Cheap fossil fuels ease the cost of its green agenda. But the middle class still can’t afford to live there.
Happy days are here again in the Golden State—or so it might seem. Housing prices are nearing their prerecession peak. Gas prices have dropped by $2 a gallon since their apex five years ago. Employers are hiring: a net gain of 377,000 jobs in the past year alone.
Since 2012, California’s economy has grown faster (an annual compounded 3.4%) than every state save Texas (4.8%) and Colorado (3.6%), according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Tech has led the upswing, but agriculture and manufacturing have increased, too. Lo, California two years ago eclipsed France to become the world’s sixth-largest economy, with a GDP of $2.46 trillion.
The state continues to defy conservatives’ predictions that its progressive tax and regulatory policies—from carbon “cap and trade” to limits on suburban sprawl—will strangle the economy. Democratic politicians tout California’s apparent resurgence as vindication for liberal governance. Yet the Gilded State is prospering despite the government-imposed handicaps, and for much of the middle class the economic luster is illusive.
The seat of wealth-creation is Silicon Valley, where tech King Midases enrich nearly everything they touch, from real estate to retail. Unemployment in the San Francisco Bay Area is effectively nonexistent, with the official jobless rate hovering around 3%. Oakland, once shady, has become the Brooklyn of the West—a fast-gentrifying hipster mecca—and Los Angeles’s glitzy “Silicon Beach” has overtaken grungy Venice.
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