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Comment by scop | Hacker News Reader

We will be moving out of CA in the coming months. We are lifelong residents. We are leaving due to cost of living and especially quality of life for our children.

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Please consider the policies that made your location expensive and of poor quality for families when voting in your new home.

Oh trust me, I didn't vote for said policies in SF and I won't be voting for them in TX!

I know everyone likes to scape goat some policies for that, but as Occam razors would have it, I think it's just the population growth that was the main cause of price increase, and a population decrease would probably result in a price decrease.

Calling this a simple supply and demand problem is not the whole picture. How come you can't just build new housing to accommodate for the population growth? What's the tax burden in CA relative to other states? Where do those tax revenues go that don't benefit the taxpayers quality of life? What other factors negatively influence quality of life for families which are encouraged by policy?

> I think it's just the population growth that was the main cause of price increase

Population growth without commensurate growth in housing. You can add people, but you gotta let them build houses. If you don't, then prices rise, for reasons that are very easy to understand if you're not financially (or otherwise) motivated to find them confusing.

Building houses isn't free, and when there's a huge demand for land to build on, and all the land is already taken, prices to build the house jack up, and everything follows. Find me a single city anywhere with similar growth that didn't have housing and rental cost go up and maybe I'll reconsider. But right now, I stand by the most simple explanation as likely the cause.

The most simple and obvious explanation by far is that demand has outpaced supply. The thing your analysis is missing is that this mismatch is entirely artificial. It is more or less illegal to build new housing. It is structurally and legally impossible to construct enough housing to meet supply. Zoning prevents most of it and excessive regulation takes care of the rest. The cost of housing is astronomical because it's illegal to build enough of it.

I'll turn your phrasing around and say show me a city that makes it legal to build as much housing as people desire for 30 years that still has high prices and I'll consider your point of view. But until then, it seems to me that you're going to have to make it legal to build housing if you want more housing.

I would love to move out of CA in the coming months. My spouse is begging me to. If my job were to finally announce permanent, optional WFH for employees, I list my house for sale that day.

Same complaints: cost of living / taxes, quality of life, and kids' education.

The only thing keeping me here is my current job and clear opportunities for future [tech] jobs. If WFH became the norm, I'm out of here in 50 milliseconds. There are probably a lot of people like me.

The key is to get out and keep your salary. If your job does go full WFH, you can most likely keep your salary and then move, but then if you want to find a new job in a couple years, finding that same SF salary will be much tougher. I live in Dallas and have friends in Austin. 6 figure jobs are available, but you won't find many (if any) of these 180-200+ type jobs outside SF and NYC.

Granted, $120k-150 for a single earner is plenty to live a good life in Texas, even in the cities (as long as you don't have excessive personal debts). Something to think about that I'm sure you've probably considered.

You're not looking hard enough or don't have the experience necessary to get these jobs. There's plenty of these jobs in Austin.

Interestingly, if you consider it at all, it means that you need to move out now: otherwise you are going to be caught in the huge wave of moving people and will be unable to realize all benefits, i.e. you might have to take the loss on the house, etc. Also, if you spouse really wants to move...

I'm curious why you bought a house in California to begin with. The cost of living was similar in the last two decades.

Before COVID and the prospect of multiple companies considering optional WFH became a possibility, I figured I was pretty much stuck here for career reasons, so might as well build home equity for 20 years or so.

you better vote red so your new state doesn't end up california 2.0

Proposition 13, which arguably had a hand in creating the housing problem that exists there today (alongside neighborhood efforts to pause any new housing development, something Austin is facing as well) was championed mostly by Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, both of whom were conservative.

Anecdotal, but everyone I know who left California recently did so due to the high cost of housing, not because of their tax liabilities or a plastic straw ban. Kinda hard to be upset about having to give 9% of your income to the state when you have to give 50% if your income to the landlord (for an 80 year old, 350 sq ft studio heated by radiator in my case when I lived there).

> We are leaving due to cost of living and especially quality of life for our children.

Sorry for noseing-in, but could you elaborate on the part that affects the kids? What sort of factors are there, or what kind of expectations?

Yes, you and poster you're replying to mention "quality of life". What does that mean?

A cynic would see this as a dog-whistle for "too many Asians/Hispanics/foreigners". (And I have actually heard a white person here in California say that about the schools.)

I suspect though you mean something else.

See my reply on a parallel comment. I will be moving to a more diverse area.

It's remarkable how "I don't like the Bay Area" translates so easily to "racist dogwhistle".

Quality of life means things like:

- "there are children in my neighborhood"

- "I don't need to keep looking over my shoulder at the playground with my children"

- "I can get a 15-yr mortgage on a house that is 2000 sqft, be financially stable, and safely deal with recurring large medical expenses that we will always have due to pre-existing conditions"

Here are some other "quality of life" issues:

- Massive seasonal forest fires that have become normalized

- Risk (however small) of a catastrophic earthquake

- Dangerous public transport

- Piles of feces, needles, and general filth on (some) city sidewalks

- Daily bumper-to-bumper traffic on freeways from 8AM-11AM and 1PM-6PM

- Extreme regulatory burden and cost of normal things like starting a business, building a home or addition, and owning firearms

I don't think many people are attempting to raise children in SF proper, where this anecdote takes place, but walking into a safeway parking lot and having to dodge used needles is not what I would call high quality of life.

Although in all fairness, I am not aware of the drug situation in other parts of the country.

There are plenty of families in SF proper. If you don't have kids, you understandably aren't spending much time in parks, playgrounds, and kid-friendly neighborhoods.

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