State Senate Republicans want to block Melissa Hurtado from being seated despite every county in her district certifying totals. She won by 20 votes. Republicans are making erroneous claims of uncounted votes.
What is the state GOP stance on Greg Wallis's win in AD-47? Truly bizarre that they would criticize elections in GOP run counties especially...
This isn't directly relevant, but I knew the Wallis family very well growing up, although I haven't spoken to Greg in a decade. His father, who was head of the California Dental Association, coached my baseball teams starting when I was ten years old in Little League and going up through my high school varsity team. (When my father was hired by a defense contractor more than fifteen years ago, the government interviewed Ken Wallis to confirm my father's loyalty to the American way of life.) His younger brother was my teammate on all of those teams and also on the high school football team. Greg was several years older than me, but he was also a coach on my Little League teams.
Prior to this election he was working for Chad Mayes, which is interesting because it would suggest that he's not like other Republicans. We'll see how true that ends up being.
I have no idea who is paying 600k+ to buy homes in San Joaquin and Stanislaus County. I just assumed these newcomers must have tech jobs or are selling real estate in the Bay Area to find more space.
Wonder if they could be foreign nationals looking to buy property on US soil? I don’t understand why China’s rentier class would want to purchase real estate in the boonies, away from the Bay Area or Metro LA but I guess they don’t have to be rich PRC folks or even ethnic Chinese? Guess demand creates its own supply…
I am confident that PRC nationals are not the ones buying houses in San Joaquin County. My mother has long dreamed of buying a house in Tracy and moving there, but these dreams have foundered as each time my father has pointed out that the house in the Santa Clara Valley is fully paid off and moving to Tracy would make everyone's life worse for no benefit.
I have some family friends who live out there; one couple in Tracy owns about half a dozen houses in the Valley and makes all its income from rent on those, but the rest work in the tech industry. Remote work makes it easier, as does only having to come to the office two or three days a week. If you work in the Livermore Valley (increasingly a secondary tech hub), the commute is not especially long. And a lot of people just do live in Mountain House or Tracy and commute to the South Bay, because you can get a real house out there for less than a million dollars. Google runs three buses every morning that start in Modesto and stop in Tracy and Livermore before proceeding to the office: there's wi-fi on the bus and you can count the time you spend toward your working hours.
If you ignore the voting patterns, which are a consequence of the Bay Area's unique ethnic demographics, the Bay Area exurbs are just like exurbs anywhere else. I don't think there's anything mysterious about them at all.
