We live in a country the size of Western Europe with climates ranging from tropical to frozen tundra most of which are full of cheap land and housing if you don’t mind living a bit out of the way… and you picked Texas?
When a longtime Californian leaves California, they make a big stink about it like it's a zeitgeist and parlance of our times. And they only move to Portland, OR or Austin, TX. There have been a few to move to New York City, but that is seen as selling out. Lastly, a handful to Colorado but no one has an opinion on that therefore they are ex-communicated until they return to either California, Portland, or Austin.
If you moved to Texas specifically to get a bigger house for your money, then of course you are going to hate it.
We moved to Austin-adjacent and downsized on the house. We put away about 100$k from the sale of our previous house, and used the rest for downpayment, netting us a <$1000 mortgage payment per month. During the periods of heat or cold, we now just peace out and travel, because we have ample cash to do so and still manage to put away for retirement. Currently chilling in Miami till middle of next week.
The rest of the time, weather is nice, plenty of good food, plenty of things to do.
> During the periods of heat or cold, we now just peace out and travel, because we have ample cash to do so and still manage to put away for retirement.
that's nice but is it a good long term solution? i presume you don't have any kids. i wonder how this approach would work once you have kids and they start school. or maybe you do have kids but they are much older and moved out or no plans for kids idk.
I’m a life-long Texan (more or less), and this sounds like totally logical analysis. I love living in Texas, but I don’t particularly care for our state government, but it also doesn’t affect me enough to affirmatively desire to leave the state. I’d love to live in California but not sure I could afford the lifestyle I’d like to maintain. In fact, quite sure I couldn’t - CA is a great place!
Thank you for this take. I don’t live in California, but most of my family has this attitude of “California is the worst! Look how expensive it is.” It seems as if supply and demand has decided it’s a great place to live.
Edit: Not sure why this take would upset anyone. I didn’t say it was necessarily good or bad to live in California. All I said is that the average price of a home seems to dictate that people enjoy living there more than many other states.
Haha, did someone actually tell you the weather is fine? I was born in Texas and I've lived in Austin for 13 years and I've always thought the summers are unbearable.
Although my perspective is tempered with what I experienced around the gulf, in Mississippi and Florida. The humidity there is so bad I literally don't think it's fit for human settlement.
I’m from the PNW but my dad went into nuclear power so I had the privilege of living in Vicksburg Mississippi for four years as a teenager. I don’t get it. Also tried Austin for a summer when in grad school…, my dashboard melted before I realized you really need those sun protection thingies.
San Francisco is one of the most humid cities in the US (so much that mold can be a problem in some cases). Relative humidity is on average higher than Wash DC --but lower than Port Arthur, TX.
That easternmost part of the state is the "piney woods" and it's lovely compared to the concrete island that is Dallas. The forests have a mitigating effect on heat.
The westernmost part of the state as well: I live 3 hours outside of El Paso near big bend national park at an elevation of ~4000. The winters are chilly at night; the summers are MUCH better than Dallas/Austin/Houston.
I like the heat here in TX. I moved from Michigan, where I also enjoyed the cold (but not the lack of sunlight, affinis Seattle). Saudi Arabia was a bit too hot for my taste, but Texas summers are very enjoyable to me. I may be an outlier, but I genuinely enjoy doing things outside in the Houston summers.
I grew up in Los Angeles, and moved to DFW from Seattle, I'm solar powered, while houston is a little too hot for me, DFW is quite pleasant. As it turns out I'm solar powered, I'd love to go back to Los Angeles, but I'll never be able to afford it again.
I'm a southerner (not TX, but living in TN currently) and I really dream of making it to CA some day.
The south is cheaper for a reason, and CA is expensive for a reason. You get what you pay for. Red State governance is truly abysmal, the climate is terrible, and there is precious little BLM land to explore.
If enough people leave CA to reduce the price (or enough people move to the south to raise the price here) I'd gladly move to the west coast.
And yet the economic growth of the red states, particularly in last few years has outpaced the blue states. Not to mention the tons of people moving into red states. Hence there are many that disagree with your assessment.
I’m sure you‘ll miss Tennessee’s no state income tax once you move to California.
Sounds like me! I'm moving back to CA after ~2 years in Dallas. I didn't hate Dallas, but my fiancee does. But yeah the weather is awful: 115 degree summers, below-freezing winters.
Here in SoCal the other year we were almost hitting 118 in August (killed almost all of my potted succulents, baked the roots) and that's BEFORE including the concrete factor.
I'm a Texas native. The temps in Texas are nothing like what California gets.
On the other hand, the rockhounding is far, FAR better out here in Cali. But you aren't doing that in the summer. You could do that in Texas in the summer out in the Llano uplift region.
It's hot, but 115-degree summers is an exaggeration. The high is usually around 100 degrees (still too hot, of course). I do much prefer the weather in California.
That's why I tell disbelieving Californians that we have better weather in Texas than they do: When we have nice days, we appreciate it, whereas when they do, they don't even notice .... :-)
(Source: Spent several years in California long ago.)
You had to eat the second six months of a year lease on a house, maybe lost your deposit, too; plus you paid to move an entire family from California to Texas; then paid again to move from Texas to California. Then had to find another place to live in California and pay another deposit there.
Having helped a friend move from California to Texas recently, it sounds like at least a $40,000 mistake.
I moved to Texas from VA and absolutely hated the area. The state politics, the weather, the layout. Lived there for four years and only just recently moved back to Seattle where I can actually have reasonable public transit and weather.
I feel like most of the people that leave for Texas will end up feeling the same.
Which US state doesn't have problems with bugs though? I know none hold a candle to Australia but it seems like each has its own unique problem with bugs.
The entire western coast of the US (cali to Washington) has far less bugs than the east or Midwest. I assumed it was the drier climate but Seattle area doesn’t have a lot of bugs either.
After moving west, I found in identical weather conditions, the west is better to be outside because it will have less bugs.
Ah, I see you're yet to encounter Texas roaches. Additionally, Texas is number 2 on mosquito prevalence after Florida, along with other biting insects. As a bonus, Texas is also home to recluse spiders, whose bites can cause necrosis.
Texas is no Australia when it comes to dangerous critters, but of all the American states, it's in the top 2, and gives Florida a run for its money.
California is a great state in many ways, but it'd be a stretch to say it's even half assed a solution to its housing problem: they've quarter assed it at most. And it does someone no good for a state to be great in many ways if they can't afford to live there.
The situation has been dire for some time, but all they do are small incremental steps towards building more housing, it's nowhere close to what's necessary. Unfortunately, the NIMBY, anti-housing sentiment is very strong.
Well they did just pass a bunch of laws last year to upzone the whole state, crush NIMBY zoning BS and lower permitting requirements for dense development near transit stops.
Builder’s remedy is already being applied against NIMBY communities like Santa Monica and Redondo beach, no take backs.
It takes time to build the homes and see the impact but it’s hard to say that they’re not moving strongly in the right direction.
Sure they’re doing it 20-30 years later than they should have but they’re certainly not sitting on their hands right now.
Newsome knows he needs to show that he really addressed the massive headline problem that everyone hears about California before he can have a serious crack at the presidency, or else he’s never going to overcome the “California bad because mismanaged by Democrats”
> Well they did just pass a bunch of laws last year to upzone the whole state
Have you seen the particulars of that law that upzoned the state? It's actually extremely weak:
"* Benefits homeowners NOT institutional investors. Recent amendments require a local agency to impose an owner occupancy requirement as a condition of a homeowner receiving a ministerial lot split. This bill also prohibits the development of small subdivisions and prohibits ministerial lot splits on adjacent parcels by the same individual to prevent investor speculation. In fact, allowing for more neighborhood scale housing in California’s communities actually curbs the market power of institutional investors. SB 9 prevents profiteers from evicting or displacing tenants by excluding properties where a tenant has resided in the past three years."
Translation: will be used only sparingly, because it's illegal to do it with a standard case of a corporation replacing existing housing with more housing. How many owner occupiers are interested in this and can afford this kind of redevelopment?
"Respects local control. Homeowners must comply with local zoning requirements when developing a duplex (height, floor area ratios, lot coverage etc.) as long as they do not physically preclude a lot split or duplex. This bill also allows locals to require a percolation test for any duplex proposed to be on septic tanks."
Translation: still lets local NIMBYs restrict density.
"It takes time to build the homes and see the impact but it’s hard to say that they’re not moving strongly in the right direction."
It's the right direction yes, but as you say, it's the kind of thing that should've been the response to the much weaker housing crisis of 20-30 years ago, not the much more serious one now.
The laws being passed aren't enough. They have a bunch of caveats (SB-9, for example, has a long list of disqualifiers) that limit the utility of any particular bill and making actually using it difficult. The builder's remedy has been on the books for what, about thirty years? Only now is it starting to see some use.
California needs to dramatically cut back on its land use restrictions and figure out how to streamline everything. Even a typical (nominally uncontroversial) single-family home can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to entitle before anybody even breaks ground. It's madness.
Unfortunately, it's simply not in the culture of the people of the state to want to pursue cost-efficiency or reductions in bureaucracy.
California has not even ¼-assed it. The governor stated in 2018 that we were short 3.5 million homes, which might be approximately correct or at least in the ballpark, and as a state we were going to build them by 2025. That pace should have been 2 million homes by now, but only about 350k units were actually built.
Where does one build 3.5 million houses? The housing needs to be where jobs / etc, are. It should also be where resources are. A good deal of the state has water issues regularly; additional part of the state can't keep the power on due to - heat waves, fires, over use, winds, cats farting.
The rural county I live in has open jobs, but a sizeable chunk of the work force is either seasonal (logging, etc) then coast on unemployment for the off season or don't actually want to work. Those that do, are flaky as all get go. (My partner and I own a small business in the county).
What does this have to do with housing? Covid and growth of a near by metro area (about an hour away) have pushed people to buying up what was previously cheap (yet affordable) housing. Small cabins that would be going for ~75k or a bit more 7 years ago are pushing over $200k now. The local community college as well as natural disasters further puts pressure on the housing situation. How about building more? Well, insuring housing when large fires have come through? Hard to come by. Building costs have also gone through the roof.
Housing is needed in this particular county (and surrounding) but isn't being built.
California is a great state? I guess the mass exodus over the last several years is just simply people leaving in excitement.
California is not great. It hasnt been great for a long time. It's hostile to anyone who is not the elite while also mascarading as a progressive paradise. The problem with people leaving is they export the same politics that got California to it's position as a working class hostile state. In the most common states, Oregon, Nevada, and Texas Californians are looked at with great disdain. It tells you something, at least, when even a left-leaning state like Oregon doesn't want you.
Dude, as someone who left, California is a great state and I never would have left if I could afford to live there. Only a small portion of Oregon is left leaning, and people who feel they are being squeezed out by Californians of course are going to feel antagonistic and try to justify that antagonism in their heads as more than just fear.
It's not a problem to everyone. For example, it's not a problem to many homeowners that the value of their homes keep going up and to the right.
Living in California is expensive, in more ways than just housing. Not everyone can afford it. Just like not everyone can afford a new BMW. In my corner of the state, people who increasingly cannot afford to live here are noisy. I mostly don't engage because I'm aware that I will simply receive vitriol and anger for sharing my views. But quietly, I'm ok with it. They can move if they want to. I love it here and having fewer people on the fringes of society as neighbors isn't really the worst outcome to me.
Edit: and this why I don't engage. I'm out. Merry Christmas everyone.
Yes, if we made it illegal to manufacture new lawnmowers or sofas or iPhones, then the value of the existing lawnmowers, sofas, and iPhones would skyrocket, which would be (at least in the naive accounting [0]) very good for the current owners of lawnmowers, sofas, and iPhones -- but hopefully you can see how ridiculous that is as policy.
[0] I say "naive accounting," because it's not so great if you ever need to buy a new lawnmower, sofa, or iPhone or if you hope your kids will someday be able to. And it's not so great for your city in the long run if making ordinary products illegal results in drastically lower levels of productivity, etc, etc.
You get anger and vitriol because your views are part of the problem. NIMBY’s pull up the ladder and try to turn a nice semi-affordable car into a Porsche then tell everyone “sorry, it’s just expensive to be here. Not my fault!”
Thing is, people aren't asking you (and people like you) to do anything, but simply to stop actively blocking things (like building new homes). You're getting the vitriol because you're simply sharing your views. You're getting it because based on your views, it seems like you support measures that actively blocks progress for others.
For the most part everyone arguing in favor of ideas championed by the left are unable to engage in rational argument they always engage by attempting to personally insult and label the other as bad or selfish. As someone that has always voted Dem prior to this past midterm, this style of argument actually drove me further right. Got to the point where I decided that if an idea can't be championed on it's merits it's probably not something I'm interested in
I find it problematic that so many people reject your opinion, in particular because I suspect they are probably downplaying the degree to which it parallels the way most Americans think about where they live, to one degree or another.
Your logic isn’t unsound, but it will increasingly come across as unreasonable because not everyone in the workforce has the option of finding employment and accommodation elsewhere.
So if people keep leaving then the property values go down. Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it isn't going to happen.
Imagine property values start plunging, people can't leave, they just start abandoning houses, soon you get vast swathes of abandoned houses which lead to increased crime and urban decay.
Decades from now people will shake their heads and talk about the golden days of California and the problems with the silicon belt.
TLDR: I'm fine so what's the problem? I'm the victim! I can't speak my hilarious beliefs because people will "engage" aka challenge my poorly thought out and constructed opinions.
As a San Francisco area homeowner and a BMW owner, I believe every human deserves a roof over their head.
Edit: Please don't discuss the things I've said. My BMW is the victim! Merry Christmas.
> It's not a problem to everyone. For example, it's not a problem to many homeowners that the value of their homes keep going up and to the right
"Increasing price of cars during pandemic not an issue for people who already have cars."
Yes, people are upset that the government pushes policies that hurt people, and that make no sense generationally (intentionally targeting rising property values is just a generational ponzi scheme).
If your stance is apathy or even pleasure upon seeing the suffering caused by bad policy, it's no wonder you're being downvoted.
This is “gross” decline, the backing data has a “net” migration of -113k. NY actually had a much higher net decline at -180k which translates to a 3x higher decline as a percentage (0.9% vs 0.3%). This isn’t necessarily a CA thing as people keep positioning it, it’s a high taxes among other things (like housing, and high mobility)
California has had a net decline to domestic (intra-US) migration for quite some time; pre-COVID, it was more than compensated by international immigration.
NY is harder to measure, since families move to CT and NJ all the time.
Jersey city has massively ramped up development and is filling demand generated by families who want to move out of their NYC shoebox. The entire NJ-PATH route has been expanding rapidly the last decade or so.
Actually, 8/10 of NY state's biggest cities (barring Syracuse, Rochester) are within a commute distance from neighboring states/countries. Although the bottom 9 combined, add up to 10% of NYC's population. So they don't really matter.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. I live in Oregon and know of at least 15 families that moved to Idaho, Arizona, Texas, etc. because they didn’t like Oregon’s approach to Covid.
Well CA might have the best jobs in the world & great weather , for people to move away from there speaks mountains about the issues plaguing the city.
Agreed. It turns out the data they report from actually has that exact thing in it: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/tables/2020-... -- I believe this change rate appears calculated against their 2020 census data and not the estimates from 2022.
States with most negative change rate: California (-0.9%), Illinois (-0.8%), Louisiana (-0.8%), West Virginia (-0.6%), Hawaii (-0.5%)
Five most positive change rate: South Dakota (1.5%), Texas (1.6%), South Carolina (1.7%), Idaho (1.8%), Florida (1.9%)
Interestingly three states did not have enough change to register: Kansas, Michigan and Vermont.
It would also be interesting to see churn rates. A place could be stable count wise, but actually turning over people fast and running out of suckers (kinda like Amazon warehouse employee base)
Also, that’s not the title I’m seeing when I click the link, it’s — California’s population shrinks for third straight year as high costs stress households — which is a lot less editorial.
The second lowest of five bands is not “the middle band”.
I would agree that it is not particularly notable; a lot of the headlines are “look at the big numerator and ignore the big denominator, because narrative agenda”.
It's the consequences of this. A shrinking tax base meaning the government has to cut back on programs and services. It means reduced infrastructure spending and maintenance. These have down the road effects.
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.
> If people are fleeing a state that often means that the problems are so bad
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.
I agree. I’m confused when I hear about calls to “address” the issue. People leaving isn’t a problem, the real problems are the reasons people move away.
Nothing wrong with decreasing population, but when your richest citizens are leaving, and poor migrants are coming in, then you start having fiscal problems, particularly for a state that has decided to fund itself with income and sales taxes rather than property taxes.
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.
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.
Lol if you think the net is outbound. Most of those people were replaced. Who else is going to pay the high rent? The only option when rent is too high for HENRY is to pack in as many poor workers as possible. Viva congestion!
California is NIMBYism at its worst: the far left opposes more housing, the far right opposes more housing, and the center is sick of traffic from more housing.
> California is NIMBYism at its worst: the far left opposes more housing, the far right opposes more housing, and the center is sick of traffic from more housing.
It's the banality of evil.
It's not that homeowners are conspiring to create unaffordable housing, it's just that they all just care about the benefit to themselves of rising home prices and maintaining the comfortable exclusivity of their neighborhoods. Everyone hopes someone else is fixing the problem.
Collectively, each city wants some other city to build more affordable housing. It's not a political issue. It's the haves vs. the have nots, just as it's always been.
The only solution is to have the state organize a plan that forces many cities in the bay area to build denser housing is some of their prime locations -- I'm thinking like way Palo Alto's downtown and Caltrain station area is surrounded by single-family suburban houses. Some of which are on huge lots! Any areas surrounding public transit corridors like that should be immediately built up into multi-story housing complexes.
Who are the people moving out? Primarily those without money or assets to stay. People who tend to skew younger.
So you drive out the younger, start a feedback loop where more young people leave, inverting the population pyramid. This is accelerated by the lower birthrate.
Congrats, you now live in a place where young people are overwhelmed by grey pressure and the only realistic alternatives are decreasing quality of services, or siphoning wealth to push for more services. The latter solution nullifies most benefits stubborn NIMBYs amassed for themselves a few decades before they got old.
Not true at all. The far left objects to gentrification, where the supply of housing nominally increases but prices continue to go higher. Short-term rentals and properties being kept vacant for land speculation are two factors. The far left hates landlords and property speculators, for more or less the same reasons Adam Smith did.
Also explains why Texas is growing the quickest. It turns out that population is basically the integral of new home starts. Who could have predicted this, except every YIMBY I know who has been screaming about this for 25+ years?
Yeah crazy to think that people like cheap houses and no income tax /s.
But in all seriousness. The ROI on California taxes has to be one of the worst deals in the country. I can’t think of another state (maybe NY) that does so little with so much.
A lot of people are going to be surprised when they buy a decent home in Texas and end up getting slammed by property taxes. Or you buy a home in the middle of nowhere and have to deal with the worst infrastructure around.
Texas also has a ton of NIMBYism. That's the same root sentiment for "Don't California my Texas" which says "You may be a resident, but you better not do something I don't like" -- same mentality.
I see this same resistance when it comes to building non-single family homes, and Texans are instead thinking more lanes + more sprawl is going to solve the influx of people. Then they lament pricing and make claim that long time Texans have more of a right to live here than new people. I'm sorry but for a capitalist and freedom loving state, it sure is echoing some of the exact same things that helped California's demise.
100%. Land use policy in CA (and the US more generally) is insane. Suburbia/car-dependency is a terrifically bad policy decision that CA _heavily_ bought into. We may need to wait for the boomers to die out a bit more before we can fix it.
San Francisco's budget for homelessness is over 500 million per year. If that isn't enough money to address the problem in one city we clearly need radically different solutions.
People are doing the math. If you make enough money in California you pay 10% of your income in taxes. First of all, what do you get from that 10% you pay that don't get in other states with lower or no income taxes? For the people paying the taxes the answer is not much. People also fail to account for the fact that the 10% they are paying is 10% of their GROSS income, not net after federal taxes. So if you are already paying 30% of your income in taxes that 10% can be a material increase in the quality of your life. It's the equivalent of receiving 16% more net income. Also subtract what you pay in increased food prices and increased housing costs you will be saving much much more by leaving CA.
People in California seem to believe that other parts of the country with lower taxes are hell on earth, they aren't. When I moved to San Francisco, I had many conversations with people denigrating my home state of Florida. In retrospect I can see this for what it was, a coping mechanism for having to live in such a terrible place and pay an absurd amount of money for the privilege of doing so.
The reason California has seen such economic success can be attributed to proximity to the fastest growing economies and largest manufacturing hubs in the past 30 years and a little luck. If you really need to live on the west coast, Washington state is a much better option.
The problem is that there is nowhere near as many SWE jobs in other states as in Bay Area. I just moved to the Bay from Munich and I miss Germany a lot, but the career opportunities are here in California. Admittedly, I don’t enjoy my life as much as I did in Munich where I could walk, cycle and enjoy great city life. However, I knew all that before I moved here and it was a calculated decision: the career opportunities I have here are way better than anywhere in the world. If I could live somewhere else and take the career prospects with me, I would definitely consider it. But remote work is not as available as people predicted and IMO it also takes away from the ability to grow in the company in many ways.
Yea, California is overpriced and has many problems, but if one saves here enough then moving anywhere with plenty of savings is very comfortable in the future. There’s nothing wrong with willing to live in other places but there’s a good reason people move to California.
Why do you think I moved there myself? The jobs didn't exist anywhere else. Thankfully that's changing. If you are a valuable employee, one trick you can do is after working at a company for a year ask them to let you work remotely. If you are good they will let you.
Additionally, I think companies and investors are catching on. If I give a company $100 million I don't want $10 million to go to avoidable state income taxes and another $20 million to go into landlord pockets via inflated rent prices (commercial and residential), I want it to go into the business.
I lived in Florida for a while. Between the ultra-conservative retirees and the over-representation of the tragically hilarious on-point stereotypical poor white rural southerner I thought it was an awful place to live. I get a lot of value for the taxes I pay in California: schools that aren't prohibited from discussing certain scientific topics ("climate change") and that aren't outing LGBQTP+ kids to other kids' parents in letters, for one example. Anyone who holds up Florida is a positive place to move to instantly loses credibility to me.
Ok, so you think being in a bubble with people that agree with you is worth 16% of your income a year. Meaning if you work 30 years you need to work 4.8 years longer to retire. This doesn't take into account investment returns.
People inflate the amount of state income tax they have to pay in California. Yes the rates are high but so are the deductions.
Some years ago I had to deal with California income tax for various reasons. I think at that time you had to earn over 50K to hit 9% marginal. In my state you hit that at about 16K. And this is after deductions where California had a ton more. I believe one needed an income of over 100K before the amount they paid in taxes exceeded that of my state.
I think overall taxes are undercounted in California because the state taxes absolutely everything. California has the highest income tax and highest sales tax in the US. Throw in the grocery bag taxes, and all the other random taxes in that state you are just paying an absurd amount for nothing.
Readit News
So few days of good weather. Maybe worth it to some, but a bigger house was not worth it to me at all. We moved back in 6 months.
So many people want to live in California which causes more issues
We moved to Austin-adjacent and downsized on the house. We put away about 100$k from the sale of our previous house, and used the rest for downpayment, netting us a <$1000 mortgage payment per month. During the periods of heat or cold, we now just peace out and travel, because we have ample cash to do so and still manage to put away for retirement. Currently chilling in Miami till middle of next week.
The rest of the time, weather is nice, plenty of good food, plenty of things to do.
that's nice but is it a good long term solution? i presume you don't have any kids. i wonder how this approach would work once you have kids and they start school. or maybe you do have kids but they are much older and moved out or no plans for kids idk.
Edit: Not sure why this take would upset anyone. I didn’t say it was necessarily good or bad to live in California. All I said is that the average price of a home seems to dictate that people enjoy living there more than many other states.
Although my perspective is tempered with what I experienced around the gulf, in Mississippi and Florida. The humidity there is so bad I literally don't think it's fit for human settlement.
Deleted Comment
That easternmost part of the state is the "piney woods" and it's lovely compared to the concrete island that is Dallas. The forests have a mitigating effect on heat.
Deleted Comment
The south is cheaper for a reason, and CA is expensive for a reason. You get what you pay for. Red State governance is truly abysmal, the climate is terrible, and there is precious little BLM land to explore.
If enough people leave CA to reduce the price (or enough people move to the south to raise the price here) I'd gladly move to the west coast.
Dead Comment
I'm a Texas native. The temps in Texas are nothing like what California gets.
On the other hand, the rockhounding is far, FAR better out here in Cali. But you aren't doing that in the summer. You could do that in Texas in the summer out in the Llano uplift region.
Deleted Comment
That's why I tell disbelieving Californians that we have better weather in Texas than they do: When we have nice days, we appreciate it, whereas when they do, they don't even notice .... :-)
(Source: Spent several years in California long ago.)
That must have been expensive!
You had to eat the second six months of a year lease on a house, maybe lost your deposit, too; plus you paid to move an entire family from California to Texas; then paid again to move from Texas to California. Then had to find another place to live in California and pay another deposit there.
Having helped a friend move from California to Texas recently, it sounds like at least a $40,000 mistake.
Probably cost 4K, not 40K.
It’s not just being indoors more but also being uncomfortable indoors. Boo
I feel like most of the people that leave for Texas will end up feeling the same.
Which US state doesn't have problems with bugs though? I know none hold a candle to Australia but it seems like each has its own unique problem with bugs.
The entire western coast of the US (cali to Washington) has far less bugs than the east or Midwest. I assumed it was the drier climate but Seattle area doesn’t have a lot of bugs either.
After moving west, I found in identical weather conditions, the west is better to be outside because it will have less bugs.
Texas is no Australia when it comes to dangerous critters, but of all the American states, it's in the top 2, and gives Florida a run for its money.
Low temperatures? Heating.
High humidity? Dehumidifiers.
Low humidity? Humidifiers.
Particulate matter? Air filters.
Bugs? Pest control. Bug screens. Traps. Mosquito treatments.
High energy use? Solar.
Lack of density? Sign me up. More privacy, less noise, lower crime rate, and fewer problems in general. No rude people constantly in a hurry.
The stuff there are no solutions for: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and natural disasters in general. Except for insurance, that is.
The situation has been dire for some time, but all they do are small incremental steps towards building more housing, it's nowhere close to what's necessary. Unfortunately, the NIMBY, anti-housing sentiment is very strong.
Builder’s remedy is already being applied against NIMBY communities like Santa Monica and Redondo beach, no take backs.
It takes time to build the homes and see the impact but it’s hard to say that they’re not moving strongly in the right direction.
Sure they’re doing it 20-30 years later than they should have but they’re certainly not sitting on their hands right now.
Newsome knows he needs to show that he really addressed the massive headline problem that everyone hears about California before he can have a serious crack at the presidency, or else he’s never going to overcome the “California bad because mismanaged by Democrats”
Have you seen the particulars of that law that upzoned the state? It's actually extremely weak:
"* Benefits homeowners NOT institutional investors. Recent amendments require a local agency to impose an owner occupancy requirement as a condition of a homeowner receiving a ministerial lot split. This bill also prohibits the development of small subdivisions and prohibits ministerial lot splits on adjacent parcels by the same individual to prevent investor speculation. In fact, allowing for more neighborhood scale housing in California’s communities actually curbs the market power of institutional investors. SB 9 prevents profiteers from evicting or displacing tenants by excluding properties where a tenant has resided in the past three years."
Translation: will be used only sparingly, because it's illegal to do it with a standard case of a corporation replacing existing housing with more housing. How many owner occupiers are interested in this and can afford this kind of redevelopment?
"Respects local control. Homeowners must comply with local zoning requirements when developing a duplex (height, floor area ratios, lot coverage etc.) as long as they do not physically preclude a lot split or duplex. This bill also allows locals to require a percolation test for any duplex proposed to be on septic tanks."
Translation: still lets local NIMBYs restrict density.
"It takes time to build the homes and see the impact but it’s hard to say that they’re not moving strongly in the right direction."
It's the right direction yes, but as you say, it's the kind of thing that should've been the response to the much weaker housing crisis of 20-30 years ago, not the much more serious one now.
California needs to dramatically cut back on its land use restrictions and figure out how to streamline everything. Even a typical (nominally uncontroversial) single-family home can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to entitle before anybody even breaks ground. It's madness.
Unfortunately, it's simply not in the culture of the people of the state to want to pursue cost-efficiency or reductions in bureaucracy.
The rural county I live in has open jobs, but a sizeable chunk of the work force is either seasonal (logging, etc) then coast on unemployment for the off season or don't actually want to work. Those that do, are flaky as all get go. (My partner and I own a small business in the county).
What does this have to do with housing? Covid and growth of a near by metro area (about an hour away) have pushed people to buying up what was previously cheap (yet affordable) housing. Small cabins that would be going for ~75k or a bit more 7 years ago are pushing over $200k now. The local community college as well as natural disasters further puts pressure on the housing situation. How about building more? Well, insuring housing when large fires have come through? Hard to come by. Building costs have also gone through the roof.
Housing is needed in this particular county (and surrounding) but isn't being built.
Where does housing for 3.5 million get built?
California is not great. It hasnt been great for a long time. It's hostile to anyone who is not the elite while also mascarading as a progressive paradise. The problem with people leaving is they export the same politics that got California to it's position as a working class hostile state. In the most common states, Oregon, Nevada, and Texas Californians are looked at with great disdain. It tells you something, at least, when even a left-leaning state like Oregon doesn't want you.
Living in California is expensive, in more ways than just housing. Not everyone can afford it. Just like not everyone can afford a new BMW. In my corner of the state, people who increasingly cannot afford to live here are noisy. I mostly don't engage because I'm aware that I will simply receive vitriol and anger for sharing my views. But quietly, I'm ok with it. They can move if they want to. I love it here and having fewer people on the fringes of society as neighbors isn't really the worst outcome to me.
Edit: and this why I don't engage. I'm out. Merry Christmas everyone.
[0] I say "naive accounting," because it's not so great if you ever need to buy a new lawnmower, sofa, or iPhone or if you hope your kids will someday be able to. And it's not so great for your city in the long run if making ordinary products illegal results in drastically lower levels of productivity, etc, etc.
Your logic isn’t unsound, but it will increasingly come across as unreasonable because not everyone in the workforce has the option of finding employment and accommodation elsewhere.
Imagine property values start plunging, people can't leave, they just start abandoning houses, soon you get vast swathes of abandoned houses which lead to increased crime and urban decay.
Decades from now people will shake their heads and talk about the golden days of California and the problems with the silicon belt.
As a San Francisco area homeowner and a BMW owner, I believe every human deserves a roof over their head.
Edit: Please don't discuss the things I've said. My BMW is the victim! Merry Christmas.
"Increasing price of cars during pandemic not an issue for people who already have cars."
Yes, people are upset that the government pushes policies that hurt people, and that make no sense generationally (intentionally targeting rising property values is just a generational ponzi scheme).
If your stance is apathy or even pleasure upon seeing the suffering caused by bad policy, it's no wonder you're being downvoted.
Jersey city has massively ramped up development and is filling demand generated by families who want to move out of their NYC shoebox. The entire NJ-PATH route has been expanding rapidly the last decade or so.
Actually, 8/10 of NY state's biggest cities (barring Syracuse, Rochester) are within a commute distance from neighboring states/countries. Although the bottom 9 combined, add up to 10% of NYC's population. So they don't really matter.
So a CA thing
States with most negative change rate: California (-0.9%), Illinois (-0.8%), Louisiana (-0.8%), West Virginia (-0.6%), Hawaii (-0.5%)
Five most positive change rate: South Dakota (1.5%), Texas (1.6%), South Carolina (1.7%), Idaho (1.8%), Florida (1.9%)
Interestingly three states did not have enough change to register: Kansas, Michigan and Vermont.
Also, that’s not the title I’m seeing when I click the link, it’s — California’s population shrinks for third straight year as high costs stress households — which is a lot less editorial.
How does the home price growth rates compare between CA and the states Californians move to?
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2022/comm/perc...
I would agree that it is not particularly notable; a lot of the headlines are “look at the big numerator and ignore the big denominator, because narrative agenda”.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
The median home sold from Marin County to Santa Clara County is $1M+.
That's the same land mass as from Times Square to the Maryland border.
https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1440035534693232640
California is NIMBYism at its worst: the far left opposes more housing, the far right opposes more housing, and the center is sick of traffic from more housing.
It's the banality of evil.
It's not that homeowners are conspiring to create unaffordable housing, it's just that they all just care about the benefit to themselves of rising home prices and maintaining the comfortable exclusivity of their neighborhoods. Everyone hopes someone else is fixing the problem.
Collectively, each city wants some other city to build more affordable housing. It's not a political issue. It's the haves vs. the have nots, just as it's always been.
The only solution is to have the state organize a plan that forces many cities in the bay area to build denser housing is some of their prime locations -- I'm thinking like way Palo Alto's downtown and Caltrain station area is surrounded by single-family suburban houses. Some of which are on huge lots! Any areas surrounding public transit corridors like that should be immediately built up into multi-story housing complexes.
Who are the people moving out? Primarily those without money or assets to stay. People who tend to skew younger.
So you drive out the younger, start a feedback loop where more young people leave, inverting the population pyramid. This is accelerated by the lower birthrate.
Congrats, you now live in a place where young people are overwhelmed by grey pressure and the only realistic alternatives are decreasing quality of services, or siphoning wealth to push for more services. The latter solution nullifies most benefits stubborn NIMBYs amassed for themselves a few decades before they got old.
Aka "congratulations, you played yourself".
Personally, I do not know a single person whose NIMBY is motivated by this.
What do you mean by this? Who is the "far left" and what are they opposing exactly?
Not true at all. The far left objects to gentrification, where the supply of housing nominally increases but prices continue to go higher. Short-term rentals and properties being kept vacant for land speculation are two factors. The far left hates landlords and property speculators, for more or less the same reasons Adam Smith did.
But in all seriousness. The ROI on California taxes has to be one of the worst deals in the country. I can’t think of another state (maybe NY) that does so little with so much.
I see this same resistance when it comes to building non-single family homes, and Texans are instead thinking more lanes + more sprawl is going to solve the influx of people. Then they lament pricing and make claim that long time Texans have more of a right to live here than new people. I'm sorry but for a capitalist and freedom loving state, it sure is echoing some of the exact same things that helped California's demise.
But not enough people do want it fixed because they are trapped with their real estate investment which they can’t adored to have decrease in value.
There's already a mountain of private capital ready and consumer demand that the moment laws let them build they will, regardless of gov $ investment.
People in California seem to believe that other parts of the country with lower taxes are hell on earth, they aren't. When I moved to San Francisco, I had many conversations with people denigrating my home state of Florida. In retrospect I can see this for what it was, a coping mechanism for having to live in such a terrible place and pay an absurd amount of money for the privilege of doing so.
The reason California has seen such economic success can be attributed to proximity to the fastest growing economies and largest manufacturing hubs in the past 30 years and a little luck. If you really need to live on the west coast, Washington state is a much better option.
Yea, California is overpriced and has many problems, but if one saves here enough then moving anywhere with plenty of savings is very comfortable in the future. There’s nothing wrong with willing to live in other places but there’s a good reason people move to California.
Additionally, I think companies and investors are catching on. If I give a company $100 million I don't want $10 million to go to avoidable state income taxes and another $20 million to go into landlord pockets via inflated rent prices (commercial and residential), I want it to go into the business.
Some years ago I had to deal with California income tax for various reasons. I think at that time you had to earn over 50K to hit 9% marginal. In my state you hit that at about 16K. And this is after deductions where California had a ton more. I believe one needed an income of over 100K before the amount they paid in taxes exceeded that of my state.