When I bought my Texas house about a decade ago the average house price in my metro was about $200,000 and now I think it is about $250,000. These average houses are individual units from 2500-3000sqft on a quarter acre lot. If you are able to sell an equivalent CA house for $2,000,000 you are moving in wealthy compared to Texans. It doesn't mean you can afford a mansion here though, because property taxes are about equal to CA property taxes at about 6.5% per year.
Yes, people who bought a house while ago in California, sell, and move to Texas would have a lot of money. But again, is this typical?
I'm not saying it necessarily isn't typical, just that "it seems like", or "appears to be" isn't data. A lot of people leave California because they can cash in on their house, but a lot of people also leave because they'll never be able to get a foothold in the housing market.
We really do need some data on this to have a meaningful conversation about it.
1. Get a big tech job in SF and earn > $200k per year (in some cases 2-3x that). 2. Deal with living in a run down apartment yet still paying $2200-3500/mo. 3. Shovel a large percentage of your income into savings for 5-10 years. 4. Move back to <anywhere else> with $300k in cash.
At which point you can pay either pay straight cash, or make a huge downpayment, for a nice house and live pretty comfortable in the upper middle class for the rest of your life.
Again I would love to see scientific data on this, but in my immediate work setting, I've heard 12 of the 15 engineers I work with state this as their "life plan."
Of the three who that isn't their plan, two are Bay Area natives, and one (I think) has decided he'd like to stay.
So, circling up to the parent comments, there are certainly large numbers of these people leaving every year, taking their <geographically relative> big bags of cash back to the corners of the world.
This was the business owner at my first job out of college. He sold his California home and used that money to bootstrap his business for two years and hire employees while also supporting himself and his family.
The answer though is middle class people according to IRS data - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/19/californians-fed-up-with-hou...
Property tax in CA is capped at 1% of assessed value per year.
but he’s not taking into account other reductions in expense, like no state income tax.
[1] https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Portland-Oregon/market-tr...
Your assertion that "when Californians leave, they leave wealthy" may be true, but I would like to see it substantiated with some kind of cite.
Having grown up in SF (I'm in my late 40s), I have, by this point, seen a lot of people leave (and arrive), and they run the gamut.
I know a couple with two small kids who did what everyone in Portland fears most - they bought in SF during the housing bust, sold recently, collected 800k or so, and now own a house outright in Portland.
I know a woman who grew up in Palo Alto in the 1970s and works as a documentary film maker. She left for Denver with nothing but the savings that can get you through a few months.
Lots more, and they're anecdotes, but it's enough to make me suspect that "when Californians leave, they leave wealthy" isn't true often enough to make it a generally accurate statement, even if it does describe a substantial number of these cases.