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Comment by InTheArena | Hacker News Reader

I live in a state where we are suddenly inundated with California’s refugees, fleeing the state now that they don’t have to physically live there. Reasonable taxes, a much less stressful work-life balance, bigger homes all make it very appealing to ditch the once0golden state.

Our company has decided not to reopen a majority of it’s office space. Ironically, the Bay Area office is remaining open while other offices are being closed, but even there it will be a shadow of it’s former self

I would like local and federal governments to come up with a plan for the inevitable bail out that transforms some of this space into more livable space, more community access, and more on-demand office space.

Apple’s HQ has turned into the worlds largest set piece for a iPhone ad.

San Fran is going to come out of COVID dramatically weaker. That’s been inevitable for a while, the pandemic just accelerated it.

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I can't help but think this take is projecting a bit too much.

Inundated? How so? What are you seeing?

Tax benefits, work-life balance and bigger homes? Really, you can see these changes in the last 6 months of a pandemic? I could be wrong but I don't think the majority of employers are letting employees change states (and state taxes). WFH does not mean work from anywhere, especially tax-wise.

This all sounds plausible longer term but to say you're inundated seems like it must be hyperbolic.

Not OP, but I know three different families who are actively visiting other states to decide where to live next because they so loathe Newsom and the California governance writ large. They never liked it, but the wildfires, pandemic response, and ability to work elsewhere pushed them over the edge.

Yea, I would leave the Bay Area in a millisecond, but only if I could still keep access to the Bay Area job market as a remote employee. There are plenty of great places in the USA without the crushing taxes, endless commutes, and one-sided politics of CA. I would gladly accept a "cost-of-living adjustment" to my salary if I could work from home in NV or FL or something.

A majority of tech workers in California are from somewhere else, who came to California for the opportunity. They know what it's like back home. And yes, especially the 30-somethings with kids, they're leaving

I'm not saying there isn't some desire among employees but most companies do not want to pay taxes in 50 states. I don't think the vast majority of workers can simply move without changing employers.

> but most companies do not want to pay taxes in 50 states

Surely not but I would wager that most employees work for companies that already have multi-state (and in many cases multi-national) operations, and therefore have the administrative infrastructure to support employees in arbitrary states.

You are an engineering manager for XYZ Corp. Your boss asks you whether employees should be able to work out of state, and still be equally productive.

After during research, you come to the conclusion that yes, productivity won’t fall. However, you note that finance has flagged the payrolls issue.

Your boss tells payroll to sort out multi state taxes.

>Your boss tells payroll to sort out multi state taxes.

If only the world was so simple, haha.

In my experience, most companies use ADP or Paychex or similar, they rarely roll their own solution. This is a non issue IMO.

And if anyone reading this is thinking of doing this, really research the taxes. For example if your company does not have an office presence in the state you move to, you will pay state taxes for both that state and California. If your company gave you any stock related compensation, California wants a piece of those too, even after you've moved.

You can blame the media for this.

Stories about problems in California get a lot of clicks, so people see a couple week’s worth of bad news and think the state is on fire is ways that aren’t due to actual flames.

It takes some time to get a feel of the culture of a new place, but trust me as someone that has lived in a few other states, it eventually makes a big difference. California has dramatically out performed other states, and is more expensive because it was working, in part because of the culture that is unique to California.

I live in NYC and lots of friends have left town for upstate New York or similar places. But I'm waiting to see how great they think these places are after they have eaten at the same 5 restaurants for a year. And once live culture returns to NYC and other places, how will they feel then?

Of course, the other way to look at the de-campers is that they were going to move to the burbs inevitably. Which good for them, but cities are injured, not dead.

I feel like comments like this often lack perspective. Upstate NY, especially Buffalo and Rochester have plenty of things to do in them and far more than five restaurants.

It strikes a nerve with me because in Massachusetts a similar sentiment is expressed by Boston-Cambridge folks about Lowell, Worcester, and other periphery cities. Its simply mot true that these places are devoid of culture snd cuisine and in the age of Yelp and Google Maps it takes almost no time to find it.

I think the grandparent is probably referring to upstate in the Hudson Valley sense of the phrase. Plenty of cute towns, but Hudson / Woodstock / Kingston are definitely in the O(tens) of great restaurant options, comparable to a slice of any single Manhattan / Brooklyn neighborhood most tech people live in.

As someone who moved from a large small city (300k residents, 100k students, 300k daily commuters) to San Francisco ... yeah the density is totally worth it. Back home we had restaurants and cuisine and all that. It wasn’t a wasteland.

But SF has more high quality restaurants within a 20min walk of my apartment than my hometown had in total. Average restaurant quality is higher too. Just because there’s more competition.

Another fun example: in SF we have 5 grocery stores within a 10min walk. Back home the nearest grocery store was a 3min walk away, great. But the next one after that was 10min. To get to a proper supermarket size grocery store ... that’s a car trip. In SF it’s a 15min walk.

Density is wonderful. There’s economies of scale that you get at 18,400 people per square mile that you just can’t pull off at 4,500.

The ultimate test for a city is this: Do you have 5 “asian restaurants” or do you have 5 south vietnamese, 3 north vietnamese, 10 cantonese, 5 ramen, 6 japanese grill, 3 sushi, 4 dimsum, etc

For example back home we had the mexican restaurant, here you have 10 for each type of mexican food.

The way you feel about SF vs your 300k residents town is how I feel about Tokyo vs SF. When I'm in SF it's sad how few choices I have and how bad most of them are. And all those asian restaurants you mention are not remotely "good". You can find a few descent asian restaurants in the south bay like say Fremont but LA does them all significantly better and in far higher quantity

Correct. Both of those cities are larger than SF. Less walkable due to lower density, though.

If it weren’t for SF’s high concentration of my industry (tech), I’d likely move to NYC, London, or Paris.

I find Tokyo far more walkable than SF. I don't like the public transportation in SF. It's dirty, gross, and slow and have to walk over homeless people and smell piss everywhere and even without transportation most areas in Tokyo are super walkable with access to almost everything you could need just a few minutes walk away.

I'd say Paris and London (and most > 1m people cities in Europe and many in Asia) are also more walkable than SF.

> I find Tokyo far more walkable than SF.

Agreed, and I think the parent was saying that LA and Fremont are less walkable than SF, not that Tokyo is.

I fear this is exaggeration. San Francisco has a few nice restaurants; but many, more affordable cities do just as well or better. The problem facing SF restaurants is the economics: it's so difficult to afford a place to live there, that kitchen staff definitely can not afford to do it. Combined with the relatively poor access story -- it's surrounded on 3 sides by water -- it means the core staffers have to be recruited from hours away, two hours or more. Restaurants definitely got worse in the last few years that I lived there (up until early this year).

There are exceptional cuisine resources in San Francisco, and amazing grocery stores, like Bi-Rite and Rainbow, but as a whole the situation neither benefits from the culinary community that it used to have (how many people have moved away) or from the kind of consumer that it used to have (well to-do kids just out of Stanford or a midwest school are not people who know what buffalo mozzarella is, or why you'd want to buy it, but their money rapidly became the only money that mattered).

You’re right what counts as “nice restaurant” depends a lot on perspective.

So here’s some perspective: My entire home country has 6 Michelin star restaurants. Of those, 1 is in the capital which is the home town I’m comparing above.

SF has 7 restaurants with 3 stars.

Whether that means you're eating better food on a regular basis in SF than in many other less dense urban areas in the USA (nearly all are less dense) is a different question, though: and the truth is, you're not.

Places with stars don't have the economic situation I discussed: they have the money to really go beyond their surroundings.

The thrust of my argument is that there’s more of everything in a bigger city. As such you have more options and more competition.

The competition means that a lot of places scraping by in smaller cities can’t make it in a bigger city. In theory that means median quality is higher.

And even a 3-star restaurant won’t survive in a place that doesn’t get enough well-to-do visitors to sustain it.

For a more casual perspective, SF has 126 restaurants on the Michelin list (not all hve stars). My entire home country has 52.

None of this speaks to whether or not SF has more to offer you than other less dense cities in the US, so many of which have excellent restaurants and, indeed, better restaurants. I was very impressed with the food in Austin on a recent visit, for example. Perhaps if SF had continued on the high density curve while maintaining affordability (as Tōkyō has done) it would be a different story.

Quality food has more to do with agriculture and supply chains than money or density per se -- good salad is not something you can buy if no one is growing it -- and more and more areas in the US have made the transition to that kind of farming and production.

Now challenging SF on grocery stores -- that's another matter. They are drawing on deep roots, there.

The reality is, unless you're really in the sticks, there are probably some reasonable, if not pretty good restaurants around. Case in point: Amherst MA, college town, tons of great restaurants that probably equal Cambridge or Somerville (not in quantity, but maybe quality). Also some pretty interesting places in both Holyoke and Northhampton MA.

In fact some of the best food & drink I've had was in parts of Nebraska & Missouri and Wisconsin. You absolutely don't need to be in the city to get good food & entertainment.

If Californians move in bulk the culture will diffuse out; especially in tech hub cities.

That’s an interesting observation that’s normally only made about political affiliations.

I wonder if there is precedent with the migration out of NYC and the like in the post-WWII/mid Century period. It was a real boom time for the West...California in particular. A lot of folks came from back East or the Midwest...

Not many tried to explicitly recreate their East Coast/Midwest life in the West...in fact they made a point of trying to create a unique California “lifestyle”. That new California lifestyle was the hot US cultural trend from, say, 1960 to 1990.

May happen again, but in the reverse direction, Californians creating a new Montanan/Utahn/Ohioan/etc. culture by engaging in the roots of their new not-California and building something better, bringing their creativity while leaving behind their California. Of course, if they try merely to graft a California-lite onto their new rootstock...well, they could be an important new source of protein for the locals...

I don’t think this creative dynamic could happen in other “tech hub cities”, because, frankly, there is no essential culture there to work with. Austin may be nice, but it seems more parasite on Texas culture than symbiont.

(Which has been a slam against California over the years too. What’s the difference between California and yogurt? Yogurt has an active living culture. More people outside of California believe that than you might think. It’s been 30 years since CA has been a dominant nationwide cultural thing, Hollywood as almost a metaculture notwithstanding. Silicon Valley? That’s getting onto 25 years old now...that’s senescent in US cultural terms.)

haha.... here you are posting on a California based website/forum, and pretty much use California based products without even knowing (facebook, reddit, google, youtube, iPhone, Android, Macs), they are all California culture, in digital form.

CA, like it or not, has an outsized influence to the whole world, to the point that it kinda becomes 'undistinguishable' as it is everywhere. I am talking about tech/SF/SV and Hollywood. They have risen to the 'metaculture' level which few places/countries have.

ps, HN, reddit, FB, started in the east coast, but had to move in the west in order to flourish. Same with the Movie industry. It started in the NYC and New Jersey suburbs, but had to move West in order to flourish.

Haha... What is California culture in digital form? I remember being 16 and posting this rant but substituting "USA" for "California". Gotta make sure everyone knows my group is the best!

The “reasonable taxes” in many places depend on large-scale transfers at the state/federal level from places like SF.

But this pandemic is going to be crushing state and municipal budgets across the country, and many of the worst-hit places will be rural and exurban.

Nah, the spending power of the federal government, and the tax collection of the federal government are not linked.

So long as the fed can print money the federal government can spend. It cares not about the states or how much income tax flows in. Hence, it can run up structural deficits until faith is lost in the $ (inflation).

State governments, on the other hand, cannot print money. They must operate in a zero-sum mode.

Yes, the federal government could bail out state and local governments (and indeed that’s some of what the Heroes Act does – passed by the House in May).

But the GOP Senate intransigently refuses to act or even negotiate, and so state/local governments are getting crushed.

Well good? The federal government has no obligation to bail out the states

That's a political decision and the gop has decided to let the states that need bailouts diy it.

I don't think it's wise, but it sure is within gop policy aims

You seriously think that everywhere in America with reasonable tax rates is just getting fiscal transfers from SF?

Personally I don’t think “low taxes” are “reasonable”. We live in a complicated society and we all benefit when we collectively pay people to do a huge variety of important jobs which are hard to fit into a pure-profit system. Cutting funding for those exposes us to a wide variety of risks and eliminates many future opportunities, in the long term harming us all. The Covid pandemic is a perfect case study in the way that e.g. public health infrastructure, expertise, and political support can save hundreds of thousands of lives. (While we are talking about San Francisco here, it’s worth noting that SF and the Bay Area has done by far the best of any US city / metro area at containing Covid and preventing needless deaths of residents, despite some failure especially early to properly target testing resources toward poor/minority areas full of “essential workers”.) But infectious diseases are only one of the many risks that individual people cannot adequately understand and protect against on a personal basis, for which it helps to have collectively funded public institutions.

Instead of income or property taxes, some places raise money via sales taxes instead, or other regressive schemes. Some places raise money by questionable fines on their own residents. Some places make money off the back of wanton environmental destruction.

Some just accept shoddy local services. (When you compare the US to other wealthy nations, it’s really shocking how poor our basic infrastructure and public services are, even in the richest US states and cities.)

But most low-tax areas of the US are substantially supported by federal-level transfers, for example from federal highway budget, from military bases and defense contracting located there, from federal agriculture subsidies, from federal welfare and healthcare funding, from social security payments to people who retired somewhere different than they lived while actively working, ...

There are really two axes that everyone seems to conflate into one. There is funding, as in whether or not there is sufficient funding to achieve certain outcomes. Then there is competence, as in managing the resources to achieve certain outcomes. Both are necessary but neither sufficient by themselves, only together.

The U.S. seems to be stuck in a loop wherein the available funds are argued about endlessly, and everybody acts as if that's the only dimension about which to speak and win. Not nearly enough is done to boost competence in the government sector. I think this is plenty true even if we set aside the current U.S. administration in which a number of federal entities are headed by naked toadies (to be fair, it's certainly not true of all federal organizations even now).

I tend to agree with you that the U.S. is probably not taxing enough for consistently high-quality outcomes in areas where the government is responsible. Yet I'm sympathetic to those that point to places where tax rates are high and so is wastefulness. But when the only lever it seems that can be pulled is on the revenue/spending, it's no wonder the correlation between that lever position and good outcomes is low - it ignores the competence with which any of those funds are managed.

I think it's entirely possible to have competent government if that is made a priority and addressed with some flexibility.

There is a single problem with this line of thought: you cannot raise taxes over 100%. Yes, more taxes gives you better services and it benefits the society more (not the tax payer), so increasing the taxes is the logical way to go... until you reach 100% and you are stuck. At that point one can still argue taxes should be increased for better services, but it will be harder to do it. Then people will start thinking about how to limit the spending and how to get the most from less money, maybe even to reduction in taxes.

Define "reasonable tax rates." I'll tell you this: states where there are very low taxes (e.g. no income taxes, low sales/other taxes) tend to be net takers when it comes to federal dollars: they get more from the federal government than their populations pay in taxes. States like California are net givers: their populations send more to the federal government than they get back.

As a bonus irony, the "taker" states also tend to house the most vociferously free-market/anti-government types.

I'm taking a look here (visualization is crummy, but there's a list below) https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/donor-state...

There are only ten donor states in 2019:

    - Connecticut (- $4,000)
    - New Jersey (- $2,368)
    - Massachusetts (- $2,343)
    - New York (- $1,792)
    - North Dakota (- $720)
    - Illinois (- $364)
    - New Hampshire (- $234)
    - Washington (- $184)
    - Nebraska (- $164)
    - Colorado (- $95)

And these are the top taker states:

    - Virginia ($10,301)
    - Kentucky ($9,145)
    - New Mexico ($8,692)
    - West Virginia ($7,283)
    - Alaska ($7,048)
    - Mississippi ($6,880)
    - Alabama ($6,694)
    - Maryland ($6,035)
    - Maine ($5,572)
    - Hawaii ($5,270)

The majority of those top taker states are under Democratic Party control, and 40 out of 50 states are takers of federal dollars, so I don't see much evidence for your point.

Virginia/Maryland are a special case, since they are immediately adjacent to DC, so are home to a large number of federal workers. New Mexico is impoverished and filled with elderly retirees, and also has (relative to population) a large number of well-paid federal workers at Los Alamos and Sandia national labs.

In every state though, rural and ex-urban areas are subsidized by federal and state tax revenue coming from cities.

New York put together a report for 2017 that seems more reliable than the list you are using: https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/budget/2018/federal-budg...

The source of your data is a SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government report: https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/1-7-19b-Bala.... Scrolling down to page 14 shows a nice visual that completely supports my contention. The two surprises to me are ND and California, but the rest essentially show that taker states tend to have higher populations of individuals who are opposed to the federal government spending money ("anti-government spending").

Thanks for sharing this. What I see on page 14 is a map of the same data I shared. It shows that there's a small number of net producer states, and a larger number of net takers. If you look at page 17, you'll see that most states actually fall into the low tax and low spending quadrant. So while they may need to raise taxes by some amount, they're hardly being hypocritical the way it seems you want to paint them.

California refugees is a weird point to make (I know you are trying to make a political point here). But in my 13 years of living here, I have met only a handful of “native” Californians. Everyone is from somewhere else. And that’s what make this special. I have lived all over the world, and consider CA to be the best place in the world to live for me

Which state? I thinking of moving and would like to know good states to move into

North Carolina is decent. Made the move in 2013, been working for SF Bay Area companies since. Cost of living is very low, kids' education is decent (impacted by COVID-19 currently, of course).

Did you maintain your salary ?

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