Really good U.S. economic news has been rare the past decade. While unemployment has dropped steadily from its Great Recession peak of 10 percent in 2009 to roughly 5 percent for the past year, a measure that evaluates how many people want to work full time but can’t find such jobs shows the rate to be about 10 percent for the past year. “Underemployment” seems the new normal. Fewer adults are working than at any time since the 1970s, when more married women stayed home.

That’s why so many people were elated by the U.S. Census Bureau report Tuesday showing that 2015 was the best year for median-income wage gains for middle-income and lower-income households in decades. Even with the 5.2 percent increase in median wages, wages are still below what they were before the Great Recession hit, once adjusted for inflation. But the 2015 gain was bigger than expected, and the trends are strong. The American Dream looks more resilient than many feared.

Which brings us to California, where the good news on wage growth was tempered by a troubling reality. Census Bureau statistics released Tuesday showed that overall U.S. poverty was at its lowest level since 2008. But an alternative measure that includes the cost of living shows California has the highest poverty rate of any state. Nearly 8 million residents — 20.6 percent of the total population — are stuck in financial desperation. The biggest reason is the extreme cost of housing.


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What did the state Legislature do about this crisis during its just-concluded session? It passed measures that make it easier to add housing units to properties with already-built homes, and it renewed its support for affordable housing programs that amount to lotteries benefiting a limited number of families. Yet a common-sense proposal by Gov. Jerry Brown to increase housing stock and bring down the cost of homes and rent died in the Senate last month after winning Assembly approval in May.

Brown proposed to remove local review of any residential project that complies with local zoning and sets aside some units as affordable. But in the Sacramento pecking order, the housing needs of the poor and the middle class weren’t deemed as important as the desires of influential environmentalists, who love laws letting them block local projects. Nor are the needs of the poor and the middle class as important as construction unions, which demanded that all projects built under Brown’s proposal pay union-level wages.


So expect your children to keep moving away. Expect more homelessness and more emotional tales of professionals and even high school students relocating to far-away homes. This is California, the capital of poverty — and political callousness.