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Seriously considering Seattle or Las Vegas, or farther afield, Hawaii or New Zealand, in 2013+.
From a selfish standpoint, should I, as a Californian in a booming industry that looks like it will remain a central part of the economy for the forseeable future, be too broken up about a lot of people moving elsewhere for jobs? Should I want the metro area I live in to be seeing double-digit-percentages population growth over decades (I don't think that would make it any cheaper, or would make traffic any better)? And even then, the overall populations for the parts of California I'd want to live in are still rising, and jobs and new companies are still being created, and I'm meeting a ton of smart people who've moved here from all over the country.
I certainly have no intention to move back east any time soon. I've found a lot more interesting stuff being done out here, and the weather is worlds better, and the high population density allows a ton of things I like.
The Manhattan Institute is an explicitly conservative political organisation. That doesn't inherently invalidate any of the conclusions they draw, but readers should be aware that they have been made with a pro-free market, anti-big government mindset. Others may draw quite different conclusions from the same facts.
At the high end of moving out (rich people), California is unappealing because it's budgetfucked. Education, transportation, public services, and everything else will suffer for a long time. This leads to their crazy high state income tax and crazy high sales taxes and municipalities doing insane additional taxes for businesses on top of everything else. The Bay Area may be the best place to create Show Me Your Food…
http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/Va...
By the way, the reason the state is "budgetfucked" as you eloquently put it is because of low taxes, not high taxes. You may be interested in reading about Proposition 13, a scheme under which people who are sitting on massively valuable assets are taxed at lower rates than those who actively acquire and dispose of much less valuable assets, and where assets held by corporations are taxed static amounts (in terms of absolute magnitude, not rates) in perpetuity.
Except the charts are subtracting out-migration from in-migration. California is the most populous state, about 38 million people. New York is the second most populous state, about 19 million people. Nevada went from having 1.2 million to having 2.7 million. South Carolina went from having 3.4 million to having 4.6 million.
Nevada never really had a population base that could have been subtracted in those charts. South Carolina also had a small population base.
What I've seen happen in New York City is large blue-collar families leaving ethnic neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods being replaced by young professionals. Williamsburg is an example - it was a working class ethnic neighborhood, now it is yuppies, hipsters, startups, art galleries, and the like. You can think what you want of it, but it is certainly not a sign of a lack of prosperity.
That's another assumption implicit in the article - that the Duggar family leaving a state, and two yuppie kids moving in is bad economically, because the population decreased. If small populations meant a bad economy then Norway, Denmark, Finland, Singapore, and Uruguay are bad, and Nigeria and Bangladesh are good. Prosperity does not equal population size.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had to put places in order, I'd go with: NYC, Barcelona (May-July), Seattle (August), Austin (not summer).
Sure, I'm biased because I moved here from NYC, but also check out Nashville. You can live like a Columbian drug lord on NYC (or California) freelance rates.
The Manhattan Institute is an explicitly conservative political organisation. That doesn't inherently invalidate any of the conclusions they draw, but readers should be aware that they have been made with a pro-free market, anti-big government mindset. Others may draw quite different conclusions from the same facts.
I don't think this is relevant. The reason that people for the most are leaving is not politics or taxes, but high cost of living. The biggest expense for most people is housing. From 1930-2000, almost everyone who moved to CA made money on exploding real-estate values, eithe directy or indirectly. This extended massively peoples wealth, so they lived in houses and with a lifestyle they could never afford based on th…
After just roughly scanning the graphs I'd speculate that the ageing society plays a role. Which could explain why less liberal states are experiencing a rise of population, while the more liberal states are experiencing a decline. Which is just my hunch (without any source or proof) that people get more conservative with age. And another one, that they prefer to live in places with like-minded folks. Just wild guess…
What Illinois needs is genuine growth and that doesn't happen overnight. In the meantime, people get fed up and leave -- unless they have to sell their home or business.