Is Orange County Too Rich For its Own Good?

Joe Matthews

November 5, 2018

Essay

Essay explores the many ways in which the OC is failing: lack of housing, the nature of the jobs here, as well as the lack of mass transit and other infrastructure for its booming economy. ... Orange County hasn’t developed the robust and innovative tech sector of other wealthy American places. Instead, what distinguishes Orange County is the high percentage of its workers who are in high-paying professional services posts, from finance to accounting. But those higher-paying job categories are stagnating, while there is robust growth among much lower-paying job categories—in tourism, leisure, construction, and, to some extent, healthcare. The real growth in jobs in Orange County in the next decade, according to state projections, will be low-paying ones in food preparation and service, personal care aides, and retail sales ...
Orange County, despite being a job center and a crossroads between counties in Southern California, has been irresponsibly cheap when it comes to building its infrastructure ...

California - Orange County

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