Kotkin on CA's Infrastructure

In addition to demography, the prolific Joel Kotkin also chronicles the manifold problems besetting California in the 21st century. Writing here for New Geography, he focuses on California's unmet need for new-but-boring infrastructure spending.

We neglect roads, bridges, ports and economic energy projects because, in many ways, these are not a priority of the green lobby, which prefers less growth, more density and a shift from cars to transit. So, instead, we get money spent on high-speed rail and ultra costly, environmentally damaging solar panel farms or inefficient wind turbines erected in the middle of the desert.

These energy costs hit hardest the state’s interior and heavily Hispanic working class but this doesn’t seem to much bother the state political leaders, who come overwhelmingly from the affluent parts of the Bay Area and coastal Southern California.