Guest Editorial: Some good news for California’s millennials

This editorial is from the Orange County Register:

We are constantly being told - and sometimes even find ourselves believing - that the millennial generation doesn't have much of a place in California anymore.

Too expensive. Too few jobs for the highly educated. Would you like sweet-potato garlic fries with that?

So it's nice to have that apple cart of expectations upset by a study at financial website Magnify Money that, as the Sacramento Bee reports, shows that when it comes to finding jobs and higher pay for the college-graduate members of the younger generation, of the top 50 cities in the United States, six of the best for millennials are in California.

Take that, Texas (four).

And here's another trope that was ripe for skewering. It's that very idea, promoted by people who apparently haven't been to the city by the Bay in some time, that San Francisco is in toto a hellhole so dangerous, with its hypos in the gutters and homeless madmen on every block, that no safe-and-sane American dares visit, much less work or live there.

Because the No. 1 city in the nation for high-paying good jobs for millenials? San Francisco. Using the metrics of millennial population change, workforce participation, unemployment rate and median wages, it topped Denver and Austin for the best place for young people to have a career.

Now, we know what the downside to that one is. Although the Colorado and Texas boomtowns are getting pricier as well, to live in San Francisco a 20-something better be making a pretty penny, because she's going to be shelling out $2,500 a month for a futon in the corner of a fourth-floor Mission District walkup.

But it's not just the Fog City that makes the national list. San Jose comes in fifth, and other California cities in the top 50 include Los Angeles at No. 29, San Diego at No. 40, Sacramento at No. 41 and Riverside at No. 43. And if the cost of living in those cities is not quite as low as in Des Moines, there's a lot to be said for being surrounded with like-minded people of your generation working in interesting, well-paid jobs.

California politicians, from the new governor to city councils and county supervisors everywhere, need to do a better job of making the state a more business-friendly place where people can afford to live. But we've already got good bones.

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