California’s green policies destroy blue-collar jobs

Joel Kotkin

New York Post

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01.03.2026

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California’s green policies destroy blue-collar jobs

Gavin Newsom complains of “faux outrage” over his comments to a largely black audience in Atlanta about his SAT scores, in which he implied a shared lack of ability.

No state makes more of its “enlightened” stance on racial justice than California. But few states do worse.

Governor Newsom and his Sacramento claque have embraced reparations for the descendants of slaves. They are also working overtime to preserve affirmative action policies, despite the electorate’s widespread rejection.

But Newsom’s racial rhetoric is, as the leftist site Jacobin suggests, nothing more than “pure rhetorical posturing.”

For example, the reparations promise new free tuition and housing subsidies to anyone who can prove they are descendants of slaves — but there’s little to no money behind this feint.

California’s adoption of such “reparations,” recently also embraced in San Francisco, also seems a bit absurd, given that it was never a slave state.

California, like every state, is burdened by a racist past, but much of this was aimed at what were larger populations — first Native Americans, then old Californios (descendants of Mexican/Spanish settlers) and, most of all, Asians, who were banned from landownership and were subject to brutal pogroms, the worst occurring in Los Angeles.

But the greatest irony is that both Latinos and African Americans do worse in California than in “unenlightened places” like Texas and Florida.

The key difference in California has been the imposition of draconian environmental regulations, which have devastated industries like construction, manufacturing, and logistics.

It’s what attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls “the green Jim Crow.”

Latinos have been hardest hit because many are employed in the “carbon economy,” which relies on energy and has been decimated by regulatory pressures.

For example, Latinos constitute well over 50% of all California construction workers and the majority working in logistics, according to the American Community Survey.

But due to regulatory constraints, construction in California has been among the weakest in the nation, making it hard to build what the market wants — namely, affordable apartments and modestly-priced single family homes.

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Truckers, too, are threatened by state laws mandating that independent operators buy electric trucks, which need huge batteries, can cost over $400,000, and cannot do long hauls without stopping for long charging periods, undermining the economics of a trucking fleet.

Goodbye LA and Long Beach; hello Houston, Tampa, Charleston, and a host of others.

Another critical industry hit by Newsom’s regulatory regime is manufacturing, which saw a reduction of 795,879 jobs n California between 1990 and 2021, according to the Census of Employment Wages.

Latinos constitute the majority of all California factory workers.

Particularly egregious has been the purposeful destruction of California’s once gigantic, and generally well-compensated, oil and gas industry.

Roughly 30% of workers in oil and gas are “people of color” in the heavily unionized field.

Now blue-collar workers see their industry disappear as the state increasingly imports its fuel from foreign sources, at high prices.

All these businesses share a common malady: strangulation through often well-meaning regulations.

The biggest losers are the working- and middle-class voters, and the poor who would like to create a better life.

This affects everything from homeownership to incomes.

A new report from the University of Texas Civitas Institute compared California Latino incomes to those in other states, adjusted for cost of living.

In the report, Chapman University business professor Marshall Toplansky found that Latinos in California make $10,000 less than their counterparts in Texas, also lagging other states — from New Mexico to Oklahoma to Michigan.

In 2023, the levels of Latino employment were higher than they were in 2018 in Texas, while they were lower in California.

Today, adjusted for costs, African Americans in California have incomes slightly below their counterparts in Mississippi.

The same pattern can be seen in rates of homeownership, long the linchpin of upward mobility.

Today, notes demographer Wendell Cox, the lowest Latino or Latino homeownership rates can be found in places like San Jose, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, while Latino homeownership in Texas and New Mexico remains 10% to 15% higher. Latino homeownership in California ranks 41st nationwide.For many minorities, the result is lifelong rent and poverty rates that are the nation’s highest.

Only 10% of white Californians are poor, but Latinos constitute half (50.7%) of poor Californians, and African American poverty rates are 30% higher than those of whites.

Perhaps worst of all, the state is not helping the next generation of minorities to reverse the downward trajectory.

Latino students account for over 56% of all public-school students, but only 36% met English language and just 22.7% math proficiency standards.

As former state Sen. Gloria Romero, now running for lieutenant governor, notes, California minority students perform worse than their counterparts in Florida and Texas; California Latinos rank among the bottom 10 states in higher educational degree attainment in the nation.

For many minorities, Newsom’s California is no longer a feasible place to live. Many look for opportunities elsewhere.

California’s black population peaked at under 8 percent in 1980, and has actually declined to barely 5.5 percent.

In Newsom’s San Francisco,the city’s African American community has declined from one in seven in 1970 to barely one in 20 today, with most now ensconced in public housing.

The problem here lies not with racism, or lack of reparations, as Newsom and “progressives” insist, but with their own policies, which devastate minority communities.

Those are what has to change.

Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas-Austin. His Substack is @jkotkin.

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California’s green policies destroy blue-collar jobs

Joel Kotkin

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