Sunday, April 22, 2012

UPDATED--"Joel Kotkin: The Great California Exodus"

Update: "Joe Shmoe Shrugs: Kotkin on California’s Middle-Class Exodus".
Original post:
We've been posting on the self-induced travails of the formerly Golden State since the blog's early days.
From the Wall Street Journal:
A leading U.S. demographer and 'Truman Democrat' talks about what is driving the middle class out of the Golden State.

'California is God's best moment," says Joel Kotkin. "It's the best place in the world to live." Or at least it used to be.

Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation's premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for hipsters who had grown up listening to the Mamas & the Papas' iconic "California Dreamin'" and the Beach Boys' "California Girls." But it also attracted young, ambitious people "who had a lot of dreams, wanted to build big companies." Think Intel, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

Now, however, the Golden State's fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn't Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.
Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.

The scruffy-looking urban studies professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., has been studying and writing on demographic and geographic trends for 30 years. Part of California's dysfunction, he says, stems from state and local government restrictions on development. These policies have artificially limited housing supply and put a premium on real estate in coastal regions.

"Basically, if you don't own a piece of Facebook or Google and you haven't robbed a bank and don't have rich parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak," says Mr. Kotkin....MUCH MORE

HT: Carpe Diem who writes:

U-Haul rates for one-way 26 foot truck rentals in May:

From Sacramento to Houston: $2,370
From Houston to Sacramento: $1,007

From San Francisco to San Antonio: $2,214
From San Antonio to San Francisco:  $1,069

Dynamically-determined U-Haul rates reflect the differences in relative demand for one-way truck rentals between any two U.S. cities.  The 2:1 California-Texas price ratios above suggest that demand for trucks leaving California is roughly double the demand for trucks coming into the Golden State....MORE