Considerations for Californians looking to move out of state (2019)
withersworldwide.com
withersworldwide.com
Everything else is irrelevant.
So, in order.
1) Does your partner support the move?
2) Do you have family, friends moving with you or whom you will be closer too?
3) Have you traveled to new destination / lived there a bit / have a small community there?
4) Is the community aligned in terms of values
It is easy to fantasize the positive about a new place without living / thinking of the negative.
This is very true. I live in a state that I don't much care for poltics-wise, but I have a lot of family and friends here, which makes it 100% worth it.
I've personally found that staying long enough to have time to get a minor routine in the new place can be super helpful.
Like, no, thank you, as someone who goes outside every week-end, I'm not moving somewhere where it's 100F or 20F for like 3-6 months of the year. It's insane coming from Western Europe how shitty of the US is climate-wise.
I grew up in NZ, moved to Colorado for ten years and whined about the snow, then came home and realised how good I'd had it in CO. I hadn't noticed the rain because I'd grown up with it. Only when I came back to it from a place with little and predictable rain, did I notice it.
I grew up barefoot. Went to university in Wellington and in my first year, had to go see the doctor. "I have weird things on my feet."
"They're chilblains! Wear shoes!"
Wellington definitely has a different climate to the north.
Places like Spain and France get the pleasant end of the stream that brings slightly warmer weather than they otherwise would have given the latitude.
Meanwhile, the eastern part of the US gets the chaotic middle portion that generates hurricanes.
My favorite weather is the Mediterranean weather on California's coast, particularly the Central Coast. The favorable weather is one of the reasons why the area is so expensive. Barring that, I can cope with the warm Mediterranean climate of the Central Valley. Yes it gets hot in the summer, but it's a dry heat, and the winters are also dry, with snow being a once-per-generation occurrence, and the spring and fall are just as nice as on the coast. Barring that, I like the weather in the Pacific Northwest; yes it does rain a lot, but the summers are amazing. I also heard good things about the weather in parts of New Mexico, where it's a high elevation desert and thus it doesn't get too hot in the summer, and where it sometimes snows in the winter but doesn't get extremely cold like it does in places farther north.
I left to complete the journey to financial independence without the burden of California state income tax. I got no benefit from being around a bunch of one dimensional software engineers with zero creativity in their lives outside of tech, no sense of independence or adventure.
But I hear you. You should move, at least do a six month lease somewhere and work remotely.
This statement is objectively false. High income and high net worth individuals and families are the only category that continues to arrive in a positive net domestic migration into California. The people who are leaving are the less wealthy, who don't need to pay the state taxes, but who also cannot afford the housing prices.
The ones actually fleeing are the lower-income conservatives who can't afford to stay, and don't want to because of politics. Meanwhile, wealthy conservatives are flooding into the nice parts of CA, driving up housing prices.
There's a reason that every major GOP presidential candidate comes to Los Angeles when they want to raise lots of money: it's where the wealthiest Republicans live.
The state is better in every way, shape, and form with them gone.
You'll never find a state as progressive as California- energy, taxes, social causes, taxes, transit, homelessness, taxes, housing prices, political corruptness, taxes.
The best part about my fellow, life-time Californians leaving California is how they simply continue to vote the same way no matter where they end up. This is a great mechanism for allowing for more states just as progressive as California, which they will unfortunately leave at some point too!
I've seen this a lot, and never understood it.
There’s a lot of political talent in the state but also a lot of rich, powerful people who want to preserve the status quo.
Like the one you had who was constitutionally prohibited from being president?
Depending on how the market moves for those industries, the state can easily end up with a big surplus or big deficit in any given year. Surpluses and deficits have almost no inertia and aren't very meaningful on their own.
There's naive political pressure to react to them immediately (everybody wants a slice of the surplus; everybody wants to use a deficit to undermine governing party candidate) but it's not responsible governance.
If anything, I'd expect politically ambitious governors to take the bait and spend surpluses immediately on programs or tax cuts that win them attention, which sounds like the opposite of what you're saying.
Though I think part of it does come from the psychology of good weather all year. If it's always sunny and there's palm trees everywhere, rather than cold and rainy all the time, aren't you gonna be less interested in politics and more so in just chilling out? If California's climate was harsher, I believe the hogs would have been slaughtered years ago.
As a fairly disgruntled Californian myself, there are fellow Californians I know who aren't that far off from the attitude you described sarcastically. I feel kind of bad because I think they know deep down that reality is gradually no longer reflecting their viewpoint, and they can't admit it. I have a very good long time friend, for instance, whose politics have been pretty much entirely implemented by the state over our lifetimes. He's very much a self-described "progressive", and that puts it lightly (he also considers himself a communist, but he's more bashful about that). He, being a once openly political guy, no longer opens his mouth about these issues because he can't deny that other states and entire other countries with smaller economies are surpassing us in those regards.
Take energy, for instance. California's leaders have stated explicitly many times over the years that we are "leading the nation" and "setting an example for the world" with our policies towards infrastructure, yet what do we have to show for it? Blackouts? Massive wildfires caused by the electrical grid? The closing of nuclear plants? Give me a break.
Then there's the social issues and homelessness. Maybe it's a case of the frog being boiled slowly, because to me I've clearly seen a massive decline in our cities over my lifetime. I'm ashamed to show visitors around LA and refuse to do so at this point because the homeless encampments are so widespread. I'm absolutely for helping the homeless, but we also have this effect where the homelessness has permeated everything.
And yeah, to be stereotypical, our roads are crap, despite how frequently parts of them are closed off for maintenance. Every time I drive in another state, I'm stunned at how nicely paved the highways are. In much of SoCal, you can expect lots of pits, cracks, and seams to cause a bumpy ride. There's even a part of the 210 freeway that, I kid you not, reminds me of that scene from the Pixar movie "Cars" where Lightning has to pour new asphalt on the main road and it comes out all patchy and awful.
Yet there are still people in complete denial or in delusion. The rest of the world has moved on, and because California is too-big-to-fail with its abundance of resources, it's effectively in the "cash cow" phase that most corporations experience where nothing needs to change because the hogs can keep feeding from the trough. Basically, California is the IBM of states; we're old and slow and boring, but everyone's still relying on our mainframes.
The only problem I see in California is the taxes are too high for what you get in return. At those rates, you'd expect to throw in free healthcare or some amazing public services and infrastructure. So I'm suspicious the budget is used properly and that there is probably a lot of corruption.
If I was a Californian, I'd be hard pressed to either expect more from my taxes or demand tax cuts otherwise.
So a lot like discovering you are a Facebook user and never created an account.
It's an order of magnitude easier to influence decisions in my town vs. my state. The other thing is that it's also much easier to leave my town if I don't like the decisions made. Sure, I can move states too, but that's a much bigger hassle than moving 10 minutes down the road.
The thing about the property taxes is that if you move to someplace like Austin where the property values are skyrocketing, your property taxes can jump a ridiculous amount in a single year. You're completely insulated from that in CA (once you _own_ property, which is obviously the hard part in the SF Bay Area etc).
Edit: Was asked for an example, here it is.
In the aftermath of the protests in 2020, there was some talk of removing the police officers that are assigned full time to the schools. Parents pushed back and we still have those officers in place.
I've also lived in towns with corrupt local governments, and you can't do shit about it. Good luck getting people to come out to vote. And when the good ol' boys club takes the mayor and sheriff offices, and fills the roles with their friends/family, it can be hard to oust them. Prove that the tickets you're getting are due to running against they mayor on a platform of change, and not because you were speeding for the 7th time this week.
It got so bad in the town I grew up in that people were pushing to dissolve the police and local government. Even my hardcore right-wing, retired police officer uncle was in favor of dissolving the police department.
California would have been in a much better shape if the state government could tell these cities to shut up.
It's a false dichotomy to suggest that the alternative to prop13 is market-rate set taxes on people's homes.
There's no free lunch. Lower property taxes mean higher sales and income taxes to compensate. The reverse is true too; when you go to states with no income tax, usually they have high property and sales taxes.
All you're deciding is the distribution of tax payments.
Property tax rates are somewhat higher nominally in florida but homes in California are about 4x more expensive than Florida, so the total amount paid in taxes in Florida is much lower (both in total and relative to median income).
I don't think your comment is correct generally-- yes, the difference isn't quite as large as you might guess by looking at the bare rates but no income tax states still have significantly lower tax burdens.
The real shitty part about prop 13 for me is not the residential tax rates but commercial/industrial - some giant corporation owning a giant warehouse that has an insane value should NOT be paying a super low tax rate.
Property tax is much more in total, and percentage of household income in California than Florida.