Seven Lesser-Known Things I Learned Living in California
Short reflections on subtle things I learned living in California for six years.
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When I graduated college in 2014, my then-girlfriend-now-wife was accepted into graduate school at Pepperdine University and she asked me to move to Los Angeles with her. I thought it over, and not having any firm post-graduation plans myself and with a pretty girl asking me to move to a major cultural center with nearly 300 days of sunshine per year, I gave the only sensible response: yes.
And so life in Los Angeles, California began. It would be our home for six years, before we ultimately decided to move back to Maryland.
We both love California. Given its cultural prominence, life there was in many ways unsurprising or even downright stereotypical. But I did discover a few subtle or underdiscussed aspects to life in California.
If You Have the Time, Avoid the 5
Interstate 5, also known as “the 5,” is the main North-South route in California, running from the Mexican border to the Oregon border and passing through San Diego, Los Angeles, the Central Valley, and Sacramento. Being part of the Interstate Highway System, it is essential to the country's and California’s economy and mobility. But really it’s only advantage is its directness.
If you have the time, two of the most beautiful drives in the entire world run North-South in California.
US Route 395 is an inland route that runs from the Mojave Desert through Owens Valley and the Sierra Nevada mountains. It also serves as the main access road for both the highest and lowest points in the contiguous United States (Mount Whitney and Death Valley). With just a few hours driving, you will switch from deep desert to snowy mountain peaks, with a recommended pitstop at Erick Schat’s Bakery in Bishop, CA.
California State Route 1, also known as the Pacific Coast Highway or PCH, needs no introduction; it is world famous for a reason. Running along nearly all the Californian coast, it serves Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Francisco, as well as several famous attractions such as Big Sur and the Golden Gate Bridge. Built between the Pacific Ocean and the California Coast Mountain Ranges, there is no doubt it is the most beautiful road I’ve ever driven.
The Universities of California are the Crown Jewel of American Higher Education
The Ivy Leagues are often thought of as the pinnacle of American education, and there is no doubt that they are great schools. But if America is the land of opportunity, then it is the Universities of California that truly represent our nation, and they should receive a similar amount of respect and prestige.
The ten UC schools educate many more students, for cheaper tuition, while having much smaller endowments, and still earning a respectable number of Nobel Prizes.
Proposition 13 Is One Of the Worst Laws
Proposition 13 is an amendment of the Constitution of California enacted during 1978, that caps property taxes and limits property reassessments to when the property changes ownership. It decreased property taxes by assessing values at their 1976 value, limiting the rate of taxation to 1% of the assessed value, and restricted annual increases of assessed value to an inflation factor, not to exceed 2% per year. It prohibits reassessment except in cases of change in ownership, or completion of new construction. These rules apply equally to all real estate, residential and commercial—whether owned by individuals or corporations.
It is also one of the worst laws I’ve ever encountered.
First, it corroded the California tax base (most localities in America use property taxes to fund much of the government), shifting the burden onto highly volatile taxes like income, capital gains, sales, and gas taxes, which creates large swings in state tax revenue.
Second, it creates and implicit property subsidy for homeowners that increases the longer that they own their home, and not by a small amount. This directly contributes to California’s housing crisis and the subsidy feeds on itself, as the more housing supply is restricting, the higher home prices become, increasing the value of the subsidy.
The great example of this is the Painted Ladies houses on Steiner St in San Francisco. Six houses that are essentially exactly the same (top) but pay wildly different property tax bills (below), ranging from $1,108 to $43,944.
The Subtle Bounty Of Urban Permaculture
For all six years, I worked in a cardiology lab within the medical school at UCLA. The lab’s principal investigator would take an annual vacation to Palm Springs, CA during grapefruit season because there was a patch of trees near where they'd stay. He'd bring back several large picnic coolers worth and the entire lab would have as much grapefruit as they wanted for several weeks.
And this isn’t just a one-off example. Within just a few blocks of my wife’s and my apartment, there were two kumquat trees, an avocado trees, a grapefruit tree, countless lemon and lime trees, and many rosemary shrubs that we could openly harvest from because they were in the street.
Now, no one is suggesting that we should get all of our fruits and vegetables from foraging. But most people dramatically underestimate how much food could be produced if we, as a society, simply decided to start planting more tree crops and shrubs all around our built environment.
For example, it has become somewhat of a meme that children consume lots of berries, and the berry industry has been booming over the last decade. But what the fruit industry doesn’t want you to know is that you can just plant fruit trees and shrubs in your backyard and harvest the bounty for free.
The Liberal Stereotype Is Overblown
It seems most people forget that California was were Ronald Reagan came from.
California was not the first state to legalize gay marriage (Massachusetts). California was not the first state to legalize cannabis (Colorado). California was not the first state to legalize psilocybin mushrooms (Oregon). California was not the first state to legalize gambling (Nevada, or in modern times, New Jersey).
Only once in the last five presidential elections has California been in the top five states with the highest Democratic voting share. In fact, more people in California voted for Donald Trump than in any other state.
Likewise, it even has some odd outright-conservative tendencies. It is one of the hotbeds of NIMBYism. The state has made ~zero progress on high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The California Coastal Commission would never allow small, walkable towns like those that line the Mediterranean Coast to be built, yet they require parking up and down the coast. Despite all the talk of ‘police reform’ over the years, Wikipedia can maintain a page of the gangs inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. California’s most high profile politician, Vice President Kamala Harris, came to prominence by being prosecutor (compare to Obama, who was a civil rights attorney and constitutional law professor).
California as Holy Roman Empire
Though it is often stereotyped as such, I did not find California an especially dysfunctional place. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t have problems, because every place has problems.
However, one major source of dysfunction that I did find was the completely fractured nature of California’s major metropolitan areas and how much local control was granted to them. It is a modern version of the Holy Roman Empire.
When people hear “Los Angeles,” they probably don’t realize that it is merely one city among hundreds that make up the metro area, even though you’ve probably heard of many of the others: Beverley Hills, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Long Beach, Compton. And the same applies to San Francisco and the Bay Area.
This fractured nature and strong local control creates friction within the metropolitan area as projects that would benefit the entire region have to coordinate through, around, and with so many different cities and agencies, such as Beverly Hills fighting the Purple Line extension or Santa Monica’s population remaining stagnant for nearly six decades. Seriously, why are the “cites” of Vernon (population: 222) and Industry (population: 264) allowed to continue to exist?
Consolidation within both the Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas would help both regions function better.
It Really Is That Beautiful
Last month, there was a viral tweet about California’s beauty. I hate to confirm that it is absolutely correct; California is the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived.
One of the reasons that Hollywood became Hollywood is that, back before CGI and computer animation and filming on location was more common, Southern California might just be the only place in the world that is just a few hours drive to ocean, forest, desert, grassland, and snowy mountains.
And they aren’t just any old biomes either, but like the quintessential versions of each of them: the Redwood forests, the sunsets over the Pacific, the eerie beauty of the Mojave, the agricultural breadbasket of the Central Valley.
California’s beauty seeps into your life in ways that only those of us that have lived can begin to recognize. I’m fortunate to have been able to live there for six years; it truly is paradise on Earth.