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California population drain: State is hemorrhaging residents to other states
- connor11528 3y ago:shrug:
- recursive 3y agoStill too crowded.
- rtkwe 3y agoAs 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.
- bee_rider 3y agoThe 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.
- rtkwe 3y agoOnce 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".
- quantified 3y agoAlso just getting past the crown colonies and states/territories with poor roads.
- kmeisthax 3y agoIt 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.
- recursive 3y agoI don't disagree. Perhaps people are voting with their feet.
- ImJamal 3y ago>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.
- ben_w 3y ago> 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
- LetMePostMore 3y agoYes, 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.
- Turing_Machine 3y agoIn 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.
- lr4444lr 3y agoThe important question isn't how many, but who: will this likely be a net increase or decrease to public liabilities and tax receipts?
- sremani 3y agoIt 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.
- supportengineer 3y agoI would like to hear more about the Nevada Incorporated Tax jiggle.
- Javalicious 3y agoExactly 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.
- exabrial 3y ago[flagged]
- progne 3y ago[flagged]
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> The bandits, the scorpions, the vast Starbucks deserts ... The trick is to spam [A]ttack key on random encounters to have the first move and use it to escape. Then you go straight across the land to steal a power armor, and the whole game suddenly gets much, much easier.
- droptablemain 3y agoUntil your leather jacketed friend burst fires right behind you.
- anotherhue 3y agoDo not give him an automatic weapon, under any circumstances.
- hdusnoans 3y agoI find opinions/comments like this funny, mainly for the irony. Its always that a place was awesome when I moved here, but then the others who moved here after me ruined it. They always start the clock when they moved there, almost completely oblivious to the fact that the guy who moved before them is likely blaming them, how far back do you go?
- progne 3y agoProbably territoriality started with early multicellular organisms around 500 million years ago.
- johnea 3y agoDrain baby drain! I'd love to see CA get back to it's 1980's population levels...
- asielen 3y ago400k people in a year is hemorrhaging?
- floren 3y agoFor a state of ~40 million, that's 1% of the population. If they all moved to Wyoming, they'd almost double the state population.
- SubiculumCode 3y agoThat's how many people are leaving. How many people are coming in?
- floren 3y ago> 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.
- SubiculumCode 3y agomissed net. fair.
- LetMePostMore 3y agoI 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.
- LinuxBender 3y agoThere'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 https://www.netflix.com/title/80173524
- Dudester230602 3y agoWill they be taking their voting preferences with them?
- throwawa14223 3y agoIt 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.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoIn Arizona people i overhear think they do.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoI'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.
- Mindless2112 3y agoNew 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_New_Mexico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Ne... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Arizona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Ar...
- kainsavage 3y ago<Sees baby boomers retiring to Nevada/Arizona where tax rates are lower> "Humans are fleeing California, looking for a better life!" - CBSNews
- francisofascii 3y agoWell, if you are a Prop 13 supporting NIMBY, this is good news.
- swatcoder 3y ago"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.
- JohnFen 3y ago> 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).
- quantified 3y agoHow long will the emptied houses/apartments/condos stay empty? My guess is they will be refilled almost immediately.
- droptablemain 3y agoI 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.
- ben_w 3y agoHuh. 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shagymoe 3y agoA 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_crocodile 3y agoHousing is the key common factor linking cost of living, homelessness and the other issues. With more housing built, the problems diminish.
- vaninvestment 3y agoBuild more and _ban_ investment in real estate out right so this doesn't happen again. Homes are for living in.
- yipyipyipee 3y agoI'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.
- floren 3y agoBut what will you do when you only have 2 good Thai restaurants to choose from in your immediate area, instead of 5??
- thrill 3y agoDo like most thinking adults and learn to cook?
- beej71 3y agoRestaurant 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.
- kmeisthax 3y ago>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.
- buzzert 3y agoIsn'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.
- swatcoder 3y ago> 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.
- smitty1e 3y agoI am less concerned by the diaspora as such than about the ideas that precipitated the diaspora somehow metastesizing across the rest of the country.
- yongjik 3y agoCalifornia 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.