That rate has held steady in subsequent Census Bureau reports. But now the high cost of housing is beginning to have a corrosive effect on government services in some of the most expensive areas. This report is from the San Jose Mercury-News:

Facing an acute shortage of substitute teachers, classroom aides, custodians, bus drivers and other vital employees, Bay Area schools are scrambling to find creative ways to fill the void. … San Jose’s Alum Rock Union School District is so short of substitute teachers that Superintendent Hilaria Bauer and two of her deputies recently spent a day in the classroom teaching. “It’s harder and harder to find people,” said Kevin Skelly, superintendent of the San Mateo district. “This job market is incredibly tight and it’s expensive to live here.”

 

Low unemployment, high housing costs, retiring Baby Boomers and an education hiring binge are fueling the Bay Area’s shortage of school workers. So it’s forced districts like San Mateo to hire a headhunter and the Santa Clara County Office of Education to host its first ever job fair for school support staff. Twenty-one school districts and one community college district will be recruiting. Oakland Unified held a job fair earlier this month, and made 122 offers of employment.

The single most difficult jobs to keep filled are for school bus drivers, which have starting pay of $37,000. Bus drivers are in relatively high demand in the Bay Area because so many tech firms have bus fleets to bring their workers to and from tech clusters and residential communities, and school officials say drivers much prefer ferrying adults rather than school kids.

$100K job with great perks, no qualified applicants

But it’s not just jobs requiring relatively modest jobs skills that are going unfilled. The Mercury-News notes that the San Mateo Union High School District has been unable to fill an environmental oversight job that pays more than $100,000 and campus facilities maintenance manager positions that pay up to $95,900 — even though they have outstanding perks that include 21 vacation days, 15 holidays, up to 12 days of paid medical leave as well as pensions and fully paid health care. That’s because the skill sets these jobs require are in heavy demand in booming Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, the city of Los Angeles is also having trouble filling police positions and relatively low-paying jobs, according to KPCC, the National Public Radio affiliate based in Pasadena. Here’s some of its account:

Several Los Angeles city departments report they are on track to end the fiscal year with millions of dollars in surpluses because they are unable to fill hundreds of employee vacancies fast enough to keep up with retirements and attrition of the city’s aging workforce.

As of the end of August, L.A. had nearly 4,000 job vacancies, according to a report by City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana to the City Council.

 

The Recreation and Parks Department is looking for 100 new full-time workers by December. The Bureau of Street Services has 165 openings; Public Works has 89. The LAPD has 103 vacancies and expects 325 more by June, yet fewer than 100 are in the training pipeline in new classes.

 

L.A. is on track to spend about $62 million more than it takes in this fiscal year, according to a new city financial progress report, so many departments will have to reallocate expenses to end the year in balance. Some may come from the savings of departments that are unable to fill positions.

By Chris Reed

The feudalization of California that Joel Kotkin has written about so smartly for years just keeps accelerating. Wealthy coastal professionals and public employees with deep job security and high pay simply don’t care that the high cost of housing and the lack of decent-paying private-sector jobs are driving away middle- and low-income individuals and families by the hundreds of thousands.

Allysia Finley recently wrote about this phenomenon for the Wall Street Journal in a piece headlined “The Reverse Joads of California”:

“During the Great Depression, some 1.3 million Americans — epitomized by the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ — flocked to California from the heartland. To keep out the so-called Okies, the state enacted a law barring indigent migrants (the law was later declared unconstitutional). Los Angeles even set up a border patrol on the city limits. Soon the state may need to build a fence to keep latter-day Joads from leaving.”

Now historian Walter Russell Mead is detailing how this progressive contempt for the less affluent is combining with the brown energy boom in red states to change basic population patterns in the U.S.:

“The US Census Bureau reports that the Great Plains and Texas are experiencing the country’s most rapid population growth. Thanks to the energy boom, strong hiring growth, rising home prices, and other factors, the Northeast and Midwest are bleeding domestic migrants bound for cities like Austin, Orlando, Phoenix, Denver, and Raleigh.”

One in 25 Americans moved to a different county in 2011, the highest figure in several years. It likely would have been far higher had not so many families been rendered immobile by being underwater on their mortgages.

Social justice = protecting public employees, causes of rich liberals

We’re accustomed to California leading the nation and the world, but the growing feudalization in blue states is a perverse example. It underscores a point that can’t be made enough: The party that supposedly cares about social justice instead often uses minorities as props to protect and advance the interests of its affluent liberal professional elites and its secure, well-paid public employees.

That’s bad enough. What’s appalling is how — at least in California — many elected Latinos don’t mind being props for the most powerful Democratic special interests.

The epitome of this phenomenon: Assembly Speaker John Perez. The Los Angeles Democrat’s primary role? Being the enforcer of a diseased education status quo that values teachers infinitely more than students, especially struggling minorities.