California exodus continues as population drops by 500k | Hacker News Reader

California exodus continues as population drops by 500k

latimes.com

13 pointsbilsbie8 comments

Because middle-class can vote with their feet, California continues to be the first state in both number of and percentage pf people moving out of California.

Further income divide is good for progressive political ideals of achieving fuller government control (without the middle-class' irate.

https://www.ppic.org/blog/californias-population-shifts-may-...

I’m sure conspiracy theories are great, but it’s clear why people are moving. Housing costs.

Fortunately CA is taking steps to improve that. It remains to be seen if it will be enough and/or soon enough.

I’ve been hearing about steps for years. I’ve yet to see evidence of change.

Housing in CA is so messed up and has been on the wrong track for so long that I think extraordinary evidence is now needed to support the statement “CA is taking steps to improve that”

I think the base case is something more like: they will continue to fuck up.

Housing is just stupid in LA. $600k for a 2br2ba condo with $500/mo HOA and maybe you get air conditioning (not guaranteed in West LA). If you’re not a professional or making consistent bank in general, you just can’t afford to put down roots here.

SF is similarly stupid at even higher cost. They really need to raze half the Sunset and Richmond districts and put up “missing middle” housing and a bunch of minimum 6-story condos. Converting some unused downtown commercial office space into residential spaces would be good, too.

Anyone know the gross outward migration? That is, not the net (outflux - influx), but the number of Californians who have moved to different states in the past 5 years or so.

That's ... not immediately clear.

I'll note a number of things which annoy me about this article:

- It fails to cite / reference / link sources, though there's the line "The population decrease was second only to New York, which lost about 15,000 more people than California, census data show."

- This is effectively a narrativisation of what should be a data table or chart (or several). For whatever reasons, mass-media news organisations, even reasonably robust ones such as the LA Times, are exceedingly averse to presenting charts or tables.

- We do get three links ... all to prior LA Times stories. At least one of those actually does link to US Census sources. It's by different reporters.

On that last, what we'd be looking for specifically are:

- CA population in 2020 & 2022.

- Gross and net in- and out-migration for the state.

- Natural population growth including gross births and deaths.

- A table showing net growth/decline and a percentage basis for, say, the 5 greatest growths / declines over 2020-2022.

Otherwise, there's a thousand words of text not only communicating little but doing so quite poorly.

I suspect the Census data may be "Migration Flows Data Available for Counties, Metropolitan Statistical Areas and Minor Civil Divisions", released 26 January 2023, though that's also less than clear, and the data here appear to be for 2016-2020, not through 2022.

<https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/acs-migr...>

The issues here may well be editorial policy rather than failings of this specific reporter. Regardless, they're a disservice to news readers. Those issues would accrue to B.J. Terune, Fast Break Desk associate editor, or executive editor Kevin Merida.

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