The Golden State is in crisis: environmental disasters, mass shootings, encampments of unhoused people, tech layoffs, and entertainment strikes reveal a sobering disparity to the California Dream.
is an architectural marvel designed by maverick architect Rudolph Schindler and built in 1946 for Mischa Kallis, an art director for Universal Studios. The living room glows with an orangey hue that Benjamin Moore might dub Golden Dream, and guests ooh and aah over the angular beams, midcentury furniture, and breathtaking views of LA at night, including fireworks bursting over Universal every few minutes.
Listening quietly is Nithya Raman, the city councilwoman who represents Orlean’s district. Raman, a Harvard graduate and urban planner whose husband was a writer foron ABC, has been a lightning rod for her liberal views on homelessness, which less generous critics interpret as defending the rights of vagrants to live on other people’s porches.
We’re at the Polo Lounge inside the Beverly Hills Hotel, corner booth. Elon Musk may have moved to Texas, complaining of COVID lockdowns and taxes, but some of California’s superrich want to save California—personally. Trim and bespectacled, Katzenberg opens our conversation by asking me to imagine the year 2028: mass transit across Los Angeles, the airport transformed by an $11.
“It broke my heart that I could be looking at a human being, a child, here in Los Angeles, as I’m about to go sit in a $3,000-seat Laker game, who was probably going to lose their hearing for life,” he says. “I just went, ‘Oh, my God.’ It was one of the most heart-crushing moments of my life and I could not go home and go to sleep with that.”
Over dinner one night at All Time, a restaurant specializing in “California cuisine”—fresh, unpretentious, expensive—Nichols tells me rich liberals of the type I’ve been seeing have grown conservative in recent years to protect their gains against the glaring reality of income inequality. “What you see here are people who are presenting themselves as liberal co-opting the tactics and language of right-wing people,” she says.
“There are ways to create a home outside of living in a building with four walls,” she explains. “When these encampments and communities that people have created to help protect themselves when they’re at their most vulnerable are destroyed, that is destroying their home.”Nancy Pelosi at Pier 23, I take a walk through San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, the neighborhood most often held up as exhibit A of what’s wrong with California.
“Some community members are disgruntled and feel like the police could do more,” says Artie Gilbert, who spent 26 years in prison for murder before becoming Urban Alchemy’s Bay Area director. “But the police are outspoken and the mayor done confirmed they undermanned…. They continuously communicate that to us directly.”
“Some people said to me, ‘Why are you making a big fuss about safety? Nobody ever brings that up in my district,’ ” continues Pelosi. “I said, ‘Well, good for you. That’s wonderful. Yeah. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t an ongoing [problem].’ “We spent a lot of money, California did, during COVID,” Pelosi says. “And it’s a decision that everybody has to make. And decisions are hard. So communities will say, ‘Well, I don’t think they should take away the tents in the middle of the street.’ And other people are saying, ‘Are they doing them a favor by enabling them to live in tents?’
Pelosi isn’t exactly unbiased on Newsom: Paul Pelosi’s brother was married to Newsom’s aunt, and Newsom’s grandfather worked for Pat Brown, father of Jerry Brown, who attended Catholic school with Paul, the same school Newsom attended. “All of our kids, they all grew up together,” she says. As we’re departing Pier 23, a man in a Trump golf hat approaches Pelosi, raises his phone to shoot video and begins barking at her about her husband’s tech stock trades and US spending on the Ukraine war at a time when “we have homeless people in our own city that can’t eat.”
Khanna’s district, which stretches from Cupertino to Newark and counts Apple and Intel as constituents, is the richest in California. “We’ve got $10 trillion in market cap,” Khanna tells me over tikka masala at The Nawab’s Kitchen, in Fremont, a fluorescent-lit hole-in-the-wall of the kind you find in shopping plazas all over the state. “Apple has a $5 billion spaceship in my district.”
Khanna offers a third way, pointing to his work on the CHIPS and Science Act, part of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act package, which subsidized American chip factories to the tune of $280 billion. In a transparent jab at Newsom, Khanna questions whether California is a proper calling card for national ambitions. “I think the message that says ‘Make America California’ is not a winning message,” he says.
Two days later, Kushner texts me from San Francisco, where she’s giving a reading and visiting her parents, a biotech engineer and a native-plant activist: “My parents are laughing hysterically that a journalist is asking if life in California is sustainable. They think it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard.”Sheng Wang, a Berkeley grad with long hair, spectacles, and a laid-back hip-hop mien, may have the most sane reaction to modern California: He gets stoned and hangs out with plants.
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