The states you speak of are the ones most friendly to home schooling. You can teach evolution and anti-abstinence all you want. FYI though, there are creationist engineers. I've met many.
I'm not sure what you mean by "bad" family planning. I don't see why you should care what other people do. Maybe I am "bad" for having 11 kids, but I won't force you to have that many.
Right across the hall from me is an engineer who left SF. He uses his AR-15 at home in his yard. (might go over badly in SF, you think?) He keeps goats and lots of chickens. Clearly, he does in fact "want to live in those places" instead of in SF where he grew up.
This isn't the case. Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. are just on the leading edge of a larger tend towards greater urbanization. It's a pattern that's also happening in Austin, Portland, and more cities just to less extreme degrees. The simple fact is that in a developed country dense population centers are more efficient - both economically and environmentally.
To a large degree we're still living in the shadow of the industrial revolution, when workers flocked to cities for work. As a telecommuter, my quality of life is a thousand fold higher than my co-workers in the D.C. or Dallas metro areas where it seems many people find themselves alone in a sea of humans and chronically maligning poorly planned mass transit.
Sources for greater economic growth in urban areas:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/emp...
Countries by CO2 emissions per-capita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Countries by urbanization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country
And that's not even getting into things like the amount of land that gets developed for low density homes and services, roads, water reservoirs, electric lines, etc.
Wealthy rural countries (USA, Australia, Russia), produce more carbon than dense wealthy countries. Granted, I wouldn't be surprised if carbon emissions and environmental impact of the average city resident was higher than the average rural resident - but that's largely a result of the fact that rural residents are generally less wealthy. This is definitely true on a global scale (the countries with the lowest carbon footprints are poor, rural ones), and I wouldn't be surprised if it were true on a nation wide scale. I didn't explicitly state it in in the first post, but I did clarify in the second that this was for the same standard of living.
On a side note, an interesting thing to look into is how Singapore manages to provide so much services with such a small budget - 14.2% of GDP per capita as opposed to 26% in the US. A huge part of this is because it's so much more efficient to provide services when you're dealing with population concentrated in such a small area. Imagine how much more money (and energy) it takes to deliver electricity, running water, sewage, emergency services, education, etc. to households in Oregon where 4 million people are distributed across 98,466 square miles as opposed to concentrating them all in 278 square miles. Even if things like land and labor cost more, so much overhead and operational costs are saved by not having to service such a massive area.
I realize that's more of a value judgement and not objective. But there are definitely costs associated with living in dense urban places. Regardless of efficiencies we are definitely still living in a post-industrial-revolution world, and people did not voluntarily cram themselves into giant cities then, so some sort of reversion when it's possible makes sense. Vast populations of urban people in China would rather not have to move into the city.
http://www.businessinsider.com/state-domestic-migration-map-...
OTOH they are also moving out of Wyoming and Kansas and into Colorado and Oregon.
What to make of this?
Maybe... people mostly go where jobs and cost of living and social connections line up, politics either direction just isn't a great predictor?
Sure I can name a bunch of reasons why little housing is built in California, we can start with the Libertarian wet dream that is Prop 13. Prop 13 does two things, removes any incentive for muni's to approve new housing. And starves the government of funding to pay for public goods like schools and mass transit. The zoning restrictions Libertarians bitch about are partly the direct result of that.
Okay fine. But then still the question is, even if we admit California has issues, why is it that corporations which are totally free to locate elsewhere aren't doing so? You would think with a large cost differential corporations would move. Why not?
Because neoliberal conservative dominated governments in the rest of the US means that VC's, engineers, and mangers don't want to live in those places at all. So they and their companies are paying a large premium not to.
No workers don't want to work in 'right to work state' They don't want to send their kids to schools that teach creationism and abstinence only sex education. They don't want to live in communities with bad family planning.