From the latimes.com:
A report from the state Legislative Analyst’s Office earlier this year confirmed the obvious: People are leaving California. Between 2007 and 2016, we lost 6 million residents to domestic migration. Our population still grew overall, gracias to out-of-staters moving in and our ever-impressive (though declining) birthrate. But the fact remains that many people don’t think staying in California is worth the hassle anymore.
The drop was “low in historical terms,” according to the LAO, but the political right pounced on the findings as proof of the decline of Taxifornia. Conservative pundits and politicians have claimed for years that state policies push our best and brightest to move away; indeed, they hail those who leave as new pioneers who deserve applause for taking their dreams and tax dollars elsewhere.
Those eggheads, however, never seem to check in with the folks on the receiving end of the California exodus. I do, and I bring a message from them. If you’re thinking of decamping, please don’t.
This summer, I drove on what has become an increasingly popular corridor for California’s quitters: I-15 to I-70. It runs through Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Colorado — four of the seven most popular states for expat Golden Staters. Nearly half a million of them relocated to these four states in the past decade, according to the LAO. All along the way I saw the chaos that ex-Californians have wrought.
I sped through Las Vegas, where housing subdivisions now stretch out to the hills and canyons in all directions. A third of the driver’s licenses surrendered at Sin City’s DMV come from California. Henderson nowadays is basically Mission Viejo with worse heat but slightly less snobbery.
In Utah, I stopped for gas in St. George, which the Census Bureau says is the fastest growing metro area in the United States. A recent story in High Country News highlighted the tensions there as agricultural fields give way to strip malls and people worry whether there’s enough water to go around. In Cedar City, just 53 miles up I-15, a professor at Southern Utah University told me during a recent conference that the presenters warned everyone to prepare for a change in the fabric of civic life as the city of 30,000 faces record-breaking growth through 2030.
I spent a night in Grand Junction, Colo., where a commercial on the hotel TV urged a yes vote on Proposition 110, one of two measures that seeks to fund transportation projects. The ad blamed population growth for Colorado’s deteriorating and overcrowded roads, and wants out-of-staters to “pay their fair share to keep Colorado moving forward.” Prop. 110 is a sales tax that everyone would pay, but its supporters clearly think tapping into the animosity toward newcomers is a winning strategy.
The grand finale was Denver, which increasingly looks like downtown Los Angeles with its collection of repurposed old buildings, new cookie-cutter lofts and smog. A 2016 story in the alt-weekly Westword showed that between 2009 and 2013, Orange, San Diego and Los Angeles counties ranked among the top 10 counties that sent new residents to the Mile High City, with L.A. the leader.
Colorado, in fact, has changed so much that the number of people moving out of the Centennial State in 2017 hit a record high. The Denver Post quoted a millennial who came west as a college student in 2009 but is now planning to return to New Jersey. “The growth of our beautiful city has brought nothing but increased traffic, angry entitled transplants who have no respect, and a cost of living that is through the roof,” she said.
When people are moving back to Jersey, you know the Californians have caused serious problems.
I say phooey to people who want all of the easy and none of the hard of California and just give up and git. But California does owe it to lesser states to try to keep our residents here rather than having them trample over the West like a cattle drive.
Unfortunately, Gov. Jerry Brown was never able to fix our housing affordability issue, and I doubt Gavin Newsom will do much better. (Hey Gav, proposing to “work with our corporate partners to create workforce housing” smack of the days when robber barons paid in company scrip).
So friends and family will continue to rent U-Hauls and head out on that California quitter corridor. But amigos y familias, take it from your humble sojourner: The same problems that are driving you out of California will follow you to your new ’burbs. And your new neighbors won’t be happy about it.
So stay. Tough it out. Participate in the solution rather than flee.
Or if you must move, go to Texas. At least California colonialism can achieve something worthwhile there.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-arellano-california-quitters-20181003-story.html
And after seven years in the wilderness, some of us move back 😉
> So stay. Tough it out. Participate in the solution rather than flee.
Translation: We haven’t decanted all your vital bodily fluids yet.
Newsflash. Leaving is the ONLY act that gets Sacramento’s attention. And let me reveal a secret. A whole hunking lot of those tax locusts are public service employees taking their consumption and other taxes elsewhere all the while drawing CA pensions for the next 20-40 years.
Huntington Beach has finally fought back against bogus legislation attempting to designate them as a “sanctuary city,” which may have a measurable result in more housing availability, than if they hadn’t defeated Gov Brown’s, perhaps syphlitically induced schemes to undermine our state’s sovereignty in general, and our country’s Constitution in particular. Let’s be more like Huntington Beach.
The unmitigatable fact remains, we cannot see to the welfare needs of foreign nationals. We cannot advertise for economic refugee’swhile reigning as a welfare state. It is not fiscally sustainable, nor socially desirable. It invites intellectual rot, as our state’s recent high school gpa average clearly illustrates, while planting seeds for significant community discord for generations to come.
Robotics are becoming increasingly sophisticated, which displaces a significant portion of illegal immigrant class, making them de facto wards of the state. From strawberry-picking machines, auto-order takers at fast food restaurants, and most recently, the promise os “self-driving” and even “driverless” cars.
As this particular technology proceeds, what will it mean for immigrant taxi drivers, and the truck driving industry, both which are massive go-to’s for our nation’s immigrants, both legal and illegal? It will be a socioeconomic disaster.
More and more, our society is creating a society that is leaving undereducated, and/or unassimilated immigrants with less and less to do.
Extremely bad news for people who work in a welfare state, and those on public services, which will further enhance the grand exodus of longtime California residents looking for quick relief from excessive taxes, jammed freeways and sh*tshack “villages” erupting all along our local flood control channels, while paying extra taxes for the hiring of thousands more public employees hired to keep them out of sight. It is a process that is not economically sustainable.
The Balkanization of California is gaining momentum, along with the community discord, and erosion of public trust that must follow. Far from being a “melting pot,” as there isn’t enough melting going on, it remains socially stratified by ethnicity, class, culture and identity.
This social metafunction (possibly by design) makes the state, with San Francisco leading the poopy way, separatist, unequal, far more akin to a bowl of cereal:
What ain’t fruits or nuts, is flakes.
Its up to the longtime citizens of what’s left of California to take more political initiative to at least slow the decay, if not eradicate it. Good things can happen if people with courage stand up to their aggressors politically, if only to make their voices heard in the voting booth. The election of our president has proven, things don’t have to be horrible. The inmates don’t get to run the asylum, if you work to get them out. Think of San Francisco:, some call it a Petri dish of far left sensibilities. Just because the city of San Francisco is economically and socially Balkanized, while layered in human waste product like vile frosting on a cheap wedding cake, doesn’t mean the rest of California must follow their wretched lead.
Get politically active! Make “remember the poop” your rallying cry!
We can stop this!
PS all these observations and opinions are my own, and note that everyone on the planet may disagree with me.
Another “California is depopulating and spreading social and cultural herpes nationwide” story. Super original.
Now when Jerry finally hangs up his political career, will he have his property, inherited from his father, reassessed to current value for taxes? My face is turning blue. As RD above states, there are a bunch of fire and law enforcement living in other low tax states drawing their pensions some of which were taken on a “disability”basis. California laws are so interesting.
For those who grew up in California when it was bitchen’, it’s like you were living in a beautiful house, with the best parents anyone could hope for, then the government sends agents to arrest your parents for no reason, puts ’em in straight jackets, stick’s ’em in a nut house, and replaces them with the largest, sh*tist foster family ever, allowing them to move in the house you grew up in!
Some kids would pack their bags and leave, others would try to get the horrible foster family to leave, and try to save their parents. I guess it’s a matter of temperament, and what you house and parents meant to you.