An Exodus We Never Asked For: Why the California Housing Crisis Matters to the Jewish Community

Jewish history has been defined by migration toward safer havens amidst climates of antisemitism and economic uncertainty and specifically, Jewish migration to California, beginning in the 1850s, should be understood through this lens. California has always been a state where excess flourished, conscious of its trend-setting role as a world-leading innovator in technology, economics and the arts. For much of the past century, it also helped create a new model for middle and working-class upward mobility while addressing racial, gender and environmental issues well in advance of the rest of the country. However, lack of affordable housing for California’s once flourishing middle class has led to extreme constraints on upward mobility and pervasive poverty that is extending to wider swaths of the income distribution. According to a 2020 Chapman University study titled “Beyond Feudalism: A Strategy to Restore California’s Middle Class,” while California has experienced faster income and job growth relative to the rest of the country over the past decade, our concentration of higher earning job growth has fallen drastically behind other states, including Texas, Utah, Washington, Nevada and Arizona. The study further describes how California is “often praised for its elaborate environmental and labor protections, but its record on economic mobility, middle-class disposable income, and even on greenhouse gas reductions, is not encouraging.” 

At the center of the ever-widening divide between the rich and working poor lies the ruins of failed housing policy at both the state and local level and while as Jews we are not obligated to fix the most urgent of problems that confront us, we are obligated to try. In tangible terms, this means supporting the development of policies, including educational and regulatory reforms, that foster greater creation of higher wage jobs and address high costs, particularly in housing and in energy. According to Marshall Toplansky, Professor of Innovation at Chapman University, “restrictive zoning and multiple layers of environmental review practices, while steeped in good intentions, have had deeply deleterious consequences, especially on its middle and working-class families” as the development of housing for middle-income earners has been severely constrained since the 1970s. Consequently, California’s hallmarks of upward mobility, homeownership and the availability of economically sustainable jobs, have fallen far below the national average. In simplest terms, the detachment of real estate prices from the basic economic fundamentals of median incomes has resulted in unaffordable rents and has prevented many Californians, notably the young and minorities, from purchasing houses. Toplansky further describes how this is occurring at a time when the vast majority of jobs being produced in the state pay under the median wage, and 40% pay under $40,000 a year. Moreover, since 2008 California has created five times as many low wage jobs as high wage jobs. While high wage jobs have increased marginally in the state during the past decade, states such as Utah, Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Washington have seen much higher growth.

 These statistics in the abstract seem far removed from our daily lives yet phrased differently, California lost 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state. Toplansky expands on this seismic loss in high-earning jobs describing that this loss is occurring in “critical areas of opportunity” which include the software, international trade, space, and creative industries. 

Not only are our historically robust Jewish centers at risk of atrophy when the children and grandchildren of those who were able to afford housing decades earlier are forced to leave due to lack of affordable housing, but one-in-five Californians live in poverty. Even more alarming is that according to the Public Policy Institute of California, roughly 17% of California’s children live in or near poverty. In addition, half the nation’s homeless population lives in the California, with many concentrated in the deplorable conditions of tent cities in Los Angeles and San Francisco. 

In his recent essay titled “Why Jews are Fleeing the West,” Joel Kotkin, Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, argues that demographically, Jewish migration is also changing. Specifically, Jews are “leaving liberal urban centers for safer, more welcoming environments.” Moreover, in the U.S., the “Jewish population in the South is rising, with cities like Miami, Atlanta, and Houston becoming major hubs.” Kotkin further describes that Southern universities, once dismissed as intolerant, now rank among the safest for Jewish students with far less antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment than their costal counterparts.  

Whether this pattern can be turned around or not will largely depend on what ultimately matters more; creating the conditions for our state to thrive with housing for all demographic sectors at the center or yielding to the anti-growth voices that have rendered the California dream a living nightmare for millions today.

Jewish migration patterns have always reflected larger societal conditions that either allow for communities to take root or that necessitate the need to relocate either economically or socially. In California, the excess of regulation and empowerment of local communities to block solutions to the housing crisis have led to not only an exodus of middle- and working-class Americans, but of highly skilled professions who serve, according to Toplansky, as the “seed corn” of the innovation economy and of the companies that employ them. Whether this pattern can be turned around will largely depend on what ultimately matters more; creating the conditions for our state to thrive with housing for all demographic sectors at the center or yielding to the anti-growth voices that have rendered the California dream a living nightmare for millions today.

Lisa Ansell is the Associate Director of the USC Casden Institute and Lecturer of Hebrew Language at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Los Angeles.