Given the state of affairs in California, if you could move out, would you? Why or why not? To comment on this issue, please see our forum.
There was a time when California was a migration destination. With its sun-drenched coasts, dynamic economy and boundless promise, it stood as a beacon that drew people from all over the country.
Today, after a decade of cascading failures and near oppressive disappointments, there’s a looming sense that California has descended into dreary mediocrity and is headed for imminent disaster.
We see the state’s population increase annually and think that represents growth, but that doesn’t tell the real tale. Despite new births and new immigrants (legal), which sustained California’s population growth over the last decade, fewer and fewer Americans were moving here, and more and more Californians were leaving.
Last year, California’s population rose less than 1 percent. Sacramento County’s growth rate was below 1 percent for the first time in 15 years, according to the state Department of Finance. Of the region’s other three counties, only Placer saw sizable growth.
But 2009 marked a more startling statistic: It was the fifth consecutive year that more residents left California than moved to California from other states.
“I hate what California has become,” says Lisa Duerr, a state worker and California native.
“I grew up during California’s ‘Golden Age,’ ” she recalls. “The best schools, the cutting edge of everything from culture to technology, the envy of the nation. I never imagined living anywhere else.”
Now, frustrated by high prices and tax dollars that support an entitlement attitude at the expense of the middle class, Duerr says, “I’m about 10 years from retirement and seriously considering moving out of state.”
Even as out-migration slowed nationwide due to limited employment prospects and a bleak housing picture brought on by the recession, nearly 100,000 residents left California last year, more than double the state’s out-migration during the milder recession of 2001.
From 2004 to 2008, 2.7 million Californians left for other states. Nevada, Oregon and Arizona were popular, but Texas and Idaho soon became destination hot spots.
Reasons for the exodus are many and familiar: A perennial budget mess, a laughable Legislature, waning public education, wasteful spending, cost of living, high taxes and the fear of tax increases. People gave up the California dream.
Last year, simple math made leaving California easy for Mike and Cindy Reilly: After moving from their three-bedroom home in Nipomo, south of San Luis Obispo, to a rural spread south of Denver, the taxes they pay, from property to personal, dropped by more than half.
“We both grew up in California,” says Cindy, 41, “but our dream was to own land.” They have 10 acres with plans to build a bigger home. “We couldn’t afford that in California.”
And after settling in, they quickly discovered something else: “Nobody here wants to leave. In California, it felt like everyone wanted to get out,” she says.
They still have ties here. Not wanting to sell for a loss, they rent out their California home. Cindy’s parents still live in Nipomo and Mike, a 39-year-old engineering contractor, often commutes to California for work. But the inconveniences that come with a major life change are worth the trade-off of waking up in Colorado.
In 2004, lifelong Californians Nathan and Melanie Fischer settled on suburban Kansas City. The thirty-something couple traded in their San Bernardino house for a five-bedroom home nearly twice the size, and they had enough money left after their move to pay off the debt on their two cars and buy a 21-foot motorboat. Dual incomes are no longer necessary. He works in the restaurant business while she stays home with their three children.
Their new neighbors were puzzled by the Fischers’ willingness to trade sunny California for tornado warnings and wind chill factors, but Melanie Fischer is philosophical about it: “You have to give up things to get things.”
They have no regrets.
Will more follow? In a 2008 survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, about a third of residents under 35 years old said it was just too doggone expensive to live here, and two-thirds of those said they were thinking of leaving the state.
Many Californians are third- and fourth-generation residents whose families came here a century ago because of the promise of economic prosperity. Many went to public schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s when California’s education system was among the best in the nation.
We see a picture of decline in California’s physical, social and educational infrastructure against a backdrop of other states that have managed to avoid the kind of profound change for the worse that California has experienced. It’s easy to grow despondent and become pessimistic.
Would you leave if you could?
I thought for sure most of the Bee readers I contacted in an e-mail blast would answer that question with a resounding, “Hell, yes!” Instead, most offered an emphatic, “Hell, no!”
Some cited practical reasons: Tied to a job; tied to their house; a reduction in pension benefits if they moved.
Family came up. “I would only move if my daughter and her family were to move out of state,” Joyce Tucker in Fair Oaks wrote in an e-mail.
They mentioned the weather, culture, natural beauty and a bountiful agriculture.
Most were staying put – proudly, even defiantly.
Steve Russi lived in Colorado for a year and “could not wait to get back.” Operating a lumber company that turns underutilized timber into new wood products, he had just squelched an idea by his brother about locating a distribution point in Reno to lower business costs. “That’s like staying out of the party because everything isn’t perfect,” he said. “The action is here.”
He would know. His family has business roots in California going back five generations to the old orange groves in Claremont, east of Los Angeles.
Indeed, according to a Pew Research Center study, 69 percent of native adult residents still live here, a stability exceeded only by Texas, North Carolina and Georgia. For all the complaints about taxes and warnings that higher taxes would drive out wealthier Californians, Census Bureau figures show only four other states have a higher concentration of people with annual salaries of $200,000 or more: Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Art Shapiro, a University of California, Davis, professor, is reminded of the struggles faced by Argentina a generation ago. He’s been conducting a research program there since 1977, when the country was laid waste by a corrupt, ineffective government.
“A lot of the best people in the country emigrated under the military dictatorship, which was brutally anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic and anti-modernist. And a great many of them missed their country and loved it so much they came back once the regime was gone. I don’t think Californians are such hothouse flowers that they will get up and go because things have gotten a bit nasty. I certainly hope not. If the Argentines can rebuild a working democracy on the ruins of fascist dictatorship, there is lots of hope for California.”
Terry Meany, who just moved here from Washington state, echoes that optimism. “Some believe humans rise to their best efforts when things are at their worst,” he wrote. “I’m waiting for this to happen in California.”
