Center for Demographics and Policy released a report this month, by attorneys David Friedman and Jennifer Hernandez, on “California’s social priorities.” It painstakingly lays out our trajectory over the past 40 years. For the most part, it’s not a pretty picture and – to use the most overused word in the planning prayer book – far from sustainable from a societal point of view.

Read the full article at The Orange County Register.

The Evolving Geography of Asian America: Suburbs Are New High-Tech Chinatowns

Appearing in:

Forbes

In the coming decades, no ethnic group may have more of an economic impact on the local level in the U.S. than Asian-Americans. Asia is now the largest source of legal immigrants to the U.S., constituting 40% of new arrivals in 2013. They are the country’s highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group Read more

Who Is Leaving Los Angeles Because of Housing Prices?

By: Which Way, LA?
In: KCRW Radio

Joel recently participated in a panel discussion on LA’s KCRW radio. The episode was titled, “Who Is Leaving Los Angeles Because of Housing Prices?”. More from KCRW:

The median price of a home in the LA Metro area is around a half million dollars. Housing prices and rental rates are going through the roof in LA and Orange Counties. They’re so high that fewer and fewer people can afford to live where they want to. So, more and more of them are moving away. What’s the breaking point? What do you have to make to afford to stay here? KCRW talked with former Angelenos now located in Austin, Kansas City and Baltimore.

Click the Play button below to listen. (mp3 audio file)

Go East, Young Southern California Workers

Appearing in:

Orange County Register

Do the middle class and working class have a future in the Southland? If they do, that future will be largely determined in the Inland Empire, the one corner of Southern California that seems able to accommodate large-scale growth in population and jobs. If Southern California’s economy is going to grow, it will need a strong Inland Empire.

The calculation starts with the basics of the labor market. Simply put, Los Angeles and Orange counties mostly have become too expensive for many middle-skilled workers. The Riverside-San Bernardino area has emerged as a key labor supplier to the coastal counties, with upward of 15 percent to 25 percent of workers commuting to the coastal counties. Read more

California’s Rebound Mostly Slow, Unsteady

Appearing in:

Orange County Register

California, after nearly five years in recession, has made something of a comeback in recent years. Job growth in the state – largely due to the Silicon Valley boom – has even begun to outpace the national average. The state, finally, appears to have finally recovered the jobs lost since 2007.

To some, this makes California what someone called “a beacon of hope for progressives.” Its “comeback” has been dutifully noted and applauded by economist Paul Krugman, high priest of what passes for the American Left.

In reality, however, California’s path back remains slow and treacherous. California Lutheran University economist Bill Watkins, like other economists, is somewhat bullish on the state’s short-run situation, but suggests that the highly unequal recovery, particularly for the middle class, could prove problematic over time. Read more

Measuring Economic Growth, by Degrees

Appearing in:

Orange County Register

In this information age, brains are supposed to be the most valued economic currency. For California, where the regulatory environment is more difficult for companies and people who make things, this is even more the case. Generally speaking, those areas that have the heaviest concentration of educated people generally do better than those who don’t.

Read more

What will our Latino Future Look Like?

Appearing in:

Orange County Register

President Obama’s amnesty edict, likely to be the first of other such measures, all but guarantees California’s increasingly Latino future. But, sadly, for all the celebration among progressives, the media, Democratic politicans and in the Latino political community, there has been precious little consideration about the future of the newly legalized immigrants, as well as future generations of Latinos, in the state.

Read more