California has been designated a “golden” place of expansive vistas, dreams and opportunities since at least the original Gold Rush of 1849. Through different eras there have been many different hues and sources of gold that has defined our state with the motto Eureka (surprise, discovery, “I found it.”)
Now comes a public poll by the Hoover Institute that tosses the definition of what makes today’s California golden into confusion and contradiction. And Sonoma County’s profile fits right in.
California is home to one-fourth of all the billionaires in the United States and has a $2.46 trillion economy. The 124 individual billionaires have a total wealth of a half-trillion dollars. But California also has the nation’s highest poverty rate of 20.6 percent. (That’s almost 8 million people.) That same paradox is alive and well in Sonoma County, a place where everybody wants to visit or call home, but fewer and fewer people can actually afford.
Results from the Hoover poll found three-fourths of respondents believing they were financially the same or better versus a year ago. But when asked to compare their finances to their parents only 57 percent said they were equal or better off and one-third said they were worse off.
And, when asked about the future, only 20 percent predicted their children would be better off than their parents. (Latino respondents were slightly more positive.)
So, what’s happening in this land of golden promises?
Remember, only a small number of the 49ers actually found gold in the Sierras. But California’s original gold rush produced many other kinds of millionaires and laid the foundation for great cities like San Francisco, bountiful agriculture, transcontinental rail travel and early, early tourism.
California enjoyed another expansive golden era in post World War II when massive water projects, aerospace and computer industries, modern freeways, a grand state university system and modern Hollywood all boomed.
The cover illustration for the American Dream was taken from the California landscape of 1950s suburbia homes with irrigated lawns, attached garages, backyard swimming pools and two-and-a-half children per household.
The Beach Boys provided the soundtrack and everyone wanted to go surfing. Next came the Summer of Love (marking its golden anniversary this year), when California’s dreams turned day-glo and psychedelic.
Somewhere along the way something else happened, too. What was it?
The economies of California and Sonoma County have gone through up and down cycles, most recently with the burst bubble of the 2008 Great Recession. But all the busts and booms have not always balanced out.
Over the last 10 years of economic recovery, the state and county population growth (6 percent) has doubled the pace of new housing construction. The state’s budget has tripled since 1994 from $57.5 billion to $183.4 billion. That’s a lot of money but it hasn’t been enough to maintain and repair our Golden State’s infrastructure of roads, dams, public institutions and housing programs.
When asked about Proposition 13, the property tax cap put in place 40 years ago, the Hoover respondents seemed ready to revisit the once untouchable tax limit. Forty percent of the respondents favored a “split roll” that would remove the tax cap on commercial properties.
Confidence in the public sector (government) to boost economic outcomes was very low in survey results (12 percent) and almost half of the respondents instead favored tax cuts and reduced regulations to make California more golden.
The Hoover survey did not find any answers for the housing shortage or widening household income inequality. Economists at the Hoover Institute warned that California’s economic cycle was headed for a downturn soon but also had no golden advice to offer.
Millennials and Latinos — the future population majorities — were the least gloomy in overall survey results. Maybe that means it’s time for the rest of us to head off into our “golden years.”
