California population drain: State is hemorrhaging residents to other states | Hacker News Reader

California population drain: State is hemorrhaging residents to other states

cbsnews.com

33 pointsLastNevadan68 comments

I'm in this boat. Movers came yesterday and our flight out of state is tomorrow. To answer one other poster, in my case I'm a programmer with a CS degree who's in the highest tax bracket. What I pay in taxes does not at all make up for the standard-/cost-of-living. We've been in SF for years and have a 3.5 year old daughter and a baby on the way. How anyone gets by with kids and without a lucrative job is beyond me. We pay $2,900/month just for preschool for my daughter. With two kids, it'd be $6,000/month (younger kids cost even more!). Where we're moving, it's $1,250/month and it even includes food. Everything is expensive here: food is expensive, rent is expensive, we have people literally smoking Fentanyl right out in front of our door. I'm not kidding, I actually need to get their attention so that I can even open the front gate. It's littered with trash and feces. Two days ago we were at a playground and there was a wide puddle of diarrhea in the play structure. I have to constantly tell my daughter not to touch ANYTHING. What kind of way is this to live, let alone raise a family? As I was siting outside guarding the open garage and moving truck, I literally got berated by a passing stranger for no reason and had to call the police for them to force him to move along since he was at it for almost 20 minutes and frequently coming into my garage.

"But you can't beat the weather" only goes so far. It's a shame. It's a beautiful state and a beautiful city, but to say it's going through a rough patch would be an understatement. I'm so excited to get out of here, but I do hope California can turn it around.

But what will you do when you only have 2 good Thai restaurants to choose from in your immediate area, instead of 5??

Do like most thinking adults and learn to cook?

Restaurant variety is actually important for people who like restaurants. If you're used to Big City fare, it might be a shocker to move to a town of 100,000 or fewer. Sometimes you want to go out for a nice evening, but literally every restaurant in town isn't what you're looking for.

> "But you can't beat the weather" only goes so far.

I dunno where you're going, but I hope its not Florida or the gulf coast. The realtors don't tell you about the the existential dread (and "hidden" living cost) of hurricane season.

This is coming from a central Texas native accustomed to what I thought was bad weather.

I hope everything goes well for you!

Even if you get paid less at your new location I’m sure the lower cost of living, lower taxes and less dangerous living conditions will make up for it.

I guess many others in California must be thinking the same things considering all the people who are leaving

My living situation and life circumstances are broadly similar to yours, and I'm also in California but not anywhere near downtown Metro. Instead I'm about an equal distance from the center of La and the center of San Diego, and the beach cities of orange county- each roughly an hour drive in their various directions (modulo traffic). Daycare here, at a fairly premium facility connected to the UC system, is 1700 a month for a toddler and would probably be about $2,200 for an infant (full day/5 days a week).

Rent is probably not a consideration in a move someone like yourself or ourselves might make, but if it had to be, an entire three bedroom house with a swimming pool can be had month-to-month at about $3,500-4500. median home value is somewhere around 750 to 850 depending on what side of what street you live on.

This doesn't really remedy the tax situation but it does look like a completely different universe in contrast to what you're going to deal with in the middle of San Francisco or LA, or even (to a much lesser extent) San Diego.

The downside is that you had better really, really, really like the company of fake-aggressive midlife crisis bros in humongous lifted pickup trucks, because that's who you're largely going to be surrounded by.

Will you continue voting blue after your move and bring back same policies?

I'd also like to know. I'm always very interested in what people who move from blue -> red have to say about this, whether they notice any kind of connection between the fact that the blue state is undesirable and the red state is more desirable, and if they continue voting blue in the red state, how exactly they'll reconcile that and rest assured the same doom won't befall that state.

And yet the price of housing is higher in the "undesirable" part of the country?

Seems like housing prices are always the last domino to fall.

Good question. I think both parties are have their policies that work and don't work for me. I'm in favor of social programs to get people on their feet, instead of paying for the fallout ten times over by letting people slide into homelessness and crime. I'm all for prosecuting people who steal, including petty theft, which SF has completely gone off the rails with. We should be helping lift people up to a bare minimum so that we're all lifted up. People should also be held accountable for their actions. I'll be voting for whoever sees things the way I do.

But I don't get is how it's so crap and at the same time so expensive. Maybe people leaving will finally bring some prices down.

I left 10 years ago for no other reason other than I was getting kind of bored of the Bay Area. Seems like it's really gotten rougher since then, but prices don't reflect that.

I wish you well, but it sounds a bit like generalizing some SF-specific problems to the whole CA. I live in a boring suburb in the East Bay, where commute is horrible, but there's zero human feces on pavement, no homeless tents, and my high school kids have no problem taking a walk (or bike ride) around town at 11 pm.

Of course, suburb being suburb, it's not good for the environment (you have to drive to get anywhere), and it's boring as hell. YMMV.

Yea my problems in SF are more extreme, definitely. However, it just still doesn't make sense for us to stay. We pay so much in taxes, so much in child care, and so much for housing. We could be saving on all of these fronts and still have all the things we want.

"Drain" and "hemorrhaging" carry such negative connotations. While there are some tough logistics involved in keeping infrastructure/operations/policy aligned with changing demographics, we really don't need everyone living in one state. It's not a competition.

If people who don't want to live in California leave for somewhere they'd rather be, that's probably ideal for everybody. I like it here and would rather collaborate with other neighbors who like it rather than neighbors who loathe it and stick around anyway. I'm pretty sure there will be enough of us left to make it work alright.

> If people who don't want to live in California leave for somewhere they'd rather be, that's probably ideal for everybody.

As long as most of them don't come to my state. (Not a slam against Californians specifically, just a fear of a greater population increase).

How long will the emptied houses/apartments/condos stay empty? My guess is they will be refilled almost immediately.

A shoebox house 45 min by train from SF costs $1 million. Rates are approaching 8%. Taxes are close to 10%. Your car windows can't survive 5 minutes in the city. The air is occasionally not breathable, typically during the best months of the year to be outside. Anyone not in finance or tech is probably living with their extended family because minimum rent is approaching $3k/month in a non-murderous area. Homeless camps everywhere. No enforcement on property theft.

I loved my time in CA, but the second WFH was a thing, I was out, regrettably. I'm not going to work an extra 10 years just so I can pay a mortgage.

The important question isn't how many, but who: will this likely be a net increase or decrease to public liabilities and tax receipts?

It is the hollowing of the middle, the poor will stay for the welfare, the rich will use their Nevada Incorporated Tax jiggle to stay around.

I would like to hear more about the Nevada Incorporated Tax jiggle.

Exactly this. I've got anecdata from people who have left because they can't afford housing, to retirement age people who are cashing in on their real estate and moving somewhere cheap, to conservatives moving to a more conservative state.

The only _kind of_ real data point in this article is that the last item (politics) makes for 1/3 of the people leaving.

I am less concerned by the diaspora as such than about the ideas that precipitated the diaspora somehow metastesizing across the rest of the country.

>This is certainly not an argument for abandoning the state's commitments to the California model [of setting aggressive green energy goals], but it suggests paying close attention to the choices that are made in the energy transition to avoid backlash and major economic losses

The problem isn't the energy transition, the problem is that environmental reviews have been weaponized by NIMBYs. Whenever anyone tries to build anything in California, NIMBYs sue them to delay the project for years with environmental review laws. This is far more disruptive than, say, needing to get bureaucratic approvals for environmental impacts, because these lawsuits happen after planning has finished and shovels are already in the ground.

The only infrastructure that can get built in California is, naturally, the kind that spews carbon in the face of the poor. In fact, I have a bit of a conspiracy theory: California isn't nearly as blue as we think it is. A lot of nominally liberal Californians are actually extremely conservative, because they use bullshit lawsuits, local city councils, and other measures of vetocracy to stop progress. They disguise this with wokewashing - bathing their blatant conservatism[0] in the language of social justice so that liberals don't notice it right away.

Green energy would be already attainable for a good chunk of California residents but for the NIMBYism. California actually has to build a lot of their wind farms in Wyoming - yes, the deep-red state whose low taxes are subsidized by the coal industry - purely because the residents can't enact the fallacy of relative privation and sue a wind farm for not being green enough. California wants green energy, sure, but they want it "over there" where they don't have to even know that it exists.

[0] Don't Utah my California.

Isn't "small government" the definition of political conservatism?

I think if people like big government, and they use this big government to crush housing projects for NIMBY goals, they are most certainly progressive.

> Isn't "small government" the definition of political conservatism?

Not at all. Small government was a movement within US conservatism that gained a lot of momentum in the second half of the twentieth century.

Plenty of conservatives did and do have ideas that rely on some significant government apparatus or another, at some level or another. Even during the hey day of the “small government” era, Republicans were loudly in favor of expanding military and law enforcement programs, and many craved the reintroduction of censorship programs to protect kids from being exposed to naughty things.

Conservatism is defined by reactionary conservation or restoration of traditional norms (per the specific conservatives’ vision) as set against any number of emerging alternatives. If it takes a government bureau to make that happen, history shows no reluctance to use one.

Housing is the key common factor linking cost of living, homelessness and the other issues. With more housing built, the problems diminish.

Build more and _ban_ investment in real estate out right so this doesn't happen again. Homes are for living in.

I had to make an unexpected trip out of LA last week. When I flew back in, Google Maps gave me an ETA of 1 hour 14 minutes to drive 13 miles home from the airport.

Huh.

When I get the chance (it isn't possible in all airports) I try to walk that kinda distance. (I'm (a) weird, (b) a rucksack-only kind of traveller).

Every time I've looked at a US airport though, no pedestrian access.

Will they be taking their voting preferences with them?

It sure seems like it. My state has seen a massive influx of citizens from California and constant demands to raise our low cost of living.

In Arizona people i overhear think they do.

I'm going to speculate based on living in one of the places that's losing a lot (in very relative terms) of people to Arizona, utah, New Mexico and Idaho, (but conspicuously not to Oregon or Washington,) that this is in large part a generational effect instigated by the way California development has expanded in the past 50 years or so , with entire towns springing up within the space of 5 years around cheap residential RE development tracts.

a lot of these people who are moving originally bought a family home in a new ish (for the time, far-flung) suburb development 25 or 30 years ago for $125-$175k. all the kids have grown up and moved away and they are now selling the grossly inflated slap dash neo-Mediterranean stucco pastiche typical of this area at what they feel is the peak of the market within the curve of their lifetime. Because these giant housing tracts all sold and became occupied more or less simultaneously, everyone who moved in was in similar circumstances and raised families all around the same generational curve. It's no surprise that roughly a generation later we're seeing a surge of out-migration, even without the other factors.

most of these people are going move red states redder and California bluer by this move.

New Mexico is a blue state [1], and Arizona is a purple state [2], so I wouldn't be so certain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Ne... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Ar...

Both New Mexico and Arizona also have a lot of neo-Mediterranean stucco houses. In fact, in Arizona they're probably a majority.

Urban areas/big cities in the country (including the ones in California) attract a lot of people from all over the country for decades, why didn't everyone bring their voting preferences with them to the cities from where ever they came?

I remember reading a study a while back that said people who move to Texas tend to be more Republican percentage wise compared to folks who grew up in Texas.

The study was about people moving generally from elsewhere though. Not from California specifically.

In terms of the voter demographic, California is not nearly as liberal as red-state conservatives tend to think.

California has its problems (and some of its problems seem quite deep), but when these predictable discussions mention CA's sky-high rent, how it's not worth it, and then extrapolate and predict the doom of the state, I can't but think of the famous phrase:

"Nobody goes there any more, it's too crowded."

Yes I fully agree the rents are a huge problem, but come on.

400k people in a year is hemorrhaging?

For a state of ~40 million, that's 1% of the population.

If they all moved to Wyoming, they'd almost double the state population.

That's how many people are leaving. How many people are coming in?

> However, the exodus from the state worsened, with a net of 407,000 residents leaving for other states between July 2021 and July 2022, according to the study.

When you subtract the number coming in from the number leaving, you get a net of 400k leaving.

missed net. fair.

I suspect they are only counting people above-board coming and going, but I think there is good reason to assume the "undocumented" population is increasing(the known undocumented population is ~6%), so the net may be closer to zero than 400k.

There's plenty of land here in Wyoming. Houses, not so much. Finding someone to build a house or to do any work on anything is not easy. For that reason I don't think 400k could move here if they wanted to, at least not all at once. Some may not like the snow, cold weather half of the year and the wind east of the Rockies. Some of the people from the mountainous region of northern California may like it. Anyone moving here should be self sufficient and able to fix most things themselves. Some of this can be offset by getting to know all your neighbors and local community.

As a side note Netflix to my surprise released a decent albeit violent movie that shows some of this state called Wind River staring Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Jon Bernthal. (2017) Most of the mountain scenes were filmed in Utah. [1] I think it would be incredibly challenging to film the whole thing in the Wind River National Forest

[1] - https://www.netflix.com/title/80173524

Drain baby drain! I'd love to see CA get back to it's 1980's population levels...

Well, if you are a Prop 13 supporting NIMBY, this is good news.

"Humans are fleeing California, looking for a better life!" - CBSNews

:shrug:

Still too crowded.

As with most states bigger than a shoe box (looking at you Northeastern states, there's too many of you) there's loads of open space they're just not great to live in for one reason or another; those reasons range from climate to politics to lack of jobs.

The Northeast was what America was supposed to be, but something went wrong around Connecticut or Pennsylvania. I don’t know what happened but they are where things started to go all rectangle-shaped.

Once it became easier to measure longitude and latitude in land surveying it became way easier to define state borders as straight lines instead of following a river's course or other arbitrary lines. Even in the depths of the madness of the NE you have lines that are "straight from this point until you reach another state line or the border".

Also just getting past the crown colonies and states/territories with poor roads.

It only feels that way because your state mandates everyone buy single-family homes with giant setbacks for lawns that aren't even ecologically compatible with the natural climate of the state. And also that NIMBYs terrorize every possible project to fix this with spurious environmental review lawsuits, and then go on to use the same laws to shut down clean energy projects they don't like.

I don't disagree. Perhaps people are voting with their feet.

>It only feels that way because your state mandates everyone buy single-family homes

I'm not sure that is the case. If everybody lived in apartments then there would be more people in your area which would lead to you seeing more people along with worse traffic.

People who live in areas with like 5 people per square mile don't complain about there being too many people around them because nobody is around them.

> If everybody lived in apartments then there would be more people in your area which would lead to you seeing more people along with worse traffic.

To an extent, though the sensation of crowding can also diverge from the actual population density depending on how the city planners organise things.

Berlin feels much more open and chill than places in the US; even the Mitte district whose population density is 9,600/km^2 and which is only a bit less than the 11,313.8/km^2 of NYC[0] and quite a bit more than the 7,193.3/km^2 of SF.

[0] whole thing not just Manhattan which is 28,154/km^2

Yes, too crowded, except for the 30% of the state north of Sacramento, and the entire east side of the state, and a big chunk of the Central Valley. But besides that 80% of the state that is mostly empty, it is way too crowded.

In other words, the parts of the state with the worst climates.

For example, Fresno is basically the same as El Paso, Texas when it comes to climate, but has outrageously higher taxes and cost of living.

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