When I worked at the Poison Factory, making DNA, I was miserable. The Bay Area is full of miserable people and they abuse each other to get rich so they can leave the Bay Area. The whole Bay Area is peopled with murderous ambition. So is Los Angeles. Sacramento is more of a core of welfare drug addicts, civil servants and call centers staffed by organized drug addicts, surrounded by suburbs of people who want to get out of Sacramento but can't afford it, and people who retired there because they couldn't afford to retire somewhere better or really like bicycling. Being largely flat, Sacramento is a great place for bicycling.
And then you're in the farmland, very suddenly. There's walls, then farmland. It's quite surreal if you haven't been there before. Sacramento's other name is River City, as in the city from The Music Man.
Yes, that musical is based in Sacramento. I live in the mountains, far enough away you can't see Sacramento without driving for half an hour for a view from the mountain. The mountain is largely empty, with pockets of people along the highways that wind through, but once you get east of Roseville, you start seeing more trees than houses, the sound walls vanish, and its boonies with a road racing through, with traffic crossing the Mountains towards Reno and Salt Lake City far to the East. Most of California is empty. There are huge areas of it pretty much wild, too barren for more than Cattle Grazing, for ranching. If there's water, there's fields or orchards depending on soil quality. Lousy soil gets orchards. Really lousy soil gets olive trees. They can grow on bare rock, or soil with no nutrients at all because they get them from the air. This is one reason I admire olives. They are amazing.
Much of California is craggy. The map you see on www.wunderground.com is shaded so you can spot the ridges and dips in the land, so you can see the terrain. Google Earth has this too. Once you get beyond those dense hives of California's cities, you quickly get into wild land. Most of California isn't used for anything at all. Its still very much a wild state, with all the potential uses you can imagine, though nobody invests unless they own the land in a county that won't raise punishing taxes, and taxes are raised by elected officials who mostly get the job for the retirement package from "campaign contributions" which they get to keep when they retire. They're in it for the bribes. So if you buy some wild land, put in the utilities and build the property up into some purpose, such as a new town or a factory, better make sure the officials are in your pocket or they'll stall you till they get their money. It works this way everywhere. I think in California, if you want to succeed, you really do need both bribes and personal enforcers with extralegal methods of correcting obstacles. Most of the Old Money families I've run into have those sorts of men employed, and many give off a vibe so frightening, with a coat that bulges under the left arm, I steered clear of them. People don't think of California being corrupt and murderous, but it is. Just because we distract with movie stars doesn't mean this state is about anything less than business.
However, most rural counties are less worried about competition and most welcome new business ventures because employed people make the economy better and eventually their being there brings in hospitals, which brings doctors, which brings luxuries and stable incomes and someone to marry their pretty daughters so they have a future without Meth scarring or jail. Everybody wins. Those big empty places in California, especially near railroads, could in theory house car factories, if California was less uptight about "carbon credits" and other scam nonsense. Separation of church and state, remember. No govt support for religion. Especially funding of carbon or warming, because that's religion. Its fraud for the state to fund religion, and that means jail for anybody who sends money or laws to these religious causes. Eventually, people will go to jail, and then the religions will get fined millions to recover the money.
Strip those out and a lot of those weird punitive to manufacturing law and problems go away. Renault, Peugeot, Acura, Subaru, Nissan, Yamaha, Honda, they can all have factories between Woodland and Redding. Plenty of people to do the jobs in car assembly, lots of cheap water and hydroelectric power, and the trains can carry the finished cars away for sale. Good deal, right? And as those companies adjust their cars to available fuel, they'll swap engines for biodiesel or natural gas or alcohol or even electric, if the Chinese don't get all that Lithium from Tesla in Reno. Which they probably will. Those jobs will give the people fleeing LA somewhere to go. A reason to stay here. And get them away from a very long and expensive supply chain that wastes lots of resources just existing. LA is too expensive to continue existing.
Railroads are easier to maintain than paved roads. While they require good quality steel, they're usually just a few of them, and they last for years. The maintenance equipment runs on the rails, too. You can spray down the weeds in a few passes rather than send out huge crews to stop the travel and seal pavement that's going to crack more next winter. None of those problems.
Between Woodland and Eureka, out at the coast, in the Coast Range mountains, a region with lots of canyons, ravines, faults, and rivers and stream. Plenty of ground water and rain to recharge the aquifers. There are towns up there, but not nearly enough of them. You could put a lot of population up there if the businesses in LA were moved to the water supply, which that region has. As the place is empty, the land is also cheap. You could build, using the locally available lumber, entire planned communities, warmer than Portland or Eugene, but overall similar weather, with affordable housing prices ($70K for a 3 BD, 2 BA) suitable for a family and a proper lot for a garden if you wanted, or hobby business. California has the space for adapting to the post oil world, but we have to start with abandoning Los Angeles and San Jose, both of which require water pumping at massive scale and costs millions a month. There are empty places which are better suited than the false promise of educated workers that Silicon Valley lives on. Its turned into racist ghettoes. And how is that beneficial to a business anymore?
When I look at those big empty areas of California, I see all kinds of potential development that will cost less in the short run AND the long run that supporting the existing failures of San Francisco and Los Angeles. People living there aren't getting rich, not as a whole. They're getting poorer, and sometimes DEAD, living there. Too much vicious competition. Too close together. Too few jobs, too few resources, too many costs and expenses. Its smarter to build a new factory and close the old one. Let your workers move to the new site, or hire the locals. Either way is better than operating in a cesspool like San Francisco bay area. Anyplace that supports those sorts of evil politicians deserves what they get.
I don't know if California will split up its budgeting into six regions, a sort of half-assed approach to the 6 States of California thing which would serve the same purpose. Even changing the laws of the Bay Area to suit business better won't fix the water pumping problem which costs households $300/month to import heavy metals, once-used medications which the purification process doesn't remove (birth control and Prozac for example) into everyone's drinking water. I fully detoxed after leaving there entirely. It got easier to breathe and think clearly. The Bay Area is toxic to human beings. It needs to go fallow and heal through nature. A good earthquake and fire should do the trick. Turn it into a special disaster zone, the whole place. Let the ultrarich build their own mansions after the quake, but leave the neighborhoods as ruins, a warning to the future. I should put that in my next novel. It would be a good setting point, actually. A very good setting point. The economic implications of a Federal Govt that CAN'T bail out the rebuilding, so there's no money to rebuild? That's huge. The Big One really COULD cause the end of the USA, and its currency, because T-Bills might get dumped over the costs of $2 Trillion in public utility costs for the Bay Area alone. "God Hates California" is what they would say. And they'd be right.
In that situation, building new towns entirely, with cheap real estate close to water supply is cheaper that trenching, removing ruined pipes and installing new ones just to supply water and sewer to a trashed out slum that's falling down from the quake and needs demolition anyway. Why bother? Build a new place. Build a new town. California has always been about booms and busts. The Bay Area and LA are just ghost towns people are lingering on with because there's no reason to leave yet. Flatten them and present with them with the bill, personally? They'd go. When you don't own the land you're renting, why stay? Duh! Earthquakes. That would fix California. Laws are tied to places. Flatten the places, wreck the corruption into the ground, and the laws are discarded. Just like that.
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