California and Detroit

Marketwatch recently ran two stories on what it claimed were the most and least expensive places to buy a house in the United States. The methodology was questionable, but the general conclusions fit with other data. Ritzy suburbs of big eastern cities and several places in California were on the list of most expensive, while some rural communities, small towns, suburbs in the south, and Cleveland and Detroit were on the list of least expensive.

This is interesting because not too many decades ago, Detroit was a center of prosperity with a booming auto industry and an average income said to be greater than that of New York City. The dreary history of Detroit’s decline is well known as are some of the causes – the parallel decline of the Michigan auto companies, a city government degenerating into something remarkably corrupt, kleptocratic, and inept even by big city standards, expanding welfare and criminal classes, the rise of anti-industrial “green” politicians and pressure groups, and years of its better and more productive citizens abandoning the city for more congenial places to the south and west.

Now parts of California are the sort of economic dynamos that Detroit was at the middle of the 20th Century. I hope it lasts, but California’s government is at least as hostile to enterprise and success as any in Michigan ever was, and we are already seeing flight from that state by fed up productive people. We can hope that by the middle of this century we do not see another Detroit in the now dynamic areas of California. A lot of it will depend on whether the state’s governments wake up and change course. That’s hoping for a lot. I would not want to live there or own property there just now.