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Originally Posted by Crawford
I don't think they're particularly similar. CA boomed bc of massive federal postwar economic interventions. People weren't mass-moving from Nebraska or wherever bc they thought Big Sur was pretty. There were huge Cold War-related job opportunities, in aerospace, research, military, etc. This is what really fueled the CA boom. CA had some of the highest wages and greatest economic opportunities from the 1940's onward. Institutions like Stanford, Caltech, JPL, Scripps were gamechangers. In contrast BC has relatively low wages and doesn't really have anything like CA's gigantic postwar top-down military-industrial base.
And some of the least scenic parts of CA had some of the strongest booms. Meanwhile, gorgeous areas like the Lost Coast were basically unsettled.
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You tend to overstate the impact of federal, "top-down" military-industrial investment in producing California's post-war boom. Yes, that was a factor. Especially in the tech and aerospace sectors. But private industry unrelated to any of that provided vastly more job opportunities to newly-arriving Californians, and we should not discount the role that state policies and projects played in the postwar economic and population boom. Mid-century California was planning and already building state-wide water, power, and transportation networks, the nation's best public higher education system, etc., to ensure that the state wouldn't just be bigger and busier, but also better.