Reports from The People's Republic
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The Republic of Dystopia, that is.
Joel Kotkin: California Dreamin
Leaders in these cities may genuflect to “Black Lives Matter” and hold the common belief that racial minorities must rely on constant political agitation because of racism. But in reality, progressives have presided over a kind of ethnic cleansing. In the core of San Francisco’s metropolitan area, the Black community has declined from one-in-seven to barely one-in-20 over the last 40 years, with most now ensconced in public housing. Black San Franciscans constitute 37% of the homeless and are now so marginal that one filmmaker even made a movie called “The Last Black Man In San Francisco.” Los Angeles and Portland have also experienced drops in their minority populations.
Progressivism in its postmodern guise produces a dystopic demography. Once solid middle- and working-class communities either gentrify or become zones for homeless camps, open-air drug markets, and petty crime—this in cities where families with incomes of $117,000 are officially considered poor. The Bay Area, along with southern California, now ranks among the worst places for first-time home buyers, meaning that, if people move to buy a house, they must move further out.
The result is cities dominated by the rich, the poor, and a youthful, largely childless population. They have experienced the spread of high-poverty neighborhoods and a shrinking middle class. San Francisco has the nation’s lowest percentage of children of any major American city while Los Angeles has seen its youth population plummet and even managed to lose its foreign-born population in the last decade. No surprise then that middle-class families are going extinct.
