Are California's problems really the fault of socialism and welfare abuse?

Point Reyes looks interesting. Part of it is cliffs and part is “coastal dunes” and beach. There may be parts that could be turned into condos and strip malls, but I’d rather have the park available. Having great National Parks nearby is not the same as “the feds are stealing our land!” According to wikipedia, some agriculture is allowed.

Nitpicking. Marin County is 828 square miles or 529,920 acres. Point Reyes is 71,028 acres. So it’s a little less than 12% of the county.

Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge - 911 acres
Orange County - 948 square miles or 606,720 acres
Seal Beach is 0.1% of Orange County.

Cleveland National Forest - 460,000 acres - in the counties of San Diego, Riverside, and Orange - so three counties, not just Orange.
The three counties together are 948+7,303+4,526 = 12,777 square miles or 8,177,280 acres.

So the forest is 5.3% of the three counties together. Orange might get a bigger share, but I’m not going to look into it further. It’s mostly chapparal mountains and, look at this, it was originally dedicated to the preservation of the watersheds that supply San Diego, Riverside, and Orange Counties - mostly San Diego County.

Didn’t someone mention that developers keep assuming there’s always going to be enough water? Preserving land against development is one way to mitigate that a bit. Especially if you’re preserving watershed land.

Thanks for doing this research. We should make your post a sticky to refer to whenever anyone claims that people are fleeing our state.

85% retention is real good considering that a lot of retired people can practically fund their retirement on the delta between their home value and that of a place they buy. My daughter just moved to Vegas (from Germany, not California) and the house prices are still very low there.

No, we were never socialist to begin with. Nothing out of the ordinary compared with other states, except our economy, geography, culture holds up pretty well compared with other states.