The post Gigs CEO Allen Narcisse appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post CalMatters Reporter Levi Sumagaysay appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post The Workers Lab Chief Research Officer Shelly Steward appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Californians used to envy residents of our beautiful, wine-and-wealth-drenched Central Coast. Now we have reason to pity them.

And not just because Nicole Kidman has thrown her star power into producing a TV series based on the premise that Monterey’s women might be murderers.

The past year has brought one calamity after another. Last summer’s Soberanes Fire burned a vast swath around Big Sur for 83 days, fouling the region’s air and becoming the most expensive wildfire to suppress in U.S. history. Central Coast communities suffered some of the most severe water shortages in the state during the drought. And when this winter’s rains came, the Central Coast was hit with flooding, landslides, and the failure of a vital bridge.

Then there’s this: A new report from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) shows the Central Coast is California’s capital of child poverty.

Santa Barbara County, of all places, had the highest poverty rate for young children (30.8 percent) in California from 2012-2014, the years for which the most recent data was available. Other Central Coast counties—Monterey and San Benito—had the second-highest child poverty rate. The report (which includes excellent maps on poverty among the very youngest children, ages 0 to 5) shows childhood poverty running especially high in the region’s bigger towns, especially Salinas and Santa Maria.

You might be surprised to read that, given that most narratives about California poverty involve the Central Valley, Inland Empire, or the far north state. None of the four counties where more than 25 percent of all residents live in poverty—Fresno, Imperial, Merced, and Tulare—are in the Central Coast region. In fact, the prosperous Central Coast has three cities—Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara—that ranked in the top 12 of all metropolitan areas nationally in a recent survey of residents’ well-being.

But don’t be shocked. The geography of California poverty has been flipped by coastal prosperity itself.

More advanced methods of measuring poverty—by accounting for differences in the cost of living and the use of safety-net benefits across regions—have captured regional shifts in poverty. In the process, they have revealed greater poverty on the Central Coast.

The region’s very high cost of living, most notoriously around housing prices, leaves even people who earn well above the traditional poverty line quite poor. Consider, for example, the poorer person living in Santa Barbara who considers moving to the poor San Joaquin community of Tulare.

In Tulare, the cost of living would be lower. But you’d also be less likely to be working, and you’d be making relatively less when you work, which would leave you relying more on social services to support your family.

In Santa Barbara, poverty is different, and in some ways tougher. In that city, the cost of living is much higher. You’re more likely to be able to get a job, and even a job that pays more than you’d make in the Valley. But you’ll still be well short of what you need to cover housing, medical bills, and other expenses that add up to a high cost of living. And your higher income might make you ineligible for safety net programs that would help.

“In the Central Coast counties, cost of living is higher and social safety net receipt is lower,” says PPIC research fellow and labor economist Sarah Bohn. “So both factors are driving up poverty rates there, relatively speaking.”

The Central Coast’s predicament contributes to an updated picture of the stresses of a state in which poverty and wealth are neighbors. Despite the frequent association of poverty and unemployment in the popular imagination, most poor children in California live in families with at least one working adult. And, even in an era when California’s job growth is leading the nation, working people are struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living. The PPIC analysis found that child poverty rates in the state are still substantially higher than before the Great Recession.

And such families don’t have enough help. Eligibility for social programs is still tied to a federal poverty line that does not account for regional differences, and lags reality in a high-cost state like California. For example, federal guidelines now list a single person living in poverty as making under $11,770; for a family of three, that number is $20,090. But the California Poverty Threshold—a statistic that is similar to the federal poverty line but varies for local cost of living—is $14,787 for a single adult and $26,492 for a family of three in Santa Barbara County. (The Self-Sufficiency Standard—what a single adult needs to pay for basic needs—is $27,000 in Santa Barbara County, and $59,000 a year for a single parent with two children.)

To put it another way, poverty programs don’t have all that much impact in places where it’s expensive to live. The Central Coast’s predicament is a strong argument for changing that. And change would involve new policies.

First, California’s wealthier jurisdictions need to get better at reaching those eligible for programs. (Fresno County tends to be better at getting safety-net benefits to eligible residents than Bay Area counties like San Mateo and Marin.) Second, more programs should be adjusted to make eligibility easier—and benefits more generous—in costlier regions.

The Central Coast’s child poverty also speaks to the scandalously minimalist response by the state and its local governments to California’s shortage of housing. The huge run-up in housing prices here—the median home price in California is 2.5 times the national average—is not merely a financial headache for the ambitious. It’s a poverty issue. And you can see it in the excessive overcrowding in high-poverty neighborhoods from Santa Maria to Salinas.

It’s a cruel irony that many of the coastal California cities and counties that have imposed tight restrictions on new housing and development also are home to levels of poverty that don’t get enough attention. Such communities should be aggressively challenged. Their NIMBYism, rationalized as “preserving community character,” is actually making people poorer.

None of these changes will come easily or quickly. In the meantime, say a prayer for the kids of the Central Coast.

The post Welcome to the Affluent Central Coast, California’s Child Poverty Capital appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Over the past two years, Mathews has written Zócalo’s “Connecting California” column, which appears in 30 media outlets across the state. He’s asked people in all corners of California for their ideas and dreams—and used their answers to offer such an assessment to a large crowd at Grand Central Market.

The iconic California dream was of rapidly acquired middle-class wealth, said Mathews—and it is “older than the American dream, which is a slightly poorer cousin of the California dream.” The American dream was a Puritan dream of modest wealth, accumulated year by year; according to historian H. W. Brands, the California dream—following the Gold Rush—was one “‘of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck.’”

This dream was based partially in reality: Late-19th-century California offered high living standards and high wages, and California has a history of excellent public education and innovation. But the dream was also part “nonsense,” said Mathews. You couldn’t just grab a piece of property and be set for life. Profit and exploitation, boom and bust, have always come hand-in-hand here.

So what is a more realistic dream in today’s California?

“We are not a land of leisure,” said Mathews. California is a center of industry, technology, and work. This state is the opposite of its reputation for flakiness; scholars have found that California is one of the top places in the country for worker productivity. And the state attracts more venture capital in some years than the rest of the U.S. combined. California pays more in federal taxes, and gets back less in federal benefits, than virtually every other state. “The next time someone from out of state calls Californians flakes,” said Mathews, “you tell them that we’re the ones subsidizing your flakiness.”

California is also a state of high poverty rates and middle-class struggle, with more than half of the nation’s 50 most expensive real estate markets. California no longer attracts the young, poor, and ambitious, said Mathews—those people are leaving for other states.

California is no longer a magnet for immigrants, either. The state’s immigrants are settled rather than being recent arrivals. Today, a majority of Californians are native-born. This means Californians are becoming more like one another—and as a result, “we are, dare I say, less sexy than we used to be,” said Mathews.

Yet each California city and region still maintains a character separate from the rest of the state; it’s difficult to figure out what connects us to one another. The economy of the southern San Joaquin Valley, with its oil and gas production, seems a lot like Texas; economically, the Bay Area has more in common with Seoul and Boston than it does with Riverside.

So how does one sum up all these regions and diverse communities?

Mathews said that all of California’s major regions today are less a permanent destination or escape for people from around the world—and more often a crossroads. People come to California to live and work and go to school for a while, then they return home or head somewhere else.

“We are no longer a state of arrival,” said Mathews—and so “the dream is no longer to show up and do well.” Rather, it’s “to be able to find a way to stick it out here.” Paradise, in today’s California, is more like Survivor, where everyone is scheming a way to stay on the island.

Yes, there are still crazy-rich Californians, living glamorous lives, and holding onto crazy-big dreams. But they are in the minority “Most of us who are pursuing our dreams are seeking grit, not glamour,” said Mathews.

That’s due in part to the high cost of living here. In the audience question-and-answer session, Mathews was asked whether he’s spoken with anyone who has a new vision for housing—one that would allow more Californians to stay here.

“There are a lot of ideas,” said Mathews, but they’re mostly at the local level. Although cocktail party conversation all over the state centers on housing costs, the subject is not part of the larger statewide political conversation. None of the new politicians who took office last week mentioned it in their announcements; it hasn’t been a component of any major speeches.

Why, asked another audience member, do Californians cling to the narrative that high taxes make it difficult to run a business here? How does this square with the fact that the world’s most valuable companies continue to be founded here?

Mathews said that the narrative is flawed because low taxes have not made Alabama a wealthy state, and high taxes have not made Sweden a poor country.. But in some parts of California, lower taxes or regulatory exemptions might help economies—and in other parts of the state, they don’t make sense. “We’re not easily one state, and regulation policy in one part of the state doesn’t make sense in the other,” he said.

The post The California Dream Has Become the California Struggle appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If that question seems ridiculous, it’s only because we have some mistaken ideas about both California and veterans.

The first common but incorrect belief is that California is the national capital of veterans. Yes, the state is home to more veterans—1.9 million—than any other state. And yes, California has been known as a place where veterans go to live out their lives in sunshine. (That’s one reason why CBS has set a top-rated show about Naval criminal investigations, NCIS, in Los Angeles.)

But the Golden State is actually one of the least popular places in the country for vets to live. California now ranks 48th among the states in the percentage of veterans among its adult population, at 8.8 percent. Over the last decade, the state lost more than 20 percent of its veteran population (significantly exceeding the national decline in the population of veterans). And Los Angeles and San Francisco, cities that owe no small part of their prosperity to veterans of generations past, have some of the lowest percentages in the United States.

The second wrong but common idea is that vets represent a burden on society (albeit one we are proudly obligated to carry). It’s understandable that people think this way, given that media outlets, when they pay attention to veterans, report mostly on problems such as violence, mental illness, homelessness, unemployment, or the cost of caring for vets of the past decade’s wars.

But such reports obscure the fact that veterans, by most measures, are doing better than the population as a whole.

Take suicide statistics. For all the recent stories about the spike in suicides among active duty military and veterans, suicides among veterans account for a shrinking percentage of the country’s rising number of suicides. The transition from a military culture to a civilian culture can be difficult for vets, but, in time, as veterans find that first job and settle down in a community, they do well. Overall, veterans are healthier, more likely to be married, and more likely to be high school graduates. They also make significantly more money than the average American.

Given those statistics, we should be thinking of veterans not as people who need assistance but as the type of people California needs more of. Younger veterans represent demographics and bring skills that make them a very good fit for our state today.

Despite a high unemployment rate, California is short on educated workers with technological skills, and surveys show new vets are tech-savvy. In recent years, the percentage of vets with college degrees rose, while the percentage of Californians with degrees declined. California is also heavily urbanized, and studies show that the veterans who do best are those who make their homes in urban areas.

So why don’t more veterans come? For one thing, over the past two decades, the state has lost military installations and seen declines in the defense industries that employ many veterans. For another, the high cost of living and housing is a deterrent for people who have a ton of future potential but not much present-day wealth.

California state and local governments offer all kinds of fine programs for vets, particularly disabled vets, that make it easier to find jobs or housing, start a business, secure a government contract, or go to a state park. But most of these are small-bore programs pitched for what they can do for veterans.

Why not think bigger—and about what vets can do for California?

Why not offer enormous incentives to vets who would buy homes in areas hit hardest by the housing crisis? Why not recruit vets who have helped rebuild other countries to help address the state’s estimated $800 billion in unmet infrastructure needs? And why not be even more aggressive in recruiting vets as college students?

Being welcoming to vets is good for communities. Poway, a three-decades-old town of about 50,000, has long been a haven for vets, who account for nearly one in seven adult residents. Poway is growing and relatively wealthy, and it has the best hiking trails and the lowest overall crime rate of any city in San Diego County. In 2010, at a time when the state was threatening to close parks, Poway opened a new one: Veterans Park. Last week, the city council voted to provide free business certificates and home occupation permits to veterans and active duty military.

Penny Riley, the Poway city manager and a Navy vet, told me, “There’s more we can do.”

Yes, there is, and not only out of patriotic duty, but also out of calculated self-interest.

The post Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Veterans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.