Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
In recent years, the number of people moving away from the state of California has greatly outnumbered the number of people moving into the state. Reasons for the mass exodus include rising crime, the worst traffic in the western world, a growing homelessness epidemic, wildfires, earthquakes and crazy politicians that do some of the stupidest things imaginable. But for most families, the decision to leave California comes down to one basic factor…
Money.
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For a lot of Californians, it simply does not make economic sense to remain in the state any longer. So over the past decade approximately 5 million people have picked up and moved to another state, and many believe that this trend is going to accelerate if California does not start doing things differently. The following is from an excellent article by Kristin Tate, the author of a new book entitled “How Do I Tax Thee?: A Field Guide to the Great American Rip-Off“…
The largest socioeconomic segment moving from California is the upper-middle class. The state is home to some of the most burdensome taxes and regulations in the nation. Meanwhile, its social engineering — from green energy to wealth redistribution — have made many working families poorer. As California begins its long decline, the influx outward is picking up in earnest.
I don’t know anyone that enjoys being taxed at extremely high levels, and in California extracting more and more revenue from the citizens has become an art form. California’s highest marginal tax rate is now a whopping 13.3 percent, and on average taxpayers are hit with a 9.3 percent rate…
Taxes also are much lower in Arizona than California. California residents pay nearly twice as much in state income taxes. The individual income tax rate is 4.54 percent in Arizona. It’s 9.3 percent in California, according to the Arizona Sun Corridor.
Under the old rules, the tax burden imposed upon Californians was mitigated by federal rules allowing for the deduction of state taxes. But now the new tax bill has made some major changes, and some experts believe that this will actually accelerate the exodus out of the state of California. The following comes from CNBC…
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal headlined “So Long, California. Sayonara, New York,” Laffer and Moore (who have both advised President Donald Trump) say the new tax bill will cause a net 800,000 people to move out of California and New York over the next three years.
The tax changes limit the deduction of state and local taxes to $10,000, so many high-earning taxpayers in high-tax states will actually face a tax increase under the new tax code.
Of course taxation is only part of the equation.
For many, the exceedingly high cost of housing in California is the primary reason that they have chosen to leave. At this point, the average price of a home in California is more than $200,000 above the national average…
According to Zillow, the average price for a home in the U.S. was $261,000 in February 2018. The average home price in California was $469,000. In Oklahoma, it was $116,000.
And that $469,000 figure is for the state as a whole.
In Santa Clara County (the home of Google and Apple), the median price of a single family home is 1.4 million dollars.
Yes, you read that correctly.
In some areas of northern California, the housing bubble is completely out of control. For example, just recently a burned out husk of a home sold for more than $900,000…
Real estate agent Holly Barr says she’s never had a listing generate as much attention as the one on Bird Avenue in the San Jose neighborhood of Willow Glen. The house caught fire two years ago during a remodeling job. What was left was a burned-out husk of a California bungalow sitting on 5,800 square feet of land.
When Barr put the property on the market in April for $800,000, the listing made international headlines. It sold for over $900,000 — in less than a week. The burned down house will be razed and a new property will be built there that will likely sell for far more.
Well, if families cannot afford to buy a home, why don’t they just rent?
Unfortunately, we have seen rents spiral completely out of control as well…
The median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Los Angeles area is $2,249, and in San Francisco it’s almost $3,400, according to Zumper. The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the Los Angeles area is $3,200 and in San Francisco about $4,500. By comparison, the median rent for a one-bedroom in Las Vegas is $925 and in Phoenix $945, and for a two-bedroom in Las Vegas $1,122 and in Phoenix $1,137.
Ouch.
Sadly, rapidly rising prices have greatly contributed to the homelessness epidemic that California is dealing with right now.
Even though we are supposedly in an “economic recovery”, the number of homeless people in Los Angeles has risen by an astounding 50 percent over the last five years…
The homelessness issue has achieved a special distinction in Los Angeles. Having increased 50% during the past five years, “it’s supplanted traffic as the topic everyone talks about,’’ says Tom Waldman, spokesman for regional homeless agency.
The homeless are as visible as the Hollywood sign. More than two years after Mayor Eric Garcetti declared a “state of emergency,’’ about 41,000 are “unsheltered’’ — sleeping in cars, outside City Hall, under freeway overpasses. The Los Angeles Times calls it “a human tragedy of extraordinary proportions.’’
And it isn’t just families that are leaving.
In fact, sometimes entire companies are picking up and relocating to another state. For example, Price Pump Manufacturing Co. is leaving the Golden State and is heading for Idaho…
Price Pump Manufacturing Co., an 86-year-old company that has operated in Sonoma for 70 years, bought 6 acres of land in the Sky Ranch Business Center for about $86,000. The company plans to build a 40,000-square-foot plant at the industrial site east of Interstate 84 and south of Franklin Road.
The high cost of manufacturing in California made it more difficult to compete with other sellers in the United States and across the globe, president and CEO Bob Piazza said. He said the marketplace helps determines prices, and Price Pump could not simply raise prices to maintain a reasonable return on investment.
And I found another article today about a company that has decided to leave California and is relocating to Phoenix, Arizona…
A company that manufactures workbenches and lab furniture is relocating to Goodyear, near Phoenix, Arizona, to save money, while creating 30 new jobs in Arizona.
Matt McConnell, director of sales and marketing for IAC Industries, said the move will increase the stability and longevity of his business. IAC is located in Brea, California.
“The commercial property costs in California versus the commercial property costs in other states” made the decision easy, he said.
As long as tech giants such as Google and Apple are thriving, the trends that are driving such dramatic change in the state are likely to continue.
So we are likely to continue to see a very large exodus out of California, and those that are leaving will continue to fundamentally change the communities that they are moving into.
Because there is such a disparity between the number of people moving out and the number of people moving in, it actually costs nearly twice as much to take a U-Haul from California to Texas as it does to take a U-Haul from Texas to California…
The cost of popular moving truck services, like U-Haul, is largely created through the ironclad rules of supply and demand. Turns out, there is much higher demand for trucks leaving high-tax blue states heading to low-tax red states than vice versa.
A route from California to Texas, for example, is more than twice as expensive as a route from Texas to California. Want to go from Los Angeles to Dallas? $2,558. Returning back? $1,232.
Once upon a time, millions of young Americans dreamed of moving to California. It was a land of gorgeous weather, movie stars and endless opportunity.
But now the California Dream has turned into the California nightmare, and people are heading out of the state in droves.
Good article. A few comments. I have little sympathy for those “upper middle class” people being forced to flee the state they presumably love. How many of them are liberal idiots, who helped bring this upon themselves? OK, how many are not hard-core liberals but are the sort of white Americans who sneer at conservatives, ridicule folks from the South, and never, ever dare to speak back to the “crazy politicians” they helped put in office? One more thing. When you parachute into somebody else’s state, please do not bring your California ways with you. Get your heads out of your asses and learn something.
For sure, you don’t want them moving to your state….They wrecked Seattle already.
Michael is the one that is back crying. He lost the political race he was in and finished 5th with about 10% of the vote. Now after missing the gravy train he wanted to get on, he is back blogging on his site where he cried for contributions previously for his campaign.
Nobody goes there anymore- it’s too crowded.
Plenty of welfare seeking illegals, 3d world immigrants, and homeless are going to California. No problem!
Another form of “moozie infiltration”/Dummyrat/RINO “pernicious idiocracy infestation?
Moving and infecting the rest of the country with their ideas. Soon we will all be California
Just make sure you and other locals carry a large caliber weapon open. The Libs will freak and pass your community by.
Don’t come to Sandpoint; It’s full up already. (with Californians)
The statistics show it is largely the under 50k income people leaving California, the over 50k people have still come here net positive since 2006, increasing that ever since 2010 . http://next10.org/migration
The state average income is going up in the state, and high-wage workers continue to move in but
not into every county. The net population increase/decrease varies yearly which as far as I am concerned, wake me when we lose 5 million . Everything else stated seems about right and we’ll find out the hard way on the new tax system.
If you google progressive liberal groups in California, your search returns more than you want to look at. Try the same with conservative groups… pretty much ONE returns, the Republican party. The kooky weird-o strange-o progressive liberal socialists have a pretty firm grip on the state. I was born here, I’m not leaving (anyway).
You can come to Arizona as long as you leave your Caliphonia politics and tax demands back there.
The South Western region of BC is similar.
The cost of living here is out of control. It is turning single-family homes into multi-generational dwellings as a means to cope. My business partner lives in the city. They have no expectations that their children will leave home unless they leave the region entirely. It simply is not possible from a financial perspective.
We are a good hours + drive away from that insanity but it isn’t much better here. My son and his friends graduate next year. They are stumped – they have no idea how they will afford to go to school, emerge with debt then buy a home and start a family.
For the most part, they are correct. It is impossible for them to do so from a financial perspective in the manner that we and our parents did.
In our house, we’ve begun to look at this from a multi-generational perspective. I want my kids to have those things and I want our legacy to carry on so there is a plan in place to cope with this hurdle so long as the kids are willing to embrace it. We have begun having discussions with them about it which have begun with the issue of debt and how to overcome it with teamwork. Their education is taken care of. That was the first step. The second will be work and a place to live. If we stick together they can have a relatively debt-free life and all the family they want.
The choice will be theirs. Hopefully, they choose wisely.
This situation is a repeat of 25 years ago. Then, it was the defense industry job implosion. I left then and U-Haul was also double for exiting. Of course, then housing/rentals were pretty close to reasonable, so you could have stayed if you wanted. I left because of the semi ban ( then it followed me with Clinton ), and because it just wasn’t the place I grew up in. And, no, I did NOT sell a house and go jack up the market in another state-I was renting. I did take my writing income with me, so I’m a net benefit to Nevada ( not that it was profitable back then, although I still paid state income on inventory/equipment ). Hump you very much, California.
If the rest of America could watch the televised political ads currently airing in California they’d see just how detached from reality the political class has become. You’d think every female is sexually harassed every day and every gun owner is a mass shooter in waiting. The ads are so juvenile, so childish they seem directed at preteens rather than adults. I’m stuck here as my wife won’t leave. But believe me when I say California is a hothouse of political madness and will eventually implode socially.
I have a nice 250k house in low tax, low regulation Florida, has a pool and citrus trees on a 1/4 acre lot on nice culdesac in a GOP run north Central Fla exburb county, willing to sell to a Kalifornian for 750K
I moved out of CA back around 1990; it was just after they passed a bond issue. Something like $10 billion if I recall right, everything from shave the whales to hug the trees and all to be paid for in new taxes. There are 100+ counties in CA; the measure only passed in 9 or so, but by population it passed, so all would pay.
I never looked back; parts of CA are nice, but not worth going broke for.
“Why Are So Many People Moving Out Of California?”
1. Because it finally became the Kommiefornia they were trying to build.
2. To spread the dystopia and mental illness that prevails there to other states so they don’t suffer alone. It’s working too. Look at AZ, Portland, Boise.
Let’s not forget Boulder and Denver, destroying Colorado one county at a time. The Kalifornians will go from state to state voting in the same Social Justice Engineer politicians and expect different results, as the man said Liberalism is a mental Disorder
it’s been happening down here for generations-
people move here from high tax northeastern or midwestern states & expect the same level of govt services–they then elect politicians who give them the services they want & can’t figure out why taxes go up–
If you’re moving from a Liberal state to the South remember a few things. We hate Liberals,heavy taxes,snowflakes,gender fluidity,political correctness, and Yankees .
We love out heritage,our guns,God and we have manners .
Yay, it worked. Now you guys are all going to have to put up with the retards that couldn’t make it in CA. Of course, I am sure that you will teach them real good. Those of us left in CA wish you the best of luck. Just don’t send any of them back, and don’t come yourselves either. We really don’t want you clogging up the roads.
California doesn’t care about losing middle class citizens. They are rapidly moving down the path of having just two groups, the 1% ultra elitist wealthy (Tech + Media) and the poor, servant class. Core to their strategy is to import smart poor people (h1B) and loads of poor worker servants from Central America and Muslim countries.
This is why they have the highest poverty rate in the country and do not care, as they are constantly importing cheap labor whose job it is to serve the ultra wealthy, and replace the middle class folks (including software programmers) who want a better life and can afford to leave. This is their logic. The 20% poverty rate is the cost of human freight which to them is still low.
This is a form of ponzi scheme economics and the reason they ferociously oppose immigration control. This will fail, but they currently have the power to continue this for a few more years. They are morally bankrupt, but not stupid.