Why I Left California

By Ben Shapiro

Thursday, April 01, 2021

 

Greetings from Florida.

 

It’s a sentence that would have been nearly unthinkable for me and my family just five years ago. My parents moved to California in 1979, pursuing the Hollywood dream: My father, a graduate of music school, wanted to write scores for the movies, and my mother, an education major, got a job as a secretary at a film and production company. And California was good to them. My dad never made it big, but my mom did rise to become vice president of her company. I grew up in a two-bedroom house with one bathroom and four children in Burbank, a clean and friendly suburb where the kids on the block knew each other, the parents talked in the front yards, and the local public schools actually taught kids basic skills.

 

It certainly wasn’t paradise. During my childhood, Los Angeles was still struggling to get its serious smog problems under control; flying into L.A. looked like flying into a bowl of pudding. The city was caught up in a crime wave that peaked in 1991 with 1,824 violent crimes per 100,000 residents. In 1992, after the acquittal of the officers caught on film in the beating of the unarmed Rodney King, who’d been arrested after a high-speed car chase, the Los Angeles riots burned much of South Central, resulting in over 60 deaths and an estimated $1 billion–plus in property damage. In 1994, the Northridge earthquake hit, doing $25 billion in damage; that same year, the case of O. J. Simpson, the former football star accused of murdering his ex-wife and her male friend, riveted the nation. In 1998, the Rampart division of the Los Angeles Police Department was rocked by a scandal that uncovered massive misconduct.

 

But things were actually getting better, not worse. The police department was cleaning up its act in Los Angeles; investment was pouring into the worst parts of the city, culminating in the opening of the Staples Center downtown in 1999; Hollywood was booming as an industry. California as a whole was also booming. Up north, Silicon Valley began to burst out as a chief economic driver for the state. 

 

Under the surface, though, California’s politics were changing. Proposition 187, barring illegal immigrants from accessing public services, passed in 1994 with 59 percent of the vote but was challenged in the courts. In 1999, Governor Pete Wilson left office and would become the last serious Republican figure elected statewide. His successor, Gray Davis, took actions that effectively killed Proposition 187. By the early years of the 21st century, California had become home to 40 percent of all of America’s immigrants, legal and illegal; writing in 2002, Victor Davis Hanson noted that California was “$12 billion in the red this year and nearly one-quarter of its inmates are aliens from Mexico (while nearly a third of all drug-trafficking arrests involve illegal aliens).” According to recent data from the Public Policy Institute of California, 70 percent of Californians aged 25 and older without a high-school diploma are foreign-born; 29 percent of California’s immigrants have not completed high school (compared with 7 percent of American-born Californians). 

 

Meanwhile, California moved far to the left on issues of criminality. In 2011, Governor Jerry Brown, determined not to build more prisons, touted what he termed the “boldest move in criminal justice in decades”: He decided to dump criminals onto the counties and localities. The result was rising lawlessness, often statistically hidden by no longer classifying certain crimes as crimes. Homelessness exploded, too, after legal rulings barred police from arresting people for sleeping on the street and localities declined to prosecute crimes such as trespassing and vagrancy. The problems of low-level criminal activity and homelessness began spilling out of high-crime areas and into the suburbs. Today, there are over 150,000 homeless people in California. 

 

California’s unwillingness to focus on assimilation and law enforcement, coupled with its laser-like focus on creation of more generous government benefits, meant a rise in single motherhood, heightened racial conflict, and wildly increasing budgets. Not coincidentally, in the year 2000, state debt was $57 billion; by 2005, the number was $107 billion; by 2010, it was nearly $150 billion. California has always been a high-tax state. But now, thanks to the state government’s vast overspending, new taxes are considered regularly. Today, millionaires in California face the possibility, considered by the California assembly, of a 14.3 percent state income tax, which rises to 16.3 percent for more than $2 million in income and 16.8 percent for more than $5 million. This would make the top tax bracket, state and federal, well over 50 percent of income for high earners. Even Proposition 13, the California law that protects homeowners from high property taxes, is under fire: In November 2020, voters narrowly rejected the partial repeal of Proposition 13 for commercial properties, which would have dramatically undermined the commercial rental market. Surely the next few years will see massive tax increases.

 

Simultaneously, major California cities continue to pile up regulations barring new investment and development. The high cost of housing in California isn’t just a matter of demand — it’s also a matter of supply. According to recent research, San Francisco has the most restrictive zoning laws in America. Los Angeles isn’t far behind. And Riverside. It’s no wonder California is suffering from a homelessness crisis. 

 

Over the past few years, then, California has been splitting into two distinct groups: those who live in protected enclaves in Malibu and San Jose, and everyone else. Quality of life has declined, which is why departures from California have risen every single year since 2011. The degradation was incremental — it’s hard to spot the change from day to day, especially when, like me, you’ve lived in the same general area for three decades. But the decline was happening. Every freeway underpass in Los Angeles is covered in tents now. The city of Los Angeles started putting out publicly funded Port-a-Potties to deal with the problem of human waste. Public parks in Santa Monica, set in one of the most beautiful natural places on the planet, are littered with empty bottles and needles.

 

Then there’s the issue of social politics. As a religious person living in Los Angeles, I found it hard not to fear for the future. California recently began mandating a militant LGBT agenda in public schools; it’s only a matter of time before they try to do the same in private schools, regardless of religious status. Churches and synagogues and mosques will come under fire from a militant social Left convinced of its own righteousness.

 

So why didn’t we move earlier?

 

Because California still has a lot to recommend it. It’s a social hot spot, with a huge and diverse population. It has tremendous attractions, from manmade ones such as Disneyland to the natural beauty of its beaches. Its public-university system is excellent. Many of its residents, like me and my wife, have their roots there. So when I saw my tax bill a few years ago and told my wife that we ought to start looking elsewhere, the reception to the idea was rather cold.

 

Then the pandemic hit.

 

The California government’s lockdown response removed all the benefits of living in the state while magnifying all the problems: high taxation, lack of law enforcement, willingness to tolerate crime. When riots broke out during the Black Lives Matter protests, the city of Los Angeles imposed a 6 p.m. curfew; Mayor Eric Garcetti warned businesses that if they opened, he might turn off their water and power. While we were hearing gunshots at night, our parks were being closed off during the day to prevent the COVID risk of small children using swing sets. Add in a massive wildfire and an earthquake, and God’s plagues appeared to be driving us from our home state.

 

So, here we are in Florida. Me, my wife, our kids, and my parents. 

 

And it’s fabulous. It’s a low-tax state with a well-run state government, a focus on public safety and cleanliness, and a diverse population, too. Florida is a living rebuke to California-style governance — which is probably why the media are so focused on the supposed evils of Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida overall.

 

If you want a better lifestyle, my fellow Californians, pack your bags. Discover what I’ve discovered, what Joe Rogan has discovered, what Elon Musk has discovered — what my employees have discovered (nearly all moved with our company to either Florida or Tennessee). But leave your politics behind. Because the politics of California ruined the most beautiful state in the country.