I'm in this boat. Movers came yesterday and our flight out of state is tomorrow. To answer one other poster, in my case I'm a programmer with a CS degree who's in the highest tax bracket. What I pay in taxes does not at all make up for the standard-/cost-of-living. We've been in SF for years and have a 3.5 year old daughter and a baby on the way. How anyone gets by with kids and without a lucrative job is beyond me. We pay $2,900/month just for preschool for my daughter. With two kids, it'd be $6,000/month (younger kids cost even more!). Where we're moving, it's $1,250/month and it even includes food. Everything is expensive here: food is expensive, rent is expensive, we have people literally smoking Fentanyl right out in front of our door. I'm not kidding, I actually need to get their attention so that I can even open the front gate. It's littered with trash and feces. Two days ago we were at a playground and there was a wide puddle of diarrhea in the play structure. I have to constantly tell my daughter not to touch ANYTHING. What kind of way is this to live, let alone raise a family? As I was siting outside guarding the open garage and moving truck, I literally got berated by a passing stranger for no reason and had to call the police for them to force him to move along since he was at it for almost 20 minutes and frequently coming into my garage.<p>"But you can't beat the weather" only goes so far. It's a shame. It's a beautiful state and a beautiful city, but to say it's going through a rough patch would be an understatement. I'm so excited to get out of here, but I do hope California can turn it around.
"Drain" and "hemorrhaging" carry such negative connotations. While there are some tough logistics involved in keeping infrastructure/operations/policy aligned with changing demographics, we really don't need everyone living in one state. It's not a competition.<p>If people who don't want to live in California leave for somewhere they'd rather be, that's probably ideal for everybody. I like it here and would rather collaborate with other neighbors who like it rather than neighbors who loathe it and stick around anyway. I'm pretty sure there will be enough of us left to make it work alright.
A shoebox house 45 min by train from SF costs $1 million. Rates are approaching 8%. Taxes are close to 10%. Your car windows can't survive 5 minutes in the city. The air is occasionally not breathable, typically during the best months of the year to be outside. Anyone not in finance or tech is probably living with their extended family because minimum rent is approaching $3k/month in a non-murderous area. Homeless camps everywhere. No enforcement on property theft.<p>I loved my time in CA, but the second WFH was a thing, I was out, regrettably. I'm not going to work an extra 10 years just so I can pay a mortgage.
>This is certainly not an argument for abandoning the state's commitments to the California model [of setting aggressive green energy goals], but it suggests paying close attention to the choices that are made in the energy transition to avoid backlash and major economic losses<p>The problem isn't the energy transition, the problem is that environmental reviews have been weaponized by NIMBYs. Whenever anyone tries to build anything in California, NIMBYs sue them to delay the project for years with environmental review laws. This is far more disruptive than, say, needing to get bureaucratic approvals for environmental impacts, because these lawsuits happen after planning has finished and shovels are already in the ground.<p>The only infrastructure that can get built in California is, naturally, the kind that spews carbon in the face of the poor. In fact, I have a bit of a conspiracy theory: California isn't nearly as blue as we think it is. A lot of nominally liberal Californians are actually extremely conservative, because they use bullshit lawsuits, local city councils, and other measures of vetocracy to stop progress. They disguise this with wokewashing - bathing their blatant conservatism[0] in the language of social justice so that liberals don't notice it right away.<p>Green energy would be already attainable for a good chunk of California residents <i>but for</i> the NIMBYism. California actually has to build a lot of their wind farms in Wyoming - yes, the deep-red state whose low taxes are subsidized by the coal industry - purely because the residents can't enact the fallacy of relative privation and sue a wind farm for not being green enough. California wants green energy, sure, but they want it "over there" where they don't have to even know that it exists.<p>[0] Don't Utah my California.
I had to make an unexpected trip out of LA last week. When I flew back in, Google Maps gave me an ETA of 1 hour 14 minutes to drive 13 miles home from the airport.
California has its problems (and some of its problems seem quite deep), but when these predictable discussions mention CA's sky-high rent, how it's not worth it, and then extrapolate and predict the doom of the state, I can't but think of the famous phrase:<p>"Nobody goes there any more, it's too crowded."<p>Yes I fully agree the rents are a huge problem, but come on.
<Sees baby boomers retiring to Nevada/Arizona where tax rates are lower><p>"Humans are fleeing California, looking for a better life!" - CBSNews