Unpopular opinion. It’s ok to have outbound migration. California has close to 40 millions people. That’s more than lots of countries out there.
If you have a shrinking/fleeing population you can see what ends up happening by looking at the rust belt.
If people are fleeing a state that often means that the problems are so bad people are willing to overhaul their entire lives to get away from it. This indicates problems have gotten very bad and now you have fewer resources to address them than before.
Basically when you state population is shrinking it indicates it has the largest challenges it's faced with the continually fewer and fewer resources to address them. At that point it requires a legendary genius and heroic effort to overcome the problems occuring.
But much of the outflow is quite easily explained by the Covid shift to remote work allowing everyone in the Bay Area to take their high salary savings and buy houses wherever they fantasized about living.
You can’t really directly compare to previous migrations because those all involved making a career-impacting change. This one required merely overcoming the activation energy of a house move. So the signal about the “cost of staying put” is much weaker than in the past.
This is not to claim that Silicon Valley / SFBA doesn’t have problems, just that the analogy to Detroit probably doesn’t work without significant caveats.
You can continue to believe and argue that it isn't happening and that Cali is still a great place and continue to cover your ears and scream at the reality but the fact is that when I moved a year or so back the new church I started attending was composed about 1/4 of people that had left California in the past few years, with it moving to 1/3 if we include Oregon and Washington. (And no it's not some sort of sampling bias that Californians love my Church) all of them described the various problems with CA that make it sound pretty much unlivable. So continue to believe there is no problem. It seems that Silicon Valley insists on relearning the lessons of the rust belt.
At the margins, the people who move away are the ones who were already unhappy with “issue x” but had not actually left.
Now that “cost of moving” decreases, or “cost of staying” increases, the cost/benefit of moving becomes positive for those marginal residents, but stays negative for those that love where they are.
Clearly plenty of people don’t find it to be unlivable, indeed it’s still objectively ($/sqft to buy) one of the most desirable places to live in the country even despite the problems.
This is also completely consistent with small towns seeing a large influx of people fleeing CA; it doesn’t take a high % of the most-populous state leaving to make a substantial difference in all of the small desirable towns.
I do agree that the remote trend needs to be followed closely; it’s great for senior engineers at big companies, but I wonder if startups and juniors at large companies are soon going to realize that mentoring and rapid collaboration is really hard remote, and we’ll see the pendulum swing back a bit. Or maybe we will solve those problems and the agglomeration effect of the Bay Area fully dissolves.
Another reason why property tax is a more stable funding source -- unlike income, you can't take it with you. There is a whole list of reforms that California needs to undertake to recognize the new reality it's in, and shifting itself to being funded primarily by property taxes is one of the biggest necessary changes. The second biggest change is significantly scaling back spending and decreasing its vast administrative bureaucracies.
But the article says "a majority" of those leaving were middle- or low-income people.
If you want to see data, we can look at IRS data:
"New York’s tax base shrank by $19.5 billion while California lost $17.8 billion as a result of workers fleeing those states during a time when lockdown measures allowed employees to work remotely, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Other high-tax jurisdictions such as Illinois ($8.5 billion); Massachusetts ($2.6 billion); New Jersey ($2.3 billion); and Maryland ($1.9 billion) also saw an exodus of workers during 2020.
The states that reaped the benefits of the “wealth migration” include Florida, which gained an additional $23.7 billion in gross income; Texas, which gained $6.3 billion; Arizona, which took in $4.8 billion more; North Carolina ($3.8 billion); South Carolina ($3.6 billion); and Tennessee ($2.6 billion)."[1]
[1] https://nypost.com/2022/06/06/ny-cali-biggest-losers-as-weal...
Essentially the south and south west have the worst impacts, with PNW least in the lower 48.
Ending Prop 13 would not cause "significantly scaling back spending and decreasing its vast administrative bureaucracies." Instead it would have the opposite effect. All other taxes would stay the same, but now they'd have this additional source of money.
"e.g. 1) switch to more funding on property taxes and 2) reduce administrative bloat"
Shockingly, this does not make the two steps "self-contradictory".
And by shifting responsibilities, you could easily do this without hiring anyone else - almost all states have a value-based property tax system, and this includes states with extremely lean administrative load compared to California, so your claim that following their model is some self-contradictory nut to crack is specious.
wow, thanks! Way to patronize.
We don't need "quantitative estimates" -- we just need a qualitative estimate of the propensities of politicians. Especially in California.
Edit: I'll match my quantitative skills against yours anytime. It's just that they don't need to be deployed on this one.