A "back of the napkin" calculation seems to indicate there is no mass exodus. On mobile, but here is the typical annual CA pop change stats for the past decade, give or take:
That's already a loss of 300K people as a one-time event, and the state is down 450K from a typical year. It's easy to come up with another 150K, it's a trivial not "mass exodus" number.
But possibly a lot of those who left were missed in statistics.
I’m skeptical about counting international immigrants here. International immigration is a function of a very specific thing, in California’s case a measure of H1-B sponsor companies. If Indians come to California so they can get an H-1B from Facebook, but their kids them move to Tennessee because of poor quality of life in California, then that’s consistent with the “exodus” theory in my opinion.
I’m an immigrant from Bangladesh and quite a few people in my family moved to NYC. It has lots of support for people with limited English skills, lots of service jobs, etc. But they moved to Long Island as soon as they got their feet under them. It was a proud moment for them when they made the move!
I also wouldn’t count births or deaths. People don’t choose where they’re born. The exodus theory is generally supported by reference to “net internal migration.” (People coming from other states minus people moving to other states.) That’s really what illustrates people voting with their feet.
It’s not really weird that immigrants start in California and then wind up elsewhere. That’s normal, and they are quickly replaced with new immigrants anyways. California (and originally New York) as waypoints in immigration before dispersal elsewhere is a very old concept.
> That’s really what illustrates people voting with their feet.
If you Google “California population”, you get a graph where Texas and California start at the same population in 1940, then you just see California absolutely booming vs the other, with a meteoritic rise in population. Finally, at the end, you see the boom taper off. If one were to just look at that graph, you’d think something like “no one goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.”
It is in fact weird. The entire question is, why don’t these immigrants stay in California? What do the find so repellent, or what do they find so attractive elsewhere that is not available in California?
If you believe conservative media and "anti-woke" Twitter, California is an unliveable wasteland where you can't walk two paces without stepping over homeless people, discarded needles and human feces, where crime (violent and non-violent) is skyrocketing, where people don't feel safe in their own homes, and where the only response by "progressive" politicians is to double down on their same bad policies that created the mess in the first place.
Is any of that true? I have no idea; I've never been to California. But it's what a large percentage of the country believes about the Golden State.
I live in Oakland and I find all of that true. My family and I very much want to leave as soon as possible. (I’m a non-immigrant Democrat for what it’s worth, but not very progressive.)
We’re staying in-state though—Oakland is far from typical.
There are small parts of California where that is absolutely true. A block of the Tenderloin is more likely to have shit and needles than not. Crime in SF is out of control. There’s also about 160 million other square miles where things aren’t so bad.
This is true, but the bad places tend to also be the big population centers. This naturally means the same people that are content to allow these problems to fester are also politically dominant at the state level.
> This naturally means the same people that are content to allow these problems to fester are also politically dominant at the state level.
In the 1920s, Californians would complain about hobos hopping trains to LA and San Francisco (The Little Tramp stereotypes weren't completely baseless). This was when California was predominantly run by Republicans. During the Great Depression, California then attracted a bunch of jobless/destitute Okies and so on...
If the problem has existed for more than a hundred years, maybe it's not the politicians and residents enabling it. If California wants to get rid of its homeless problem, they need to change their weather (or get fixes on a national level, but with the current Republicans in place, probably changing the weather would be easier).
It doesn't matter. Divided government and electoral pressure means that we are fixed right of center for the foreseeable future; there is a reason we elected a conservative Democrat as president. The Democrats also can't just go off and propose nationwide solutions to homelessness, they can barely get an infrastructure bill going.
There are definitely some cities like that — San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles metro all come to mind. And we did waste however many billions of dollars on a high-speed rail system that still doesn’t exist. And we keep catching on fire every summer.
But in the central valley where the majority of conservatives in California live, there are MUCH smaller cities, and therefore have fewer “people” problems by comparison. Sure, Fresno and Sacramento have some homeless problems, but those are usually crack and meth users in a particular part of town that everyone else knows should be avoided. The reality is, everywhere has some sort of problems that you’ll find if you look hard enough.
Having said that, I was one of the people who chose to leave California. I love California, and it will always be my home, but being a single father with two children making $140,000 a year in the Bay Area in 2016, I was barely making ends meet.
The rat race of the bay area, combined with high gas prices, combined with terrible traffic that extends 100 miles in any direction from San Francisco, it just stopped being worth it. So I left.
I know that I don’t represent everyone, but I’m one of the statistics that got “rounded off“.
> I’m skeptical about counting international immigrants here. International immigration is a function of a very specific thing, in California’s case a measure of H1-B sponsor companies.
Most years, California has had more net inbound (not gross) international migration than the national H-1B cap. You are greatly exaggerating the role of the H-1B in California stats.
> If Indians come to California so they can get an H-1B from Facebook, but their kids them move to Tennessee because of poor quality of life in California, then that’s consistent with the “exodus” theory in my opinion.
Lots of California international immigration is family-based, often with sponsors who themselves immigrated and went through the whole process in CA.
Immigrants face unique constraints in their choice of where to live. Places that have lots of immigrants will attract more because of family-based migration and people’s desire to be closer to support networks. But that still indirectly comes down to the availability of jobs that will sponsor immigrants.
My dad sponsored other members of our family to immigrate. They settled in New York City, because it’s a great place for immigrants without strong language skills and domestic networks to get menial jobs. But that doesn’t make it a great place. My cousin has a foreign master’s degree and works in food service. He’d be way better off doing the same job in North Carolina, where the low pay would go a lot further. But there’s not many Bangladeshis in Asheville who could help him get a job.
I’d argue that those same features actually make New York and California kind of a shitty place for people who have more options. The inequality and segregation in those places is soul crushing. My family members that came here in more advantaged positions, e.g., getting a U.S. college degree, settled in places like Colorado and Texas. Those are the same places where native born Americans are going.
> But that still indirectly comes down to the availability of jobs that will sponsor immigrants.
“Jobs that will sponsor immigrants” and “Jobs that will sponsor one particular class of dual-intent non-immigrant visa” are two very different things, so you are moving the goalposts, but still wrong.
> I’d argue that those same features actually make New York and California kind of a shitty place for people who have more options. The inequality and segregation in those places is soul crushing.
Everyone non-white person I’ve known, immigrant or not, who has traveled from California to...almost any other part of the continental US that isn’t another Pacific Coast or California-bordering state, or NYC or a couple other non-Southern East Coast metropolises—and especially to the Midwest or South—has said that about the other places compared to California, not California.
> Immigrants face unique constraints in their choice of where to live.
What you are saying is that California and New York are where the jobs are - hence the immigration. An H1B is equally valid in California and Tennessee.
You can flip this argument for those leaving California as well. Out migration out of California should be discounted because the folks moving out are the ones who are no longer productive or competitive in states with higher productivity. The out migration is simply a form of semi-retirement to a cheaper location with low economic activity. Just as expats retiring to Colombia doesn't make Colombia "better" than USA, migration out of California to other states can be discounted.
This comment also privileges the choices and constraints faced by 2nd generation immigrants over the choices and constraints of 1st generation immigrants, which is unnecessary. 2nd generation immigrants also face constraints , primarily monetary. Most folks moving to Texas are moving to find a cheaper home, not because they love the politics or the electricity grid or the weather.
IMHO, it is best to not add any nuance when numbers give u a fairly unbiased picture.
> You can flip this argument for those leaving California as well. Out migration out of California should be discounted because the folks moving out are the ones who are no longer productive or competitive in states with higher productivity.
That formulation still makes California sound shitty!
> This comment also privileges the choices and constraints faced by 2nd generation immigrants over the choices and constraints of 1st generation immigrants, which is unnecessary
No, it avoids distorting the picture. Second generation immigrants and other native born Americans have much more freedom to go where they want, so their choices are more probative. First generation immigrants by contrast face a very restricted set of choices driven by immigration considerations.
> Most folks moving to Texas are moving to find a cheaper home
That’s exactly the conservative critique of California. It’s laws make housing expensive. Add to that crime and school boards more focused on taking Lincoln’s name off buildings than opening up and teaching kids in person. All that sucks for middle class people. And that critique isn’t rebutted by pointing out California has industries that suck in massive numbers of immigrants. In fact it’s the exact opposite. For a middle class person, it’s better not to have a small segment of the population making $750,000/year.
This is simply running around in circles. Privileging 2nd generation immigrants over the first generation cannot be framed as avoiding distortion. I have never heard some one say that they moved into California because they were constrained by language barriers. Virtually everyone moves here for economic opportunity. The ones that move out are the ones who want a large single family home with a large backyard. This is what they find fulfilling and a sign of accomplishment in their life. 1st generation immigrants don't have that kind of baggage. This also explains the hatred that a lot of these smaller towns have when Californians move there. Because they bring the fuckton of money that they earned in California and amp up the price of real estate in the area and gentrify it.
Maybe, we should discount the outflow out of CA/NYC because other states don't appreciate the CA money that disturbs the economic balance there. There are several cuts that can be made if we want to "remove distortion" from hundreds of different POVs.
If we want to identify a subset of the population who are privileged enough to make unconstrained choices we must look at billionaires and where they choose to live.
Favoring 2nd gen over 1st gen is not a viable position. It easily falls apart.
What about family visas for folks from Mexico and the Philippines? I’m suspicious H1-B would even be the majority of international immigration in California.
The point is that they didn’t move to NYC because they love NYC as a place. They moved there because a Bangladeshi network can help you get a job at Dunkin Donuts and sign up for various social services. Once they had their legs under them they left the city.
I did just this, left San Francisco for Nashville. Anecdotally I’ve been seeing a huge uptick in California plates here in Nashville. Great, I did the same thing, welcome, but now don’t ruin it.
This unfairly discounts the immigrants that California attracts , while counting folks who leave. To be consistent we must look at population growth as a whole, possibly split by age group. California will typically attract younger folks looking for work.
Well said. CA immigrants paid ~$50bn in taxes in 2018, ~50% naturalize, a million are business owners.[1] Almost 40% of Silicon Valley is immigrants. Half of all immigrants that come to the US land in California. Most from Asia and Europe.
On paper this is an exceedingly productive population, and represents 25% of California.
It discounts international immigration in from every state, so California isn’t especially penalized in that regard. It’s not unfair—all it does is separate the question of what makes a state a good destination for international immigrants (which involves very specific factors) and the question of what makes a state a desirable place to live for Americans who have unrestricted choices about where to live.
Discounting international immigration from every state is obviously unfair. United States is a country built by immigrants.
It is true that most American states are unable to attract immigrants. However, they do reap the benefits from the powerhouse states that keep America competitive in the global economic sphere.
Wouldn't international immigrants who enter the United States in California and then relocate to another state be counted in the domestic emigrants statistic?
> People don’t choose where they’re born.
To varying degrees people choose to have children.
I think when people talk about "exodus" form California, they mean domestic migration mostly. Imagine the most extreme scenario (completely ridiculous in reality, but let's consider it for a moment) - all current California population has moved out, and then has been replaced with fresh immigrants. Would you consider this situation as "population exodus happened in California", in the same meaning as it is discussed now, or it would be more appropriate to say "nothing special happened"? I think it would be the former rather than the latter.
I don't know about these numbers. What I can tell you is that the business exodus from CA is very real. This means less jobs, or, what could be worse, lower paying jobs. I know of entire companies who picked-up and left for places like Arizona and Texas.
I personally cannot wait to be able to do the same. I want nothing whatsoever to do with California in terms of business. After decades of living here I am just sick of it. I can't make the move yet due to deep family ties that we must respect and be considerate of. My mother just passed two weeks ago. My father is in OK health but he is up there in years. Etc. As some of these ties dissolve it will be far easier to make the decision.
And BTW, this isn't about Democrat vs. Republican states. In fact, one of my potential targets is Massachusetts. CA has simply gone looney. I can't even begin to make a list of the nonsense people and businesses living here have to put up with.
I'll give you a few (of likely hundreds):
They passed a tax added to your property taxes that is a function of any surface area on your property that does not allow rain to come into contact with dirt. So, yes, your driveway, patio, pergola, etc. All of it results in an additional tax assessment. For businesses, this means the entire parking lot is now a tax liability. Installed solar panels on a structure over some dirt? You just incurred an additional tax on your installation.
I am currently helping a friend figure out the technical aspects of a business he wants to start. His initial target was Los Angeles. This business would likely bring dozens, if not well over a hundred jobs to wherever it might be located. We met with the building permit folks for LA County. They pretty much told us no less than three years for all the permits to be issued. He is now talking to people in Arizona, Nevada and Texas. He is also moving his existing company (~100 jobs) to wherever the new business will take root.
And then there's the hundred billion dollar high speed train to nowhere that isn't even a high speed train and (if I remember correctly) might not even have ten miles of track built.
The governor signed an executive order asking for 15% water conservation. At the same time we have no problem growing almonds here and providing this high-water-demand crop with all the water farmers need.
Oh, and have you heard of the County of Los Angeles Business Property Tax? No, not what you might think. You have desks? Copiers? Chairs? Curtains? Equipment? Shelving? Yes? Anything inside the building you own or lease for your business is considered "business property" by the County of Los Angeles. And, as such, you are required to pay a tax to the county. Yes, a tax, permanently, every single year, on your chairs, desks, computers, coffee machine, etc. In fact, they call it a "privilege tax" for the privilege of doing business in or THROUGH the county. Yes, that's correct, if your business isn't in LA County but you do business in or DRIVE THROUGH the county, you are required to pay this tax. For companies with lots of equipment (like manufacturers) this could easily amount to $50K to $100K per year. In other words, a few jobs.
There's a lot more. I'll stop there before my blood pressure goes through the roof.
> They passed a tax added to your property taxes that is a function of any surface area on your property that does not allow rain to come into contact with dirt
So they charge you for the externalities incurred by impervious surface cover? How is that anything but rational? Seriously, why do you deserve to add to pollution and drought without incurring any penalty for the cost you inflict on others?
Impervious ground cover is also an issue in Texas, particularly in areas fed by limestone aquifers. In some municipalities you’re simply not allowed to add more impervious ground cover without some sort of exception. The rest of your examples may indeed be ludicrous, but I stopped reading when you opened with something so plainly rational and sensical.
What about the tax on owning business items in LA? Does that sound fair?
Also, don’t you think it is insane that at a time when we are in need of jobs for an increasing population, job creation is stopped due to bureaucracy?
I love California, I am staying to create businesses too. However, there is way too much complacency among residents regarding the situation at which we have arrived due to our policies.
These policies perhaps impact business creators first, but also have massive repercussions on the quality of life of other residents.
> What about the tax on owning business items in LA? Does that sound fair?
From other comments, it sounds like this only applies to items exceeding some large dollar value. I'm all for increasing the tax base, especially with Prop 13 strangling our budget for things like education.
> Also, don’t you think it is insane that at a time when we are in need of jobs for an increasing population, job creation is stopped due to bureaucracy?
This certainly sucks, especially with how often regulation is abused purely to create barriers to entry and solidify the positions of entrenched players. This is a problem pretty much everywhere but Somalia though, so I'm not hugely moved by one particular instance of it in one county. We certainly have lessons to learn in this regard in California though.
> And then there's the hundred billion dollar high speed train to nowhere that isn't even a high speed train and (if I remember correctly) might not even have ten miles of track built.
The planned max speed for CAHSR is 220 mph, which is faster than TGV or Shinkansen, and well beyond the threshold for "high speed".
Also, nowhere? The initial route is from SJ to Burbank. How is that nowhere? This is absurd.
You are confusing marketing materials with reality.
The planned speed is what they used to sell it to voters. Actual speed is ridiculous due to the issues the train would run into (if it is every finished) in every town or region it crosses. There are parts where it probably won't be allowed to go much faster than 50 mph. So, yeah, nice selling point, but, no, fake news.
Same with the San Jose to Burbank story. Forgive me if I don't hold my breath. I think they don't even have ten miles built and it has been years. And those ten miles are not even functional.
If it is ever finished, this is going to be a trillion dollar project (or more). It did not make any sense even below that price point. The entire thing is preposterous. Nobody is going to ride it (translate: not enough people to justify building it) and the cost per passenger will be so high it will be the boondoggle of the century.
This is what happens when politicians sell stuff to a public that can barely calculate the tip at a restaurant.
This is a gish gallop. It won't happen, and if it does, it won't work, and if it does, it won't work well enough, and if it does, nobody will want it, and if they do, it will be too expensive.
Somehow the rest of the developed world made them work, and they form a key part of the infrastructure. But, as with everything else that works well in the rest of the developed world, "It wouldn't work here because America is so special."
> They passed a tax added to your property taxes that is a function of any surface area on your property that does not allow rain to come into contact with dirt.
Tamped earth structures. BOOM. When you make your billions, just cite @musingsole in your about page.
The business property tax is for property over $100k. I don't think many offices have that much furniture. Also, it does not appear to be true that this tax is assessed on businesses outside of la county. Just how exactly are the figuring out who is driving "through" the county? They have to send you the assessment forms.
> The business property tax is for property over $100k. I don't think many offices have that much furniture.
No. It isn't. It applies above and below $100K. The rules are a little different on either side of that threshold.
> Also, it does not appear to be true that this tax is assessed on businesses outside of la county.
Well, then you know more than the tax assessor who visited me every year at my business and told me, almost verbatim, that if you do business in Los Angeles county or travel through the county to do business elsewhere, it doesn't matter where your home base might be, you have to pay this tax.
> Just how exactly are the figuring out who is driving "through" the county? They have to send you the assessment forms.
The way I learned of this tax, a couple of decades ago, is from a guy who knocked on my front door asking about a business next door. When I told him they were out at a conference, he asked me what my business was (we had no signage outside our industrial unit). When I told him, he said "Oh, yeah, I have you right here" as he opened a thick binder.
This guy was canvasing every single industrial center at the periphery of LA County to both assess and inform businesses they owed this tax. He was well trained. After identifying himself as working for LA county (showing ID, etc.) he asked stuff like "So, do you do business in LA County or are you just local out here". If you said "yes" to any number of his well-prepared questions out came an assessment form. He even tried to come into our facility to do an inventory. Non only was I not going to allow some random unannounced guy to come into our facility, we were doing a bunch of aerospace work that fell under ITAR regulations, NDA's, etc. You can't just walk random folks into your office when you do that kind of work. So, in what I am going to call a "third world style", he proposed an assessment value right there and then, in my lobby. I agreed and wrote the county a check.
F-ing thieves.
Think about it: Businesses in LA County have to perpetually pay taxes on their desks, chairs, tools, computers, tenant improvement (yes, that too!), SUPPLIES, etc. A perpetual tax on the damn chair you are sitting on. That's what it has come to. I don't understand why voters pass this crap and expect job creation, growth and the ability to compete with the likes of China.
100k is pretty easy to hit with 75-100 employees. 100 desks, chairs, and computers is going to be at least that much. hopefully you don't have meeting rooms, printers/copiers, a waiting area, a break room with fridge/microwave/coffee/table/chairs...
"businesses with personal property and fixtures that cost less than $100,000 are not required to file a Business Property Statement annually. Instead, a value is established based on an initial Business Property Statement filing or by an on-site appraisal. That value may be adjusted by subsequent annual on-site appraisals."
You pay this amount annually so long as you didn't buy anything new. They can show-up and do an on-site appraisal and get you if you under reported.
It doesn’t make it less ridiculous. It disincentivizes business creation in LA. Also, due to inflation $100k will be much less in a decade when small business owners will start getting hit by it.
California's larger number of domestic outmigrants tend to be lower income than the smaller number of domestic inmigrants. The people coming in are more likely to be software engineers, the people going out more likely to be the warehouse workers (or, even more likely, retirees.)
So what this tells me is based on migration alone, (since births / deaths are not indicative of intent to migrate) California has been flat at best, not counting an unknown number of international emigrants - so that number is likely lower. Given that those net immigration numbers have been dropping faster in the past couple years, we may indeed be seeing the tide turning on California immigration.
The thing about states like New York and California is the the fringes rot while everything is great in the core. The areas that are doing gangbuster business may be healthy at the moment, but other areas are dying.
I don’t know California well, but I know New York, and that upstate and western NY have been in free fall for years with some exceptions. Industry left in the 80s… cities like Syracuse are husks. Agriculture has been in decline for a long time and dairy, once the strongest ag industry, is in a death spiral as industry consolidation and subsidized fake products take over. Even NYC is not as resilient as it was… financial services pay the bills much more so than in the past.
California is obviously different, but I can’t imagine there aren’t parallels. Once the bell-weather tech giants start diversifying their physical locations that’s going to have a real impact.
All the tech giants have had locations in lots of other cities for many years now. Yet it hasn't seemed to affect their main California locations as of yet.
Sorry, but "back of the napkin" calculations are quick order-of-magnitude type estimates based on reasonable guesses or first principles, not by looking up numbers on the web (napkin not big enough to write out URLs; maybe use envelope)
- The article says that "millionaire flight" out of California is a myth. This is mostly true and a good point.
- However, the article/research looks at outflow and doesn't find a trend but this is bad methodology. It looks like they are not factoring in the fact that less people are moving into California then had been previously even if the rate moving out isn't too different. It almost feels intentional given how clean and well-covered the data is on that.
This opening paragraph is good
>Every year from 2000 through 2015, more people left California than moved in from other states. This migration was not spread evenly across all income groups, a Sacramento Bee review of U.S. Census Bureau data found. The people leaving tend to be relatively poor, and many lack college degrees. Move higher up the income spectrum, and slightly more people are coming than going.
The myth (repeated endlessly here and elsewhere) is that high taxes and excessive commercial regulation are driving wealthy founders and other knowledge workers out of California. The truth is that high housing prices are driving low and middle income households out of the state.
California has much lower housing costs outside of major cities. It’s exodus is seen as unusual simply because it’s a a populous state, but rate wise it’s hardly unusual. IMO, people leaving California in large numbers is also a function of how many people move into the state because people who moved long distances once are more likely to move again.
As 2020 was a serious outlier I am sticking with U.S. states by net domestic migration (From July 1, 2018 to July 1, 2019):
Net domestic migration rate per 1,000 inhabitants: Alaska −12.96, Hawaii −9.76, New York −9.29, Illinois −8.28, Connecticut −6.19, Louisiana −5.60, New Jersey −5.51, California −5.15, skipping several places Delaware 7.15, South Carolina 10.30, Arizona 12.50, Nevada 14.03, Idaho 15.31. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
It’s the territories that are seeing the fastest changes.
American Samoa –26.1, Guam –11.0, Northern Mariana Islands –15.4, Puerto Rico –14.1, U.S. Virgin Islands –7.5
Suburban and housing costs in California are very high by national standards. Is your argument that the people who are moving out of California overwhelmingly non-native Californians?
Once you are out of the main coastal communities housing prices drop dramatically. I have friends in Eureka renting a gigantic house for like $1200/mo, and I saw studio apartments in the city center in the order of $750/mo. The SoCal equivalents would be $3500/mo-plus and $1500/mo-plus, respectively.
So Eureka Ca, which is in the middle of nowhere costs about the same as the suburbs of Raleigh NC. Raleigh has a mid level international airport with direct flights to Europe and other continents, has many other cities and great schools in it, and nearby (NC State, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, etc), (the whole research triangle), etc... with plenty of job opportunities.
What does Eureka have (appart for nice nature)? How much does one has to drive to go to an airport that can fly directly to Europe or Asia? If your local business closed, how long and how much would you have to drive to find another job?
Commanding a mid-level metro prices, without the economy vibrancy of one, is sheer overpricing. And maybe that's why so many locals are leaving. (the influx is usually immigrants, which are more willing to put up with crappier conditions).
The people on the bottom 50% aren't taking international flights and proximity to international airport is honestly a worthless metric for 90% of the population.
In fact 500,000 of them without health insurance are looking encouragingly at a possible medicaid expansion 11 years after the ACA passed.
it is a proxy for jobs and a large labour market and choice, even for poor people.
Eureka doesn't have one, yet it commands prices of a mid sized metro.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but must point out that Eureka sits directly on the Pacific Coast of the mainland United States, which adds significant desirability to a town that is admittedly best known for having a lot of tweakers.
(In fact Eureka is fairly centrally located on the coast, which is kind of cool, too. I’d want to live in Arcata instead because less tweakers. But Arcata isn’t directly on the coast, so you can’t really compare them)
This is really pedantic, but Eureka isn't really directly on the coast either, it sits on the far side of Humboldt Bay and is shielded by an isthmus that is mostly empty land. That said the coast is a 10 minute drive (and maybe 25-30 minute drive for Arcata)
As for the populace... they don't call it Eutweaka for nothin
The more we narrow our focus the less meaningful the discussion. Whether Eureka is overpriced is a digression. The parent post to this whole offshoot is implying that comparing a carefully chosen podunk town in California with one of the only two big cities in the entire state of NC shows why people are leaving CA.
Eureka can be overpriced while the overall thesis remains carefully constructed malarkey. NC has grown by 300% in the last century while CA has grown by 900% in the same period. More recently NC has grown at about 1% per year over the last decade. California grew similarly over the same period until 2016 when it started to slow down. Its barely a blip in the graph and needs no complicated explanation.
I chose Eureka because I know people there and have direct experience with the town, even if it is an extreme example. If I knew folks and the housing situation in Stockton, or Modesto, or Bakersfield, or even Temecula, or any of those other armpit Central-Valley cities, I would have used them as an example.
And you're right, maybe Raleigh is a better choice. Or maybe Minneapolis. Or perhaps Boise, or any number of other mid-size capitol cities. But they aren't California.
I think the point is that we should compare major metropolitan centers/coastal communities in CA to major metropolitan centers and coastal communities in other states. That there are places relatively cheaper in CA is not in question, but those cheaper places are likely similar to even cheaper places in other states.
The opportunities available in Eureka are not the same ones available in the Bay Area (although it's likely gotten better). I suspect they don't even stack up to Raleigh favorably. Eureka is much smaller than many bay area cities, and more importantly, is isolated, so it feels much smaller than even the ones that it is similarly sized to, as once you leave Eureka, you're not immediately entering another city of the same or larger size.
Right but this is just by virtue of CA being a big, long, state where the northern reaches are far away from the economically active parts.
Eureka is charming enough, but it has no specific attractive force over any other (very) small coastal city where the next-larger city is many hours' drive away. Compare to Crescent City, or southern coastal Oregon.
So yes, you're still in California up there, and housing is less expensive. But there are no jobs (WFH tide floats all boats), and it isn't the California that most people are looking for. See also: Bakersfield.
Median income in Eureka is well below the national median income. It's a beautiful area, very mild weather, old growth redwoods nearby, and the Eureka/Arcata/Fortuna area has universities, some good restaurants, and top notch breweries. But there's almost no work. Illegal cannabis growing used to be really big in that area, and now legal cannabis is significant, but pay is really low.
Susanville is a small town with a thriving industry in corrections, so lots of jobs if you don’t mind being a prison guard. It’s also an hour or so out of Reno, and has cheap housing. It’s also nice nature wise, and if you head north you are warned there are no gas stations for a hundred miles or so.
But moving to rural Nevada, rural Oregon, or rural Arizona is much cheaper than your example of a very cheap city in California. Even moving to Eugene, Reno, or Flagstaff would be cheaper total living expenses.
Absolutely true; you can easily double your bang for buck in California housing by moving outside of major areas. And those less populated areas are still _really_ nice.
But for every buck you save, you lose an hour of your life to our terrible transportation infrastructure. Twice the house, four times the drive. It's why the housing price equation is as unbalanced as it is here.
> I have friends in Eureka renting a gigantic house for like $1200/mo
They must have started renting that house at least 10 years ago and had a landlord who never rose the price. Because rental prices for large houses are $2000+ (Eureka/Arcata) or $1800+ (McKinnleyville) now.
Eureka is a moderate sized town by most standards, and you can get cheaper places in similarly sized towns or larger small cities throughout the US. Probably get apartments much bigger than a studio, too.
I clarified, I am saying the net migration from California is hardly unusual as a percentage of the population. However, the magnitude of exodus is a function of both the size of the state and the number of people who recently moved to California.
It’s not that an overwhelming percentage of people leaving recently moved in, but they do represent a larger percentage of people moving out which is normal.
Unless it's a temporary trend driven by speculators. Looking at CA house prices is like looking at FAANG stock. People will keep jumping in to join the ride until it finally crashes.
I guess this is probably the story that gets repeated in places like HN which I agree is common.
However, if you ever talk to uber drivers or your waiters they will complain about how expensive California is. Or even people at parties who are in between jobs and thinking of moving to where they grew up. I guess in real life I just hear more people talk about the general cost of living argument than a than the specific anti-tech one.
To clarify I am saying that some people on here are saying that California is anti-business/anti-tech and that is why people are moving out. I am saying the vast majority of people moving out of CA are just doing so because general cost of living isn't a great deal.
And almost by definition, if you move to California from somewhere else then "home" would be lower cost of living. Only exceptions are if you grew up in NYC, Boston, DC or a few other cities.
If you live on the west coast, people fleeing the high COL of Hawaii is pretty common. Also Alaska. The west isn’t cheap, I think a lot of people would be surprised by prices in Montana (and not just because Californians are bidding up housing prices).
> And almost by definition, if you move to California from somewhere else then "home" would be lower cost of living. Only exceptions are if you grew up in NYC, Boston, DC or a few other cities.
Lots of California is cheaper than a lot more than just the few most expensive cities. California is not just the central cities of the Bag Area. Also, on a state level, HI has a higher cost of living than CA.
Everyone knows that California is not just LA and SF. But also Florida isn't just Tampa/Miami and Arizona isn't just Phoenix.
The big cities in CA are more expensive than the big cities in other states. The rural areas in CA are more expensive than the rural areas in other states.
Pointing out that the rural areas in CA are cheaper than the cities in other states is not compelling.
And for the record, Hawaii is seeing net out-migration too. At least its excuse for low cost of living is the fact that its an island that has to ship everything in.
Your link doesn’t support your argument. California’s COL index will be dominated by the fact that it’s one of the nations most urban states, with two of the largest and wealthiest metro areas.
Indeed, my experience is that there are parts of CA that aren’t significantly more expensive than my Midwestern home state.
Certainly if one's goal is to live somewhere cheap while remotely-working at a high-paying tech company, you'd pay the highest state income taxes in California at the top bracket.
If we're just talking about random middle class (and below) people ability to retire in the same house they've lived in for decades, a few other states may be worse at the moment, e.g. NJ and CT and perhaps others raising property taxes fast. But the days of prop 13 protecting Californians from this same fate may not last forever.
Anecdotally as someone who's been doing some casual house-pricing over the last year around California, it is surprising how expensive a lot of the state -- including areas that were pretty cheap, in relative terms, just a few years ago -- has gotten for new home buyers. It's true that people kind of forget that there are cities outside the Bay Area and the LA Basin, but it's still dismaying how much a 1500 square foot, 3BR/2BA home that isn't of the manufactured variety is likely to set you back even in pretty remote towns in California.
Even in Oregon places like Hood River, Veneta, Bend and such have seen home prices surge.
Areas of Washington State like Arlington have seen this as well, it's crazy to see a dated 4 bed 3 bath house go for $800k when it is not within even supercommuting distance of any high paying employees.
Hawaii is not much of a defense as it has logistical reasons for its high cost, and anyway has a smaller total population than most major metro areas.
I'm not necessarily in the camp that thinks California isn't worth the cost. Though some undesirable location in the desert may indeed not be worth the taxes.
Since it is a place that people can come to California from, it is a very effective defense against the claim almost by definition, if you move to California from somewhere else then "home" would be lower cost of living.
> Anti-tech sentiment peaked in the early 2010s. Tech buses stopped being vandalized and the “die techie scum” thing mostly went away after 2015.
While we're comparing anecdotal evidence, I live in Los Angeles and count among my peers many who work in the Hollywood/Media industry. I can assure you the general sentiment among them toward Big Tech is overwhelmingly negative. I work in tech (albeit not a large company) and even I tend to agree.
I am guessing that the previous post is about the S.F. Bay Area anti-tech backlash peaking in early 2010s. I also think that the people who were expressing that backlash would not distinguish so much between Big Tech and Hollywood/Media. I think the peak after 2010 has more to do with economic stress following 2008 and the glaring wealth inequality.
No, it's not. First, most "big tech" aren't nerds in the sense you mean, and they act more like the "cool kids" bullies in those movies than nerds. Second, the negative sentiment has more to do with wealth inequality and all that brings than any such petty rivalry as you describe.
Also to be quite honest software engineers aren't as smart or nerdy as they think they are in general. Very arrogant and egotistical, though, for sure.
Depends where you're looking. If you look online, anti-tech sentiment has never been stronger. These are of course, very different groups of people we're talking about.
I live in Texas and I whenever I go to California, I find it super expensive too! I am a unifier site professor and my salary is not very different from the professors in CA (State university salaries are public). I don’t know what is keeping those professors there.
You're forgetting income taxes and then add CoL on top of that. Sure you're making gross more but that $214k turns to ~$140k after taxes while that Texas $169k turns into ~$126k. So closer to a difference of about $14k. Then think that housing is way cheaper, gas is almost half the price, electricity can easily be had for 7c/kWh in DFW, etc. I just filled up this afternoon for $2.49/gal, what does gas cost out there these days, $4.60/gal?
In the end I imagine the prof at UTD could easily have more cash at the end of the month than the prof at UC Berkeley.
UTSA is such a small school it really shouldn't even be compared to UC Berkeley or UCLA.
So pretty much >$2k and up to $5,427/mo for housing costs. And that's supposed to be somehow more affordable than the surrounding area? For a 2bdr apartment its >$500/mo more than my mortgage + insurance on a four bedroom home with a pool purchased recently. For the condos, that's a few grand a month more. Compared to $1,400/mo average rent immediately surrounding UTD. Rent can be found for <$850/mo in Richardson, only 42-70% of the cost. And that's without having a small commute and living in a cheaper part of DFW, as Richardson's real estate isn't exactly a cheap part of town.
That would have to be a pretty good-sized stipend to offset that cost. Also it speaks volumes that a professor making >$40k gross more needs to then also have a housing stipend to make the actual take home close to the person making >$40k less.
Yeah, right? The Texas A&M prof can probably afford a good-sized house, own and operate multiple cars, and still save more cash at the end of the month than a prof at UCLA living in a studio and not owning a car despite making ~$100k less gross income.
I remember taking a hard look at some job offers around SF, relocating from DFW. Crunching the numbers I would have needed well more than twice my current salary to have my savings rate be the same and I'd still be downsizing my housing a good bit.
Others have pointed out critical problems in your comparison. Clearly, you can't cherrypick the best universities in CA and compare them to second-best in TX. UTSA is not even an R1 university. Generally when people talk about top universities in TX, they refer to UT Austin and Texas A&M. In any case, neither UC Berkeley nor UCLA is a good representative of CA universities.
A major issue in looking at the averages at the entire university level like this is that you might be comparing apples to oranges. There are typically three ranks among research professors: assistant, association, and full. These positions can additionally have chairs. The salaries differ considerably across these ranks. Then there are teaching positions which are usually non tenure track. They may also have the same assistant, associate, and full professor positions but their salaries are much lower than the research professors. AAUP appendix has combined all of them into one single category.
Finally, this survey masks the salary differences among different disciplines. In American universities, B-school professors typically earn way more than other disciplines such as pure sciences, psychology, and engineering.
When we do salary comparisons (we have to do it while negotiating a raise), we pick out colleges/schools that are similarly ranked as ours and then we take average salaries of professors at the same position. As I mentioned, the salaries are public so this is possible although quite tedious.
I'd suspect CA pays somewhat better, though it'd be countered to a degree by the high number of academics preferring to live in CA. But either way, Berkeley and UCLA versus UTSA and UTD? Are the latter two even ranked in the top 100? Berkeley has the 2nd most nobel prize winners in the US behind Harvard. UCLA has a solid number too.
Years ago (2007ish) I worked for a startup owned by a guy that relocated to Reno and had a huge property in some mountaintop country club on the edge of the city line. As we stood in the snow, looking out over Reno (where they had none) he was telling me all about how the money he saved on taxes in California 100% financed the property we were standing on. It was a very nice house... guessing about 4000 or 5000 sqft.
Many many years later I was sitting at the bar at the top of the Stratosphere in Las Vegas eavesdropping on a conversation by a guy who started some kind of sanitation or janitorial business. He was trying to impress a woman that he was talking with, and I distinctly remember him saying he'd be eaten alive if he started the company in California, and that he was thankful for the tax situation in Nevada.
It's not a myth because you heard two people talk about it? It's not entirely a myth, I think we can all agree - of the tens of millions of people in CA, some think that way.
But CA has long invested large amounts in its people (one reason there is U Cal Berkley, which is one reason for the Bay Area's success), which of course requires taxes, and it long has protected its citizens, including the wealthy ones - something the citizens like and vote for.
My point is that it is happening, if my anecdata is to be believed, and that sampling theory suggests it might be (or have been) a trend. As a CA native I love my state, but it is also important to understand other perspectives.
> sampling theory suggests it might be (or have been) a trend
How does sampling theory support that your two experiences might be a trend? I got two flat tires in the last ten years. Does sampling theory say it's a trend? Statewide? Worldwide?
> it is also important to understand other perspectives
Absolutely, but let's remember that much of the narrative has been pushed by a political faction for years.
> How does sampling theory support that your two experiences might be a trend? I got two flat tires in the last ten years. Does sampling theory say it's a trend? Statewide? Worldwide?
I don't run with startup/entrepreneurial types, so for this to come up in the way it has with my limited exposure to these folks, I consider that at least somewhat significant. I am not saying it is definitely a trend. But I do remember from my social science labs that ballpark-accurate statistical inferences can be made from surprisingly small sample sizes if the population sampled is broad enough. Do I just happen to find myself around locationally-anxious ex-Californian business owners? Who knows.
> Absolutely, but let's remember that much of the narrative has been pushed by a political faction for years
Ah yes, politics' icy tendrils (tentacles?) seem to molest everything they come across, and even some things they don't. All I can say is that I am not trying to push a political narrative, and that the people who are should kindly jump off a cliff.
? It depends on the size of the population. I don't believe surveying 9 people will tell you anything about public opinion among the ~325 million Americans.
And again, it must be representative. Should I ask 9 friends of mine?
No, unless you are trying to draw conclusions limited to your friends. Similarly, two flats in 10 years might be significant for you and your driving, but not tires as a whole.
> He was trying to impress a woman that he was talking with, and I distinctly remember him saying he'd be eaten alive if he started the company in California, and that he was thankful for the tax situation in Nevada.
He doesn't know that because he didn't try it.
There's news articles every year that California "has the worst business environment in the US" or stuff like that, but they're all based on surveys and what they actually mean is business owners are whining in case they get an income tax cut. CA's economy is, of course, doing great, and for the middle class the tax burden is less than Texas if you remember to count taxes other than income tax.
There are markets that are filled up with established players and lots of competition, and then there are markets with more opportunity because they are still developing. You can get eaten alive by competition as well as taxes, more so in fact. It isn’t clear that any of the two cases you referred to are because of taxes rather than competing in mature markets.
Incline Village aka Income Village, NV has been a popular destination for tax avoidance for decades. It’s true that people move states (in reality or on paper) to decrease their tax burdens. What isn’t true is that this sort of behavior has recently accelerated and turned into something that could be characterized as an exodus.
> The truth is that high housing prices are driving low and middle income households out of the state.
Also, high housing prices are allowing home-owning retirees to cash out and live the part of their life where they don't need to worry about a job quite well elsewhere.
I think part of the source of that myth is that middle-class Californians look wealthy to the middle class citizens of the more affordable regions they are moving to. Because while the cost of living is lower, salaries and wages generally are as well.
True but I do wonder if there has been a shift in primary residency among the wealthy. You have to have a residence in California if you're rich, it's just part of it.
Just my little data point but I moved into a sleepy little ID town that has a lot of people that have moved here from SoCal, and of the 5 people I asked "what brought all the way up to Idaho from California?" 4 of them commented on how expensive California was and the high cost of living. 3 of them also stated that they didn't like how things were happening in Cali.
Again small anecdotal data point but take it for what it is worth.
Well, it would make sense that the people who left California feel unhappy with California; Not that it's what you were saying, but just because it's likely that those who left the state are unahppy with it, that does not mean most people in California are unhappy with it.
In fact, I love California so much that I buckled the popular media narrative and moved _from_ Texas _to_ California. Funnily enough, people talk about the California-to-Texas pipeline as if it's a new thing, but it's been an observed phenomenon since at least 2005, and it's a lot smaller than the media would have you think (usually net ~40k year leave CA for TX, with about 80k going to Texas and 40k coming from Texas). That is 0.1% migration.
I've been in northern Nevada for the last 30 years and it's always been that way. When there's a boom in California it gets a little worse or the impact is felt a little more with things like housing, but it's not new. The best part is you get people that move here for the lower taxes complaining about the lack of services or the quality of the schools without the realization that those things are typically paid for with taxes. On the other side you have locals complaining about the "Californians" moving here and changing things to be more like California. I hear the same things from friends in Idaho that moved a decade ago to get away from the increasing housing costs here.
"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it." - Jeff Bezos
This is a tricky article because I can tell it's using the term 'exodus' and 'myth' differently than I would. It's abundantly clear there is a lot of migration out of California. Just ask Texans, Coloradans, and Idahoans.
That Bezos quote is pretty dodgy, but to address your point: Ask anyone in Denver and they'll tell you there's a mass exodus out of Chicago. Or ask anyone in Miami and they'll tell you there's a mass exodus out of Philly. People move around. I think this is a similar phenomenon to buying a car and "seeing that car everywhere all of a sudden." It's all about perspective. In this sense, data is always better than anecdotes.
If locals are leaving a place and being replaced by international immigrants then it explains the anecdotes. Everyone is more likely to know more people that left a place than moved there.
Also it will show in other stats. People in other states tell me there is an exodus there from California or New England, and their reasoning is based on differences in truck rental prices going either direction, which international immigrants don't need but domestic migrants do.
...and I think that represents a serious problem. If skilled labor and companies are moving out, and unskilled labor/immigrants are moving in, that is a major problem for the tax base.
Crime anecdotes are famously totally wrong, people always say crime has gone up recently even though it's collapsed in most US cities even since 2000 or 2010.
What this actually means is that people are watching too much TV.
It's genuinely terrifying to realize just how much power mass media holds over shaping public opinion. Without even lying usually, simply choosing what to report and who to give a platform.
American media isn't even particularly bad in this respect, it looks generally fair and reasonable compared to eg, the British media.
There is an assumption in your comment: that crimes get reported and recorded uniformly.
There is a good reason why international comparison of crime tends to concentrate on murder. Crimes are neither reported not recorded the same way. Murder sorta-kinda comes closest in this regard: it is pretty hard to ignore violent deaths.
Things like endemic petty theft have the potential to make people move to another city, while their official record is pretty low.
Not sure crime is the best choice of example given the statistically low rates of crime in SF combined with firms shutting up shop because there is so much (unreported) crime.
On the east coast I used to buy snacks passed to me through a pulletproof wall. Yes, the entire store was behind plexiglass.
Why they don't do this in tweaker central, I don't understand.
No, we'll tell you there's a mass exodus out of Texas and California, because that's the majority of out-of-state plates on the road in the metro area. And also the majority of out-of-state plates on vehicles that have gone into the ditch or median when it snows.
Denver sucks now. Kindly find somewhere else to go, y'all have been sending my rent through the damned roof, and companies insist on paying pre-boom salaries.
> It's abundantly clear there is a lot of migration out of California. Just ask Texans, Coloradans, and Idahoans.
Currently residing in Texas for 2.5 years now, moved from California. Yes, I anecdotally meet "a lot" of fellow NY/CA residents moving here. I also anecdotally have noticed that Whole Foods sells lots of local texan brewery beers. Are Texan local breweries on the rise in popularity or is it just that my proximity to the situation is making me thinking thats the case? (Note - I'm middle aged and work in tech, like lots of the people moving to Austin from CA/NY)
The media's obsession with California, is IMHO, hilarious. I lived there for 3.5 years. The quality of life is incredible, but that is offset by the absurd cost (and thus the economics of your work situation). This experience has, IMO, been in decline. But this is exactly how market dynamics work in a union of states. The more people leave California the cheaper (and thus sustainable) it becomes.
This is an overall good thing for Americans, regardless of where you live. Market liquidity means higher optionality.
This is very funny to read, because I had the exact opposite journey as you.
I love California so much that I buckled the popular media narrative and moved _from_ Texas _to_ California. Funnily enough, people talk about the California-to-Texas pipeline as if it's a new thing, but it's been an observed phenomenon since at least 2005, and it's a lot smaller than the media would have you think (usually net ~40k year leave CA for TX, with about 80k going to Texas and 40k coming from Texas). That is 0.1% migration, and seemingly negligible in either direction.
Out of curiosity: what city in Texas to what city in California? I think that's another huge factor in all of this - both CA and TX have vastly varying degrees of cultures across its cities.
Dallas to Los Angeles -- very similar in some regards, very different in others.
Funnily enough, I'd say Houston (which as a Dallasite I grew up bashing on, in the way SF does LA) is probably the most similar Texas city to Los Angeles.
> But this is exactly how market dynamics work in a union of states
Which would be great if any other state had the weather and beauty of California. And California is fucking huge to boot. Not initially splitting it up into multiple states was one of the biggest mistakes in this nation’s history.
Idahoan here, previously lived in Utah. Just adding to your point. Both Idaho and Utah are becoming inundated with people from California. It's mind boggling how hard it is to find housing here. When we bought our last house we were repeatedly outbid by cash offers from California buyers.
In my current neighborhood there have been 7 families that moved in during the last 12 months. One (us) from Utah, one from Texas, and the other 5 were from California.
40 million people live in California. That’s more than any other state by about 10 million. That’s also nearly almost a sixth of our entire country.
Everyone everywhere in this country feels like it is getting inundated by Californians. Some more than others, sure.
I can see two or three cars with Cali plates right now from my stoop. More people will always be from there. I suspect this has been happening for a long time and just now for some reason people are noticing.
Have you considered that this is a national problem? Californians are snatching up the affordable homes in Utah because others from around the country are snatching up the affordable homes in California.
The issue is the labeling. It adds subjectivity to what can be just as easily communicated objectively.
"Research Shows Percentage of Californians Planning To Leave State Unchanged since 2019"
Once SF Gate adds the subjective labels: Exodus and Myth, we get focused on the accuracy of the labels. The meanings of labels evolve, and that evolution is 'phased' through society. Hence labels will always mean different things to different people, different meanings lead to different reactions and then misunderstandings and in worst cases, conflict.
I intentionally try to filter out labels for that reason.
Californians moving to Texas seems new. But for the rest of the West, California had more people than Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. Combined. A tiny % of Californians coming to town with coastal equity can upset the balance in these much smaller states. It’s a joke not joke that people sell their 60 year old bungalow in LA and buy a 20 acre horse ranch for cash in Boise.
Going out on a limb here, but sfgate.com might have some bias. It's easy for data to be measured incorrectly when there is an incentive to getting it wrong.
California is losing a house seat, while Texas and Colorado are gaining one (or two for Texas). While the census doesn't account for the difference between growth rate and migration, it seems pretty suggestive to me.
You know, you gain seats by gaining population. Just because one state is growing faster doesn't mean another is losing people. Those are hardly dependent nor even expected (California gained it's massive population despite an overall high growth rate of the rest of the nation).
We know for a fact that people are no longer moving to California in large numbers from other states. That's more than a little bit suggestive of the overall context, of what's happening. And it's a big change from what used to be normal for California in the past, as it used to pull large numbers of people to it from other states.
It's very obvious what's going on with California, why people no longer flock to it, and it's going to get a lot worse yet rather than better. If the flight from California isn't obvious enough yet, it will be. Given California's population growth has already stagnated, what comes next is going to be decline.
declines take 100s of years. No one will really notice but it will just slowly continue to get worse but not at any kind of satisfying pace, like a big crash.
California lost a seat in the Congress while Texas gain two seats. California exodus might be a myth but there is no inflow of people while Texas is gaining more people from other states.
It’s crazy to think that Texas and California started out having the same number of people as recent as 1940, and now California is 33% more populous. It isn’t weird that growth in Texas might start picking up considering how slowly it has grown compared to California over the last 80 years.
Anecdotal data is still data, just not conclusive data. But there is a Chinese saying "无风不起浪", which roughly translates to “If there are waves on the water, there must be wind somewhere".
We are hearing a ton of these anecdotal stories very recently about Californians moving to other states, especially wealthy, higher income individuals. My gut feeling is that there is some material shift behind it and our systematically measured data could simply just be lagging at the moment, or they are measuring the wrong things.
> We are hearing a ton of these anecdotal stories very recently about Californians moving to other states, especially wealthy, higher income individuals.
We know matches a political narrative (anti-liberal, anti-tax) and that the right, such as on Fox News, has long pushed it about CA. That would explain why you hear it so much.
EDIT: I'm trying to avoid discussing the politics of it on HN, but ignoring the narrative is like (as I said elsewhere) ignoring the Sun as we talk about Earth's orbit. It's impossible to discuss it seriously or honestly.
This is objectively true: people are leaving California for high cost of living, insane real estate prices, and dysfunctional state politics. California is not the epitome of the American dream of "heading west" to make it big that it once was. And tech workers increasingly have mobility. Just the other day there was a top story on HN about a small town in Idaho that has become unaffordable because of outflows to there and lots of anecdotes about similar things happening in other cities around the country. The great opportunity that California once was has dried up, just like the reservoirs.
Based on what? Lots of people repeating something - we of the Internet age know better than our predecessors - isn't evidence of anything but 'viral' narrative, and raises no real question other than 'where did it come from?'
Anecdotal data that you do not collect yourself is subject manipulation (both deliberate and incidental) by the people who do collect it. There are over 300 million people in the US, you can collect anecdotal data for just about any narrative you want.
Anecdotal data you collect yourself is subject to your own biases, but is probably a decent reflection of the bubble you live in.
I wonder if the exodus is true in our personal or group bubble. Two theories:
Tech workers who can work remotely night be more likely to leave but make up a small part of the population of the entire state.
I also wonder if every cohort in SF/SV goes through a pattern where many people they worked with leave the area as they get older. So many people I've worked with there left over the last ~5 years as their lifes changed in things other than tech became important. In many cases this move was somewhat involuntary and driven by high cost of housing and other necessities like day care. So there always might be people who feel like everyone is leaving.
I do not have any data to present. I only have my personal observations and anecdotes from my peers. Which is why something seems off when this article claims the exodus is a myth when I see so many California license plates and when my realtor friend says a lot of Californians are buying up houses in the local market.
I don't claim to be a better researcher than the folks in the article but the conclusion doesn't seem to add up.
There are people leaving California, and California's population is huge. But the rate at which they are leaving is less than that of many other states, and the main migration is within the state. You are seeing a lot of Californians because there are a lot of Californians.
This isn't new: a couple of decades ago you saw a ton of people from California buying up property in the Portland area back when California's population was booming and Portland real estate was cheap.
I agree. We’re encouraged to trust stats over personal observations, but stats have noise , error and bad narratives . Generally stats are picked and chosen to tell a story .
Among my friends and coworkers I’ve known dozens who left CA in the past 12 months .
Even just this morning as friend surprised me that he will be gone in a week, and I know many more who are actively looking to leave , particularly before fire season
Random samples also mean there's more noise in the data. When someone tells you a fact , like "average crime is low", or "very few people get struck by lightning", that average is skewed by useless noise. If there's high crime in your neighborhood, who cares about the low crime neighborhoods? If you work in a corn field all day, your risk of getting struck by lightning is quite high.
That's the great myth with statistics. They are deliberately chosen to tell a story. By segmenting the data, you will get signal that matters to you.
If my friends and coworkers are all leaving, that is more meaningful to me and the decisions I'll make over the next year than if the majority of the entire population is staying.
It also has an impact economically on the State if specific segments of the work population are leaving.
I'll throw in my 2 cents that I can confirm the anecdote. I just moved to a small town in Idaho because my wife was from there. We found our house because several new developments are going up.
As I've been chatting with some people at church* I was told that about 1/3 of the people that attend have moved to our little town in Idaho from Southern California in the past 2 years or so. That might not seem like much, but considering that this is small town in the middle of Idaho it seemed like a pretty big deal to me. It's especially interesting to see many people who have more traditional jobs, often revolving around construction or the cultivation of potatoes interacting with many of the white collar, MBA type Cali expats.
* Note: The church I attend is a world wide church and divides it's congregations based on geographic area, encouraging people to attend the service based on where they live. This point is made to forestall the correlation causation criticism, that would imply the church I attend is particularlye attractive to people that have recently moved in from SoCal,
EDIT:
Just to clarify my wife and I did not move from Cali, we moved from Utah, because it was getting filled up with people from Cali, that resulted in prices for housing going up considerably.
> * Note: The church I attend is a world wide church and divides it's congregations based on geographic area, encouraging people to attend the service based on where they live. This point is made to forestall the correlation causation criticism, that would imply the church I attend is particularlye attractive to people that have recently moved in from SoCal,
If we are talking about movements of people between California and Idaho, we can throw in Utah as well, then there is one church that has traditionally been very strong in those three states (and much of the west). I mean, what other church is so strong in SoCal that it owns a bunch of land (enough for a few sports fields) in LA Westwood near UCLA?
If Mormons are leaving SoCal for Idaho or Utah, that wouldn’t be very surprising at all.
Lateral moves to another part of town or metro area are hardly worth noting, except that given the time period you're talking about, many people moved from the city to the suburbs during the height of Covid. It's a nice narrative to paint, but barring some turnaround for SF the writing is on the wall. The emigration was already hiking before the pandemic.
"between 2019 and 2020, the number of households leaving skyrocketed by more than 77%, or roughly 35,000 households — from 45,263 in 2019 to 80,371 in 2020."
"But while many city residents left for the outer Bay Area counties, the region also lost population during the pandemic, according to the postal service data. In March to November of 2019, nearly 61,000 more change of address requests were made out of the nine counties than into them. In the same period in 2020, 111,350 more requests were made out of the nine counties than into them."
CA's major cities are losing pop and CA lost a House seat.
Here's a translation that may be useful: Just because you can't measure your epistemic error (error in your knowledge, worldview, assumptions, or anything else) doesn't mean it's not there.
In my experience it's the #1 source of errors that smart people make.
I assume this is getting downvoted because of its tone, but the sentiment is correct. The statement is nonsense. There can be wisdom in attempting to understand why anecdotes disagree with data, but the vast majority of the time it is simply a combination of selection bias and the human tendency to want to believe things that support your own worldview.
Bezos is making a subtle point here that I feel people are overlooking.
1. Anecdotes that you notice, by their nature, tend to come from reasonably sized groups of people.
2. "Data" as the term is normally meant in business and government does not. It may originally consist of many individual data points that represent something about large groups of people, but by the time it reaches a decision maker it has been filtered through normally just one or two people who have selected it, normalized it, and analyzed it in various ways.
In other words, "data" is often not being used with its dictionary definition of a raw CSV file but rather it means "analysis". And unfortunately the nature of data analysis is that not only is it easy to make genuine mistakes but it can also be very easily manipulated in all sorts of ways to present whatever the analyst wants to be true.
Academic research is an especially prevalent form of this problem because people don't hesitate to claim they've made a "data" based decision then cite an academic paper that presents a model with some absurd assumptions, or where the model outputs aren't visibly connected to the paper's conclusions at all, or which shows signs of P-hacking, or where the dataset is unusably small and so on and so forth.
Hence why I find myself agreeing with the other posters - if you find yourself strongly disagreeing with Jeff Bezos about something that seems to be within his domain, think twice.
The statement is saying that in many situations, data is improperly or incompletely gathered, analyzed, and/or applied. Refusing to attempt to understand why an intensely data-driven individual would make that remark doesn’t seem wise. :)
> the vast majority of the time it is simply a combination of selection bias and the human tendency to want to believe things that support your own worldview
Citation needed.
Given Jeff Bezos success in growing a business from scratch, this is clearly one of his secrets and why "Are right, A Lot" is an Amazon leadership principle. I'm always surprised that people are so easy to dismiss insights from successful people.
> Given Jeff Bezos success in growing a business from scratch…
One thing we have to remember, savant level of greatness in one area can often indicate deficiencies in other areas.
If I were starting an online retailer 20 years ago, I would absolutely take Bezos’ advice. There are also countless other areas where I would seek advice from those with different areas of experience.
Steve Jobs was fantastically successful at running a computer company. He's primarily dead because his business sensibilities were astute and on point while his knowledge of heath care was so laughable that one of the worlds wealthiest men ignored reasonable treatments that had a reasonable chance of saving him so long that all the money in the world couldn't. It seems that skill in business does not confer virtue in any other area of life and one ought not give a very successful person extraordinary consideration outside his area of expertise.
You have been presented with a thesis that the California exodus is a myth. You have responded with a complete non sequitur quote from a mediocre man about trusting the anecdote vs the data asking us to forget or ignore in order the fact that the idea espoused by the quotation is nonsense, that Bezos wasn't registering an opinion on this topic, you are, and that you have made no argument whatsoever.
It is untenable to launder your opinion through a rich dudes mouth and then accuse skeptics of casual dismissal of insights from successful people when people are actually and in fact not dismissing Bezos they are registering their opinion on your comment here today.
The election wins of Trump, Boris Johnson, Brexit and The Liberals in Australia show that data collection really matters. Similarly the financial crisis of 2009 shows that missing data can really matter.
That's the key point of the quote:
> There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it
But those are all examples of data collection working fine, though, and people not listening to the data because their anecdotes went the wrong way.
FiveThirtyEight predicted a 28.6% chance of a Trump victory: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ This is a number far greater than zero - it is, for comparison, more likely than flipping two coins and them both coming up heads, or drawing a random card from a deck and having it be diamonds.
If people look at data that says "28.6% chance of winning" and they choose to read it as "0% chance of winning," that's not a problem with the way anyone's measuring anything, that's a problem with people trying to treat data as if it's an anecdote.
I agree it's a bad example re: the Bezos quote, but I also don't think it's an example of anecdotes leading people astray. IMO it's from the brand of bad pop sci that misinterprets perfectly good data while ranting about how amazing science is and how stupid anecdotes are.
> FiveThirtyEight predicted a 28.6% chance of a Trump victory:
This is cherry-picking of the highest widely-known prediction by far, practically an outlier. And I don't think they do any actual polling, just analysis using others' polling data.
I hate to call something gaslighting, but this is gaslighting of the highest order. I am not familiar with Australian politics, but the other three cases were textbook cases of the data saying one thing (Trump might win, BoJo will probably win, and Brexit might happen) and people refusing to believe it.
How these get turned to make precisely the opposite point (Not just by you. It happens all the time) never ceases to amaze me. Presumably the thought process is "I and the people I respect build beliefs based on data. I and the people I respect were wrong. Therefore the data was wrong". Unbelievable.
What exactly is “the data” that we’re talking about? Is it the measurements that were made, and the methodology used to make them? Or is it the conclusion that something in this case is a “myth”? Because I’d suggest that only one of those things is “the data”, and the other one is a subjective interpretation of it. I’d also suggest that people who have an agenda to promote will often attempt to blur the line as much as possible between empirical measurements, and their own opinions about what they’re supposed to mean.
In this case, the data I am talking about are the polls. Of course, there's a lot of methodology that goes into designing the polls and the data collection process, but those were basically solid and importantly, not subjective.
> I’d also suggest that people who have an agenda to promote will often attempt to blur the line as much as possible between empirical measurements, and their own opinions about what they’re supposed to mean.
This ran rampant in all those cases (Trump, BoJo, Brexit), I agree.
The thing is that Bezos has very good instincts. So he’s able to distinguish between anecdotes like “my packages are taking longer to get to me” and “Bill Gates has been tracking me through my covid vaccine.”
Besides, he didn't write this in a textbook. What he probably meant is something more like, if anecdotes seem to be pointing in a certain direction, it may be worth exploring the causes and understanding them, rather than just ignoring the anecdotes because they contradict some other information you have. What you don't know can hurt you.
This is the kind of thing good CEOs and leaders do. There's some overlap with Andy Grove's observation that "only the paranoid survive."
A (baseless) line about anecdotes - and said by someone with no awareness of the issue at hand or the research - is evidence that this entire research project is wrong?
Why do we even use research? Why don't we just run on anecdotes? There have long been anecdotes about witches and black cats, about prayers to the rain god, etc. I'm pretty sure Amazon relies on research and data.
I think the myth is self sustaining. 200,000 more people leaving than Texas makes California look 50% worse. Ignoring the larger population is easy/accidental in many discussions.
Part of the problem is that when it comes to the wellbeing of a state, financially, one person is != to one person.
If corporations and highly-skilled/high-earning labor are moving out, and low-skill/immigrant labor is moving in, then you develop a major fiscal tax revenue gap that has to support more low-income neighborhoods with the tax revenue from fewer and fewer corporations and high tax individuals.
It can also have a snowball effect where people try to sell their homes before home prices fall further, or try to establish residency elsewhere before taxes are raised more.
In a way, the more we talk about it, the worse it can get. I suppose that's why the denials are so vocal.
Housing is the real problem. I still live in the neighborhood where I grew up in Southern California. Back when I was a kid, we used to have street gangs, but they’ve all been gentrified out. They’re putting up a new housing complex in my neighborhood, and I learned that I qualify for the affordable housing units on a senior developer salary, because it’s below the median income.
Wow, so much good info in two lines of comment, love it. What you don't mention is whether you inherited or at least live in your family home.
A lot of my in-laws have lived in Palo Alto way before the boom times but are considering leaving when they retire, at that point the upsides of staying are suddenly a lot less.
Careful framing of the purported “myth” is critical:
> For one, while residents are moving out of state, they are not doing so at "unusual rates." Similarly, the research found no evidence of "millionaire flight" from California and notes that the state continues to attract as much venture capital as all other U.S. states combined, despite the recent exodus of Hewlett-Packard and Oracle.
Who is saying California is unattractive for rich people and venture capital? The people leaving are middle and lower income people.
> Who is saying California is unattractive for rich people and venture capital?
One potential source: this is a popular conservative talking point about the dangers of liberal government, and the "exodus" is often used as evidence to justify those talking points.
"See, just look at California, they implemented <liberal policy I hate>, and everyone is leaving the state". This kind of viewpoint is rampant on places like /r/conservative, and is often followed by similar mischaracterizations of life in Chicago. This always fascinates me - it seems like people are actually excited about the perceived negative forces driving people out, because they feel it validates their viewpoints about certain policies, even when the evidence to support correlation (never mind causation) doesn’t seem to exist.
I haven’t encountered much serious discourse about California being unattractive to people with means.
Edit: I’ve upset some folks with this comment. I’m curious to know how/why.
> Edit: I’ve upset some folks with this comment. I’m curious to know how/why.
Any mention of politics tends to get downvoted, but in this case, the myth is in significant part a product of a political narrative. I don't know how we can avoid the subject.
We can't talk about the Earth's orbit without discussing the Sun.
In a complex state with millions of people and perspectives, is it not possible that a large group of people from California do feel that way and do express those views when they move to other states?
I absolutely think that is possible. I’m sure a combination of factors plays into this.
My point was that when I’ve seen this come up, it’s almost always in the political context. That doesn’t exclude other possibilities, but does seem to be a major contributor to the “buzz” about this topic.
The thrust of the argument is that what made California great was that it was a great place to move and raise kids in the suburbs with lots of opportunities. The changes in California are hitting those people the hardest. And those people are in fact leaving: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/09/not-the-golden-state-...
The fact that California continues to be a great destination for young single engineers, venture capitalists, and H-1B workers for whom working at a California tech company is a ticket to staying in the US at all, isn’t responsive to that argument.
I worked at big tech in California for a bit, and, anecdotally, all of my coworkers stated that they didn't plan to retire in California, because it's just so expensive it makes no economic sense. It seems the plan for many people who come in California to work at big tech is to make big money for some number of years and then move out.
I ended up leaving, in part because I didn't love the culture there, and some of it was this impression that many people around the bay area don't really care about making friends, because they know they might not be staying for long, and don't care to build roots. This is again anecdotal, but this kind of culture isn't really great long term. If your population is highly unattached and doesn't plan to stay, it doesn't bode well. Besides the high cost of living, the constant inflow and outflow of people in the bay area could end up making you want to leave too.
I agree with you that a lot of people here consider themselves transient and don't work to put down roots, but I've personally found enough people who actually want to stay here to make it worthwhile to me (but I've certainly experienced some sadness when good friends move away). Everyone's mileage will vary in that regard, of course.
They're wrong about that. The reason California is expensive for them is because the state is set up to be easy to retire in - they're just paying for all the retired boomers. If they stay long enough, they'll get to exploit the next generation too.
Gonna be the [citation needed] guy here again. I've lived in the SF Bay Area for nearly 20 years, know other people who moved here around the time of the first dotcom boom and a few more who actually grew up here (they exist), and of that group of a couple dozen friends and acquaintances ranging in age from around 30 to over 60, the number of people who believe California will be "easy to retire in" is precisely zero.
I have a feeling you're trying to make a comment about California's property tax system and the way it's protected now-retired homeowners. And, you know, fine, if someone can buy a California house now and stays here through retirement age and they don't change the property tax system, they can take advantage of that, but that is one heapin' helpin' of "if" there, pardner.
And on top of that, the property tax system makes it really hard to move into a different (even much smaller) place when you're in your retirement years. Rhat has changed recently to be a bit better (people over 65 now have a lot more flexibility in transferring their existing property tax assessment to a different property), but I think that only serves to drive your point home that things can and do change over time, policy-wise.
> Edit: I’ve upset some folks with this comment. I’m curious to know how/why.
The "conservative talking point" mentioned is a bit of a straw man. I doubt you'd hear it much these days by serious commentators (you might hear it from an old guy in a bar or a College Republican).
You're more likely to hear right-wingers these days say that California only works for you the wealthy and well-odd at the expense of the poor and middle classes. Homelessness, petty crime, NIMBYism and even a lot of the environmental initiatives (e.g. $0.10 per plastic grocery bag). All of those things have a disproportionate effect on the poor.
M
From another source, about people leaving San Francisco:
* "Among the 50 most populous U.S. cities, 15 shrunk during the pandemic" Top three: 1) Baltimore (-1.42%), 2) San Francisco (-1.39%), 3) San Jose (-1.3%)
* Of people leaving SF: 72% moved elsewhere in the Bay area, ~20% moved elsewhere in California. The next most popular destination was Washington state, the majority going to Seattle.
That's actually much smaller than I expected for SF. 1.39% isn't really a lot at all; even in absolute number terms it's something on the order of 10,000 people.
The few people I know who’ve moved still “live” there to avoid taking a hit on compensation at review time and just changed their mailing address to a friend’s place or something.
Yup. That data suggesting they moved elsewhere in CA is based on USPS change of address requests. Friends I know who left the state (or country) used a friends kr family’s address.
I am a recent transplant to Southern California. In my experience, educated peers are moving to or searching for cities that provide good value based on their fiscal position. Some of them are moving to NYC or LA metros. Others are looking at Raleigh or Denver and a few Austin. What sticks out to me is how many people are relocating en masse at almost the same time.
Are you a recent transplant due to a life event like college graduation or the like? If so the correlative nature of your peers is likely not that actually interesting from a broad social perspective.
Why would you assume that? Without providing too much personal detail. I am 10 years+ of out undergrad, work for a large tech company, own property, and originally from the midwest. I consider my peer group diverse as I am a minority who grew up in a low income area but found success in college and consequently in my career.
I just mean that there are certain events that happen in clusters around your peer group (graduation, marriage, kids, divorce, retirement, etc) that will appear as a pattern to you (and me) that are not actually clustered in the broader population that may drive the trends you see.
I was just thinking a few days ago (while on a van trip to Yosemite) that one of the great things about moving to CA would be never hearing complaining about Californians moving there and ruining the place.
Well as someone moving out of California I’m having a hard time finding a moving truck, even 3 months out. uHaul and Ryder are having a hard time fulfilling demand because so many trucks are leaving California and so few are coming back.
There's also a lot of demand for moving trucks being used locally as delivery vehicles, since there's a surge in deliveries. Usually not the big trucks, but when a delivery service rents a small truck or van, someone who was going to rent that to move has to rent something bigger.
It's riskier, but you might see if you can buy a used moving truck and plan to sell it at the destination. I've seen a few reports of people doing that with good results, although I can imagine many ways it might go bad.
Or pod style boxes, or load a trailer and a trucking line drops it off at the new place might have better availability.
The pod-style boxes had an even greater rate imbalance in my experience a few months ago. In fact, I couldn’t even get a pod from PODS and had to use a different company.
I've also heard of people renting the smaller (and even some of the larger) moving vans/trucks because they want to rent a car, but car rental services have crazy low inventory due to a lot of shedding they had to do during the pandemic.
It seems crazy to rent a box truck just to be able to drive around town (parking has to be a nightmare), but people are doing it, or so I've heard, at least.
You may find luck with Estes Sure Move. They provide a commercial truck trailer that they truck for you and you save money the less space you use in it (they fill the rest with commercial shipping). I used them to leave the Seattle and they were significantly cheaper than the competition.
It shows a population decrease of around 0.5% in 2020.
Probably won't put much of a dent in traffic or housing costs, even if it continues for 10 years. But I still have fond memories of the 1990s, when things were more sane.
"Similarly, the research found no evidence of millionaire flight from California...".
This nonsense is clearly peddled by local politicians trying to save their faces.
I moved from CA to Vegas which automatically boosted my income by +10%. With covid times where major employers allowing people work from home - this is logical move for tens of thousands of people.
No houses for sale in decent Vegas neighborhoods here, mostly hunted by people from CA.
My millionaire friend sold his beloved house and moved to NV as well.
Lots of people i know moving to TX, FL or NV.
Raising taxes, new taxes, stupid liberal policies stimulating crime and filth, unhealthy political climate, corrupt and uncapable governor.
The list goes on. En masse or not - the tendency is there.
I'm not arguing that your real-life experiences aren't real, just that they may not be representative.
My lived experience is somewhere in the middle: I've seen some high earners leave, but more high earners stay. Based on this study, it seems my experience might be more representative of the whole.
Also not sure why you're taking this combative, condescending tone. Seems like you have an axe to grind and are emotionally attached to your position for some reason. But it does seem like you weren't happy in CA, so I'm glad you've found a place to live where you're happier.
>"A plane crashed in California"
This nonsense is clearly peddled by local politicians trying to save their faces.
I flew yesterday and the plane didn't crash, a lots people I know flew the past weeks and didn't crash either.
Ever thought that you maybe in the peer group that moves out of California for whatever reason but your group is just a statistically irrelevant minority?
We're talking about the significant demographic trend that is clearly there and it signifies the utter failure of CA
politicians to keep productive and creative people as well as businesses.
Gaslighers gonna gaslight. You don't need a Ph.D. to see this "research" was guided by motivated reasoning rather than genuine desire to figure out what is going on.
What makes you say that, did you read the paper and find flaws in their methodology? Or does it disagree with your preconceived narrative and dismiss it out of hand?
I read the UC San Diego summary. As far as I can tell, their data is from an online poll. It’s well-known that online poll respondents are generally more interested in politics than average. It stands to reason that those considering leaving California may be much less interested in politics and thus undersampled. I didn’t see this potential sampling issue addressed in their write-up, though I’m a layman unfamiliar with the polling methodology they’ve used.
As a native Californian, I'd be fine with more people moving out of California, especially the coastal areas. The surf spots are overcrowded compared to the days when I had the waves to myself.
Then there's this:
California man blasts Texas 'dystopia' in Op-Ed after moving to Austin
The California 'exodus' is more of a mass immigration into certain desirable areas in the US. These cities & even states have populations smaller than individual suburbs of LA so Californians tend to stand out; especially when they complain and want to change the places they move to.
A while ago I moved to Medford Oregon for a couple of years and the hostility towards Californians was real. Someone I know moved to Southern Oregon recently and it's a little better, primarily because there are a lot of Californians there enjoying great property values and no sales tax.
Where I moved in the Pacific North West, the most hostility comes from the people who moved here 15-20 years ago, often from California too. Although, some of them are pretty chill. Most of the people with deep roots are pretty chill too, but I have run into a amall handful of extra grumpy people.
Over the past few decades California has seen one of the largest economic booms in history yet population has barely budged. That in itself should indicate a problem but for some reason people need to see housing get so fucked that workers are giving up on their jobs and moving away at such a rate that population declines before they'll admit something is wrong
As of January it still was. We locked in $400 for a trailer from San Diego -> Raleigh last year, but on our trip across I tried to add another day and the price was around $1000 because we would lose the guaranteed price I locked in last year before we left. As a lifelong Californian it really sucked making that choice, but the state is getting too expensive and a little over the top politically for me. Maybe we’ll return home one day…
One thing I'm interested in is, regardless of whether more californians are leaving or not, are californians driving up housing prices in the various obvious targets (oregon, idaho, montana, colorado, nevada)?
I'm part of the "exodus" in that earlier this year I finally bailed on the bay area after living there my whole life for vegas, and the cost to buy a house here seems insane compared to renting and to similarly remote cities. Housing prices in the stereotypical california exodus places like Portland and Austin seem similarly wild. If californian emigration isn't responsible, then what is? Is it all just general demand for urban housing and are californians just a scapegoat?
Just one data point, but a friend of mine who lives in Boulder, CO tells me that home prices have gone up a lot in the last year or so, and his belief is it's largely driven by people leaving CA. Might not be the full cause though.
I experienced this too. Left SF and moved to Austin in 2020. Home prices have shot up 20% in less than a year. It’s such a sharp jump that I’d say Austin is not really that affordable anymore.
It may be a myth, but here in Southern Oregon, I have several new Californian neighbors that I got over the last year, where in previous years most of my newer neighbors have been other Oregonians.
"In fact, only 23% of California voters said they were seriously considering leaving the state, which is lower than the 24% who said the same in a 2019 survey conducted by UC Berkeley."
That's because we already left, so we're no longer in their survey population.
When I moved out of California, a uhaul was ten times as expensive going from SF to Phoenix as vice versa. When a survey or research project contradicts market prices, believe the market prices. Rates now are $400 AZ->CA, and $2500 CA->AZ.
Yeah, when we left earlier this year the U-Haul prices were insane. We got lucky and managed a trailer cross country for $400 but the price jumped to almost $1000 if we added another day since we would lose the locked in price we originally got.
I know several that have left for Texas. I know one that left for Michigan. One that left for San Diego. A few that left for Seattle. So it’s very real. Whether or not it moves the needle though is the bigger question. I myself would never move unless some sort of environmental catastrophe hit it, like forest fires or no more water which is actually a possibility.
On top of that, it seems questionable to use a survey from this year to show that fewer people are considering leaving California. Can't that just be survivorship bias? Maybe fewer people are considering leaving California because so many already left. This seems consistent with the states own numbers for 2020, which show that more people left CA than migrated in.
I left 20 years ago, mostly for quality of life and cost of living reasons. But I still visit often. Taxes are O(the same) where I moved to. A bit lower but not so much as to be decisive.
The article you linked here says California’s population increased between the 2010 and 2020 census. The state lost a congressional district because other states grew faster.
Not really. An "exodus" implies a -- large -- net decrease in population. Decreased growth is not an exodus, even if it's driven more by people leaving than fewer people arriving.
University of California doing "studies" to defend the state of California...right before a recall election of the Governor -- color me skeptical.
I personally know > 10 people who have left (in disgust) in the past 2 years. I have a sister in Texas who is getting personally wealthy selling houses to Californians moving there. She's been selling for > 30 years and has never seen an influx like this from a single state, ever. California even lost a seat in the US Congress due to population decline.[1]
> University of California doing "studies" to defend the state of California
Ok, but who is "allowed" to study the state of California? By your reasoning,
* If UC does a study on California, we can't believe what they say because they have an incentive to paint CA in only the best light.
* If, say, the New York Times publishes an article on California, we can't believe what they say because they have an incentive to show readers that NY is a much better state to live in than CA.
Clearly, this is crazy. People also complain that the UC system has a "liberal bias" when research comes out that paints California's housing policy as racist / classist. So which is it? UC is biased for CA? Against CA?
The answer is that the state of California is home to 40 million people with a wide spectrum of beliefs and motivations. You need to look at the individual groups producing this research, and look at where their incentives lie, where they get their money from, and whether their record demonstrates integrity.
>Similarly, the research found no evidence of "millionaire flight" from California and notes that the state continues to attract as much venture capital as all other U.S. states combined, despite the recent exodus of Hewlett-Packard and Oracle.
People won't even move states within the same country because of taxes, meaning they certainly won't leave the country if federal taxes were raised (a common argument against raising taxes). Therefore, we should dramatically raise taxes on the very wealthy and actually put that money to use improving society instead of letting a handful of billionaires uselessly hoard it. They're not going anywhere.
I think people need to reconcile with the fact that California is for people who have very high power careers or are career protected. Either that or work in service. It was too good to last very long. Just move somewhere else and embrace the weirdness.
But possibly a lot of those who left were missed in statistics.
[1] https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265 [2] https://www.ppic.org/publication/immigrants-in-california/ [3] https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-population/ [4] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/state-and-territorial-data....
Edit: learning to format...