Digging into the data: How attainable is the ‘California Dream’ today?
No one has the exact same definition of the California dream. Ask the 39 million current Californians about what the dream should be, and aside from most of us agreeing that the daily temperature should dip no colder than the mid-‘50s, you’ll likely get 39 million very different answers.
But the so-called “Golden Era” of California—that faded Technicolor image of a magical time in the 1960s when as soon as you crossed the stateline Ronald Reagan would hand deliver you a two-story house and 2.5 children and tiki-themed patio furniture—still seeps into our expectations of life here.
That vintage California dream was primarily lived out by white families. Discrimination in law and practice made it difficult for people of color, who made up a smaller proportion of Californians than they do today, to share in that prosperity. And major swaths of California’s current population arrived here well after that “Golden Era” had passed.
Still, half a century later, this...
Celebrity endorsements aside, there’s an increasingly pervasive feeling among those of us who actually live here that the California dream is just harder than it used to be. A recent USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times pollfound that only 17 percent of Californians believe the state’s current generation is doing better than previous ones. More than 50 percent thought younger Californians were doing worse.
They’re not wrong.
Over the past four decades, California middle-class incomes have stagnated: The median California family is making only marginally more now than they were in 1980. More than half of Californians born that year made less than their parents did by age 30.
That’s a problem because at the same time, the state’s cost of living has exploded. A house that 50 years ago cost about three times a younger California household’s salary now costs seven times what a younger household earns.
If the past half-century has been rough for middle income Californians, it’s been brutal for those lower on the income ladder. Starting in the late 1970s, California’s poverty rate crept higher than the national average. Now, when cost of living is factored in, we’re the poorest state in the country.
Eulogizing the California dream has developed into its own cottage industry in recent years, with politicians of all stripes promising to restore our glory days. All too often the gloom and doom obscures objective gains the state has made in service of a sepia-toned narrative. Your average Californian is much more likely to get a college education and much less likely to be mugged today than forty years ago. That's a good thing.
But something is changing, and Californians can sense it. Here’s the data behind how four common California dreams are slipping away.