A short freeze in the water wars?
Posted by Badlands Journa... on Thursday, 7 March 2019As agencies call a pause to the California Water War, the combatants look like a frieze of ancient Greek soldiers carved on a temple wall.
March 2019
Two forms of theft in California
Posted by Badlands Journa... on Wednesday, 27 March 2019Among the many damaging contradictions that plague California society is its agriculture, which regularly, exports irrigated crops while pretending to develop sustainable groundwater plans and grabbing every acre-foot of surface water from every river it can, with contempt for the habitat of species it endangers and destroys. From farmworkers paid to carry signs at public meetings demanding more water to save jobs, to bank loan officers and hedge-fund rainmakers, no one involved with California agriculture can tell the truth about water. Most don’t know it, and those that do lie.
A segmented housing bubble for California?
Posted by Badlands Journa... on Sunday, 31 March 2019...Furthermore, this run-up in house prices does appear to be driven largely by the fundamentals of the market. Rents have been substantially outpacing the overall rate of inflation, especially in the markets with the most rapid increases in house prices, like Seattle and San Francisco. Also, vacancy rates have fallen sharply from the peaks reached in the recession, and are low in markets seeing rapid price rises.