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No Evidence of California Exodus Or 'Millionaire Flight', UC Research Project Finds (sfgate.com) 451

Charlotte Web shares a report from SFGate: Despite the popular belief that residents are fleeing California, there is not in fact a statewide exodus, new research out of the University of California finds. For one, while residents are moving out of state, they are not doing so at "unusual rates." Similarly, the research found no evidence of "millionaire flight" from California and notes that the state continues to attract as much venture capital as all other U.S. states combined, despite the recent exodus of Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. The report did reveal net migration out of San Francisco during the pandemic. However, about two-thirds of people who left the city remained in the Bay Area, while 80% stayed in California, which is consistent with earlier trends...

A recent survey by UC San Diego, included in the project, found that the percentage of Californians who plan to leave the state has remained static for two years. In fact, only 23% of California voters said they were seriously considering leaving the state, which is lower than the 24% who said the same in a 2019 survey conducted by UC Berkeley. [...] The myth of "millionaire flight" from California, the project also found, is just that -- a myth. Affluent Californians were actually more satisfied with the direction the state is going and very likely to believe it will be better when their children grow up. Likewise, an analysis of almost two decades of Franchise Tax Board data by Stanford University and Cornell University found that there has been no millionaire flight from California, despite recent tax increases levied on higher earners.
"From housing affordability to post-pandemic recovery, California is faced with solving a daunting number of existential challenges. To help inform those important public discussions, UC assembled many of the state's top researchers to provide a data-driven understanding of California's population trends," said UC Regent John A. Perez in a press release.

"Sliced and diced by geography, race, income and other demographic factors, our efforts have produced a clearer picture of who perceives California as the Golden State versus a failed state," he continued. "The empirical data will be, at once, disappointing to those who want to write California's obituary, as well as a call to action for policymakers to address the challenges that have caused some to lose faith in the California Dream."
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No Evidence of California Exodus Or 'Millionaire Flight', UC Research Project Finds

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  • psy-op (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Thursday July 08, 2021 @10:07PM (#61564321) Homepage

    Someone stands to profit from scaring people into imagining that Californians are flooding their states. This has always been the case but now it is a more believable lie. Follow the money and you'll find the real villains.

    • The internet is about eyes and adverts (the reason the Slashdot editors proudly shit all over a former tech site).

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nyet ( 19118 )

      Sorry. I live in CA. That article is a load of garbage; it's a PR piece literally funded by CA to make CA look good.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by skam240 ( 789197 )

        Sorry, I also live in CA. I see shit from conservative sources all the time that blatantly defy the reality around me. This actually makes some sense.

        I mean, people are either fleeing the state in mass and our state's population is significantly shrinking or the housing prices are too high. Pick one because both together defy economics as we know it.

  • Pull up stumps (Score:5, Informative)

    by Moloth ( 2793915 ) on Thursday July 08, 2021 @10:07PM (#61564323)

    No one really wants to leave family and friends and perhaps a good job, so the tax would have to be very high to justify leaving. The taxes are more likely stopping people moving to California.

    • But no one comes to California because it's too crowded :-)

  • by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Thursday July 08, 2021 @10:14PM (#61564331) Homepage

    California is a tremendously successful desirable place. The main problem is that they failed to generate cheap housing (mainly by allowing community development boards to prevent high rises - condos, co-ops, and apartments).

    Millionaires are not going to move away from wonderful California with access to both great beaches and great Ski Mountains, to flat, cheap Texas. They have the money to buy and maintain a house, in markets with strong, historical real estate gains. They do not need to buy cheap houses in Texas that has much lower real estate gains.

    So poor people, not millionaires, move to Texas for the tremendously cheap housing, and jobs.

    Note, most of these people end up paying HIGHER taxes. Why? Because Texas has a tax system designed to give breaks to millionaires but actually has a higher tax rate than California on poor people. Yes, California has lower taxes for the majority of people in it's states, then Texas.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opin... [bloomberg.com]

    • The high housing prices in California are essentially in the places where people want to live; close to Silicon Valley, etc. I'm sure there are plenty out there who assume the prices are high because of taxes, even though the prices are high because of the free market.

      • While it is true that California is full of places where people want to live, the Community Board thing is real. In NYC, people live in sky scrapers, but not in Silicon Valley.

        It's also the cause of traffic - when you do not have high rise living situations, population density drops, so you need lots of roads out. Further distances means a) Public transportation does not work and b) more time spent in cars = double the traffic (that is, if 1 million people drive 40 miles to work, there are 1 million cars o

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday July 08, 2021 @10:17PM (#61564337)
    to live. Great weather, lots of amenities. If you have money you stick around. A few will leave... and promptly be replaced. They don't spend enough money in the local economy to matter. The vast majority of economic output is from the trade in commodities needed to live, not elites yacht mooring fees.
    • to live. Great weather, lots of amenities. If you have money you stick around. A few will leave... and promptly be replaced. They don't spend enough money in the local economy to matter. The vast majority of economic output is from the trade in commodities needed to live, not elites yacht mooring fees.

      "Great weather" = "droughts".

      • > "Great weather" = "droughts".

        Don't worry, they "own" the water that fall on people's houses in Colorado so they can live in decadence in California while the people in Colorado have trouble gardening.

      • It's still 70 to 90 year round. At least anywhere that a millionaire is going to live. And the droughts don't affect them.
    • to live. Great weather, lots of amenities. If you have money you stick around. A few will leave... and promptly be replaced. They don't spend enough money in the local economy to matter. The vast majority of economic output is from the trade in commodities needed to live, not elites yacht mooring fees.

      Ah ... hadn't seen this yet. Great weather [slashdot.org] indeed.

  • by kamapuaa ( 555446 ) on Thursday July 08, 2021 @10:26PM (#61564355) Homepage

    50 years ago, sure, escape the high real estate prices by packing up the family and moving to Ohio.

    But with the economy increasingly dominated by mega-companies, you only leave these wealthy areas if you have to. More and more, the country is divided into areas that are spectacularly wealthy and areas where there's no jobs and everybody is using meth.

    • 50 years ago, sure, escape the high real estate prices by packing up the family and moving to Ohio.

      But with the economy increasingly dominated by mega-companies, you only leave these wealthy areas if you have to. More and more, the country is divided into areas that are spectacularly wealthy and areas where there's no jobs and everybody is using meth.

      Well thank goodness, good to hear that nobody is using drugs in California!

  • You're ruining the clickbait headlines, ruining it! What if people started relying on facts, facts that were actually in articles, instead of making a judgement they post on social media about a subject they read in a single headline? Social media as we know it would collapse I tell you!
    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Multiple stories linked are all actually one giant clickbait. The real story is fitted by accident at the bottom of one of them, which explains what the issue actually is:

      >California's coffers are bulging thanks to the high-flying Silicon Valley, surging stock market and a large share of professionals who were able to continue working remotely during Covid-19. The state has a progressive income tax structure that leans heavily on top earners, allowing the state to enjoy record revenues despite widespread

    • by nyet ( 19118 )

      Ironically, you seemed to have missed the fact that the article is, itself, clickbait propaganda literally funded by CA.

      I live here. I've lived here long enough to know a CA puff piece when I see one.

  • by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Thursday July 08, 2021 @10:38PM (#61564395)
    Unless they have some evidence that the "masses" leaving California arrived in the state tremendously wealthy and left considerably poorer, I'm going to imagine that they became millionaires while they were in California. Do the people perpetuating the "California is crumbling" myth want to highlight how much wealth it generates for its residents.
  • 1. It begins with "California exodus is just a myth" but then unmasks itself later, saying "the research found no evidence of "millionaire flight"" ... oh, they narrowed it to only look for millionaires fleeing (they're not the sort who usually flee a place, since the rich clearly were able to get rich in that very place).

    2. It then tells us that most of those leaving SanFran did not leave the state, but rather just moved out into the bay area. Nice find, but unrelated to the question of fleeing the state.

    • They focused on millionaires because billionaires have even less impact on the economy than millionaires. None of these people really pour that much money into the economy. A large influx of working class people it means a large increase in economic output. Economic output tends to come from the people at the bottom and the middle. The people at the top can't produce that much economic output because they're just not that many people at the top by their very nature. As for skin color that's got less to do w
      • They focused on millionaires because billionaires have even less impact on the economy than millionaires.

        No I think they focused on millionaires because nobody thought wealthier people were the ones leaving the state. It's middle class families that sell their homes in California had live a much wealthier lifestyle somewhere else.

    • They looked at "millionaire" flight as one are to investigate precisely because that was the claim recently, that millionaires are leaving because taxes are too high. If you're anti-California and have not heard about millioniare flight from California, then you must not leave Fox News on 24 hours a day.

    • 3. The rest of the article papers over the fact that middle class people, white people, and Republicans are leaving, and seems to say this is not worth worrying about because Asians, and Latinos are moving in, and blacks are not joining whites in leaving. Fine, if you think skin color is important and therefore think more skin color diversity is such a bonus that it's worth what's being lost, or if you are looking for a way to pretend a problem does not exist.

      OK, so here, you imply that people who value diversity are the real racists for not being concerned with older whites leaving. But hold on:

      What's ignored, however, is that a lot of the influx of Asian and Hispanic people is NOT Americans of these ethnicities moving to CA from other states, but rather immigrants from outside the USA, many of them poor, illiterate, and illegal.

      Many native-born whites are poor and illiterate, I'll take the guys in the Home Depot parking lot over JD Vance's cousin every day of the week. They are willing to take a chance for a better life, they probably have more in common with your ancestors than you do. So they are providing things that older, middle-class, white people don't.

      It also ignores the political problem that the state will become even more Democrat, meaning it will be even less likely to be able to change policy directions, and this will make it even more hostile to Republicans who will flee at a greater rate, etc. This is a spiral which will not end well.

      What are these policies that are h

  • You mean Tr0ub4d0r&3 [zillow.com] is not a good password?
  • Here's an editorial in Bloomberg, from a business perspective.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opin... [bloomberg.com]

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