Have you ever actually set foot in California? Opening up National Forests for development is not going to change the price of housing in the Bay Area a lot. Until someone invents a teleporter that is.
Apparently many Californians do not share your rosy assessment. Over the last 25 years 3.4 million more Americans have left California than moved there. That is the equivalent of the entire population of San Jose, San Francisco, and Sacramento leaving the state. People want to live in an affordable place, since California is no longer that place they move elsewhere.
CA’s population has increased by about 30% in the last 25 years. That’s not from birthrate alone. Americans might be leaving more than coming, but we are getting, to a large extent, the best and the brightest from around the world-- especially Asia.
According to the right wing, Obama is an illegal himself.
I’d have to ask how many of those are retirees. Selling a California house and then taking a retirement from a job that included a bump for California living expenses to another state can leave a retiree sitting pretty. Several states have programs that reach out to newly retired Californians, courting them with pamphlets.
Another reason retirees leave is congestion. My parents grew up in southern California in a time when the area was mostly farm land. They told the story of a Navy jet that crashed near their high school. It smeared over three acres and didn’t hit anything but celery. When they retired, they wanted space around them. So, sell a California house - buy a few acres.
I’m not saying that no one leaves California for other reasons, but there’s a river of retirees headed to cheaper, wider, quieter places.
To be more precise, the population in 1990 was 29,760,021 and in 2013 38,332,521.
Source.. Oh the misery!
Obviously California is so crowded that no one lives here any more.
Probably more than 90% of the people in my building weren’t born in California.
Maybe we are exporting our dumb people to Texas.
Like me. We are going to move back East a couple of years after I retire for exactly this reason. The house we sold in NJ not quite doubled in value in 18 years - the house we bought tripled in value. We’ll make a tidy little profit when we buy someplace smaller.
I’m also planning to sell my house here in San Jose when I retire in a few years, and buy a cheaper place elsewhere. Problem is I’m having trouble with the idea of leaving California, so I’m now looking at less expensive areas outside the Bay Area.
My family came to California for the gold, and stayed for the silicon. I’m very lucky.
ETA: No doubt we’ll see a lot more migration out of California by baby boomers, but it will be more than offset by younger folks moving in, particularly from Asia as was noted earlier.
I’m from the east, so moving back is no problem. I like snow. I also want to get out before the Big One hits. Oklahomans for instance can’t criticize us for earthquakes considering they are working so hard to produce them.
The net emigration from CA to TX increases the average IQ of both states! 
I’m from the east, and moving back has no appeal to me. Right now looking for a second home in the Monterey Peninsula. Could be a retirement home, or I could see myself splitting the time 50/50. Homes are a bit more reasonable in the MBA in general, but unfortunately not in the area I’m interested in!
So revealed preference would say that California is better than Asia, but not as good as Texas, Arizona, Washington, and Nevada.
The influx of Asian immigrants is a consequence of the bifurcation of the California housing market. You have the rich Asians who work in Silicon Valley, the poor Asians who live with a bunch of roomates and not much in between. The problem is that once China become a developed country new immigration from China will level off and the second and third generations will want to live the American dream and have to follow the middle class Californians out of state.
This bifurcation has also produced a Curley effect which benefits the current politicians, so there will be no push for stopping it until it is too late.
[QUOTE=puddleglum]
The problem is that once China become a developed country new immigration from China will level off and the second and third generations will want to live the American dream and have to follow the middle class Californians out of state.
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I wouldn’t hold my breath for this to come to pass. As long as the Chinese communist party is in charge (and allowing people to leave) you are going to have rich Chinese moving to the US and other countries to get away. The China Dream doesn’t seem all that great if you actually look into things deeply there…even for the really wealthy.
California, of course, is always going to be a prime destination for people to want to move too…well, as long as the water holds out anyway.
The median income in Santa Clara County is about $100K. I don’t know what you mean by rich, but perhaps rich in Podunk is normal here.
I know a bunch of second generation Asians by the way, who are quite happy here. If you work in tech, forget about moving. This is it.
If anything, the Asians have been providing a middle-class leaven in large parts of (by my experience) Los Angeles and Orange counties abandoned by the Anglo white-flight.
Is that where we’re mostly heading? The states I’ve heard about are Oregon and Idaho. Idaho sends pamphlets. Oregon sells bumper stickers saying Don’t Californicate Oregon.
OK, I gave up and am googling. So far I’ve found Las Vegas as the #1 destination for California retirees. Yes, I know that it’s not a state. CalPERS did the search by city. They told the Sacramento Bee that as of May, 2015, 15% of pension checks were sent out of state. An 85% retention is not bad considering that our state income tax does not give a break for retirement income (according to google) and all three adjacent states do.
The Bee sorted the data and said that the most popular states for California retirees are Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon. Judges tend to go to Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Arizona and Florida. Categories of retirees tended to cluster, such as law enforcement and saftey workers, or workers with lower retirement incomes. There’s even a cluster of Manhattan Project retirees in Los Alamos.
Texas was not mentioned, but otherwise the CalPERS list is similar to puddlegum’s list.
Not everyone in California works for the government and gets a CalPERS retirement, though, so I kept looking. United Van Lines publishes a yearly survey of where Americans are moving. It doesn’t say where Californians in particular are moving, just where Americans in general are moving.
In 2014 they were mostly moving TO Oregon (althought Forbes magazine thinks it’s #1 due mostly to its nearness to California). Clicking through, the apreadsheet doesn’t exactly match the press release or the Forbes article. I’m going to go with the spreadsheet. It has numbers.
After Oregon, the states with the highest percentages of arriving vs. leaving families are, in decreasing order:
South Carolina
North Carolina
Vermont
Florida
Nevada
Texas
Washington DC
Oklahoma, and
Idaho
Americans are moving FROM:
New Jersey
New York
Illinois
North Dakota,
West Virginia
Ohio
Kansas
New Mexico
Pennsylvania, and
Conneticut.
United surveyed why they were moving and most were moving as they retired. California is listed on the survey’s map as Balanced. The spreadsheet says that of all moves involving California, 46.8% were from and 53.2% were to (totals of 13,128 and 14,908 families). From those numbers it’s ranked as 15th in states being moved to (Texas was 7th). Do the subtraction and it’s 35th in states being fled from.
Of course this does not include people moving with no furniture, or moving their furniture by plane or boat. It also does not include people using U-Haul trucks.
They’ve kept a lot of acreage, but most of it is in the mountains and high deserts. See Map. Compare to thelower mapon wiki. Those are not good places for development. Not that being federal stops that completely.
The strip along the coast isn’t land so much as the federal waters. Oh, and you see that green thing in the middle? That’s the central valley. It’s not a reclaimed desert.
So yeah. That claim about the Feds withholding land is total BS. It’s not like the Feds own a bunch of Orange County, or Marin.
Almost half of Marin County is Point Reyes National Seashore. Large parts of Orange County are Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge and the Cleveland National Forest.
I sit corrected. Still doesn’t make the point for numbersjs. 