Henry E. Brady is the Monroe Deutsch Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at UC Berkeley, the Research Director for California 100, and former Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy. Lindsay Maple is the Deputy Director of Research for California 100 and a Senior Project Lead at the Possibility Lab. They are teaching “The Golden State? California’s Future” with us this fall.
How did California 100 start?
LM: It was an initiative that originated in the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and grew into a partnership with Stanford University. The overall goal was to get folks from all across the state to think about how we might ensure a brighter future for California given the current challenges the state is facing.
Henry and I were the research team, and we partnered with a diverse coalition of experts, researchers, academics, and even youth groups to better understand the issues confronting California now and and in the future, and to come up with possible solutions.
We focused on 15 different policy areas and challenged the people who think about these issues every day to not only identify what’s happening, but to come up with policies that the state can implement to ensure that the future is as good as we can possibly make it.
Sounds ambitious.
LM: It is. Big, dramatic change doesn’t come out of nowhere. You have to think about what you want and plan for it.
How can we get Californians and our elected leaders to work toward common goals in such fractured and fractious times?
HB: We have to remember that California has been enormously successful in so many ways. We have a history of coming together and doing big things. We know how to do it. It’s in our DNA.
Look at Covered California, our implementation of Obamacare, which reduced substantially, almost more than any other state, the number of people who were not insured. It also helped decrease the cost of health care. It was and continues to be tremendously successful. AB 32 and our climate policies were way ahead of anybody else. We continue to have the best higher education system in the world, bar none. We've been doing some extraordinary criminal justice reforms that have really changed the character of how we deal with the incarceration of people in California.
We know how to bring people together to do big, visionary things. It’s not impossible. It can be done. With leadership, it can happen.
Your course is going to focus on four areas: economic growth, water and agriculture, housing and homelessness, and governance and democracy. Of those four, which one do you think is the furthest along in being tackled?
HB: Housing is being tackled. The legislature has put forth a lot of legislation. It's not clear where that's going to lead us but certainly there is an ongoing sense in Sacramento and throughout the state about the importance of housing.
We’ve taken some very preliminary steps in terms of water, but we’re nowhere near where we want to be. And the problem is that we have a very poor structure for water governance. In terms of agriculture, there have been some efforts to conserve water, but we really haven’t come to grips with the fact that these droughts are not just a temporary thing. They're a long term thing and we've got to rethink the nature of farming in California.
And it’s not just water that’s a problem for agriculture, it’s also the temperature. For example, pistachios take a lot of water. But even if we could give them all the water in the world, they’re still grown at the southernmost part of the Central Valley, where it's going to get five- to seven-degrees hotter. There will be fewer cool nights. Pistachios need something like 700 hours of cold nights otherwise they don’t mature. We can’t air condition the Central Valley.
I think it's very hard for agricultural producers, who already face so many challenges in making farms prosper, to come to grips with the fact that the world is changing fundamentally. I think it's hard for all of us.
Of all the challenges you outline in the report, which one do you think we need to address first?
LM: I’m reluctant to give you a single priority. None of these areas are separate from one another. They're inextricably linked. Because of that I think policymakers need to take a more holistic and comprehensive approach or else we're going to continue to be ending up with these unintended consequences. For example, say we solve water issues with desalination, but that increases our energy consumption. There’s just this whole ripple effect.
HB: Lindsay is right, of course. But I’m going to say housing. The median house in California is 80% more expensive — almost double the cost — of an average house in the United States. It’s two and half times more in the Bay Area. Young people simply can't afford housing in this state. And people don't want to move to the state because of the cost of housing. We can't continue that way. And we're way below our production targets.
Probably the most hideous part of the housing situation is that we have maybe double the number of homeless of any other state proportionately. Housing isn’t entirely responsible for the situation, but it’s a big contributor. It’s just terrible. So, I would say housing is our first and foremost priority, and water doesn't come far behind.
One of our big things we’re going to talk about is that our population is stagnating, and, honestly, it’s even worse than that. The working population is going to decline, the number of seniors is going to increase and the number of young people is going to decrease. Older people are more expensive than young people on average, schools are going to close, senior centers are going to sprout, state and local budgets are going to be strained by pension plans.
Any rays of hope? Please say yes.
LM: None of these projections are a foregone conclusion. What we hope to accomplish with our research is to understand the issues, because that's the only way that we — as Californians — can even begin to tackle any kind of solution. I truly believe that we are on a path to make things better, and I also believe that when it comes down to it, we're going to have to adjust. I lean towards the side of let's be pre-emptive and make the change we need now.
HB: First, California is, arguably, the most vital economy in the world and the most vital state in the country. We have entire innovation ecosystems that are changing the world. I think there’s every reason to believe that we are going to continue to be an incredibly rich and innovative state. Yes, we have great inequality and problems along those lines that need to be solved, but nevertheless we have a tremendous foundation.
My second point is that we’ve solved a lot of problems in the past. This is the state that had the prescience and ability to think about climate change and to actually start planning for the future years before anyone else. One of the problems with government is that it tends to be myopic because of the short terms that politicians have in office, but California has shown that it can be farsighted. We’ve done great things in the past and we can do it again. We just need to be pointed in the right direction. We can do it if we really try. But we must try, try, and try.