Smart-ass answer, but the fences are financial and very real. If you have no money, how are you supposed to afford to travel to a completely different part of the country where you have no friends or family, find a job and rent an apartment?

CA actually offers free bus passes for this. Well every state does - some like NY even offer plane tickets: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

It's true but it's horrible. It's called homeless dumping, similar to hospital patient dumping. Pencil-pushers use it to play games with citizens they view as "liabilities," rather than as human-beings.

I agree since it doesn’t solve the real problem. I commented on it in a separate thread below

How do you think this country was settled-- by a bunch of wealthy people staying on a friends couch?

By people with enough resources to move to an area without infrastructure and set it up. That takes money, not necessarily crazy money but far more than a the average homeless person has.

PS: The first US colonies actually took a crazy amount of capital to set up. The west was largely settled by people in covered wagons which for the time period also represented a lot of capital ~50,000+$ in 2018 USD.

The common theme with pre-civil war settlement in the US is that people would rather risk financial ruin and/or starvation than live their life (and raise their kids) according to the whims of a city/town ruled by people they do not agree with.

For example, basically all of New England that isn't on the coast was settled by people who got so fed up with the puritanical authoritarians in Boston that upending their lives and moving a few days ride west (and risking starvation/financial run in the first few years) was the better option.

That view is more propaganda than reality. Most US migration had to do with economics more than politics.

The underground railroad gets a lot of coverage, but it's peak never reached 1,000 slaves per year where 23,191,876 slaves where part of the 1850 sensuous. So, people are talking about a migration of ~0.004% per year.

What you say is true for long distance relocation, not short ones. Being a farmer is not made easier by moving a couple hundred more miles west. What moving a couple hundred miles will do is put you in a substantially more rural area where a bunch of people you don't like have a lot less, if any, power over your day to day life. The people who were relocating to California to chase some dream of riches were not motivated by politics. The people moving from somewhere outside NYC to somewhere outside of Buffalo were doing it for politics.

> Being a farmer is not made easier by moving a couple hundred more miles west.

Cheaper land makes being a farmer vastly easier. The same capital allows for more either more farm land or better farm land. Remember, farms are just like any business you can extract more money when the output stays the same but your costs drop.

A lot of the Anglo emigration occured during the Gold Rush period and some later to Central California during the Dust Bowl.

But the west was first colonized by the Spanish.

One of the first Anglos to reach Alta California was the Bartleson-Bitwell party https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Belden

Sure. And no one left their home country to come to the US with meager resources. They were all wealthy.

Settled means something different from just immigration. Lot's of poor people showed up after their was infrastructure. Without that infrastructure most people would have starved and or frozen to death etc.

Also, saying significant wealth is required to setup a colony is very different from individuals having that wealth. Consider the wealth required to build a 80 story high rise generally vastly outstrips the wealth of people living in it.

PS: That said, looking at modern immigration even illigal immigrants to the US tend to be better educated than the average peopulaion of their origin countries. Likely becase immigration is a lot of effort, weeding out the less motivated and capable.

A Greyhound bus to Fresno is $22 when bought two days in advance.

Twenty-two dollars.

And a motel room in Fresno is about $20 a night, more if you want to know that the next room isn't a meth lab.

That adds up quickly.

A lot of Californians have already done this and continue to do this, which is why the natives of places like Portland, Austin, Boulder, and Boise complain about former CA residents causing housing prices to spike

None of those places have Prop 13 or California's environmental rules, so why can't they build appropriate density?

They are. But it will be built in the context of a market economy. If you want someone to pre-build a city for a million people, try China, which still has "ghost cities".

Presumably it takes time and a continual influx is going to leave the demand constantly ahead of the catching up supply.

Skilled construction workers are a limited resource.

Skilled construction workers that aren't yet half-disabled, you mean. They have a shelf life, not unlike those of professional football players, stuntmen, longshoremen, firefighters, soldiers, pre-Industrial-Revolution farmers, etc.

"Back-breaking" isn't just a figure-of-speech; modern medicine isn't (yet?) advanced enough that a rational actor should ever choose construction work over something else; and there are just enough desperate people around that I doubt anyone is willing to pay the true cost of construction-work to a not-as-desperate would-be construction-worker.

The limited resource here, then, is actually: desperate people who are still smart enough to do construction work.

I can't wait until construction becomes a non-human-powered activity - even if it still requires a human to control the machinery.

Yeah, I don't buy this. The problem is more about the cyclical nature of the construction industry and the trend to push people to get a college degree and away from the trades which pay pretty well it's not as back breaking as you are making it out to be.

The cyclical nature would be overcome in the relevant areas if, as stated elsewhere in this thread, this exodus from the Bay Area is a slow and steady trickle.

That trend is so powerful precisely because lots of trade-working parents don't want their kids to suffer the kinds of medical bills, chronic pains (with potential resulting opioid addictions) and stunted healthspans, that they do.

Granted, construction is rather especially bad among the trades in this manner: things like welding are not quite as physically-demanding.

Most housing construction is done largely by unskilled / semi-skilled workers with a few skilled tradesmen to supervise and do the complicated parts.

Housing supply isn't very elastic.

I think complaining about housing prices is in vogue because saying "we just hate your politics" is very much not in vogue.

Why do only the rich get to live in sprawling nice populated and interesting areas? It's literal segregation.

No, it's literal allocation of scarce resources.

Their homes would do quite nicely as office-parks or some other commercial property, but those people both are rich enough and value their places irrationally enough, to [pay out their butts, and/or lose out on a big payout, to] stay there instead of taking their share of what developers think they can earn from that land.