What has happened to the quality of life in California?

With its magnificent mountains, rivers, lakes, deserts, and coastline, California at one time could rightfully claim its place among the world’s most beautiful and desirable places to live. Over the years, I have painfully seen massive population growth and battle after battle between concerned residents, who value California’s desirability as the place of choice to live, and reckless, irresponsible developers who have destroyed much of the state’s natural wonders by what I call ”creeping growth.”

Depending upon whose numbers you believe, the state already has dropped to a rank of mediocre, at best, in education quality. With a few fortunate exceptions, most of the state’s 38 million or so residents crammed into the desirable living areas are already plagued by wall-to-wall shopping centers, wall-to-wall housing developments, gridlocked freeways, ubiquitous traffic jams, graffiti, demonstrations, drug-use, gang violence, fewer and fewer jobs, more and more homelessness, aggravating waits at the DMV, massive and flagrant illegal immigration, the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, etc. High-speed freeway chases and hit-and-runs seem to have become the latest pastimes of choice. Clearly, to any competent authoreity, these are effects of overcrowding and need to be addressed now — and not kicked down the road until the current crop of politicians is safely out of office. Unchecked population growth is the most important issue of our lifetimes. Unless drastic changes are made to deal with these issues, quality of life is certain to deteriorate rapidly.