"Californication" (yes, as referred to in the Red Hot Chili Peppers song) has been a thing for almost a century now. Oregon literally tried to ban immigrants from California back in the 1940s, and Coloradoans have a notorious saying from the 60s "Don't Californicate Colorado" (it used to be a pretty common bumper sticker) due to this effect.

Go to Wyoming or Idaho and people feel the same way. California has unfortunately been exporting its ridiculous cost of living and lifestyle to the American west for decades, Austin is just the latest to feel it.

Somewhat related, Austinites used to also have a fairly common saying "Don't Dallas my Austin" (also related: "Keep Austin Weird"), referring to wanting to keep the "corporate" feel of Dallas out of Austin. The ship's sailed on that one too, though.

"Go to Wyoming or Idaho and people feel the same way. California has unfortunately been exporting its ridiculous cost of living and lifestyle to the American west for decades, Austin is just the latest to feel it."

It seems like that but the actual phenomenon is simply the slow, increasing urbanization of the United States.

There are, of course, actual Californians moving into places like Austin and Bend and Colorado Springs but with or without them, the American expression of 21st century urbanism is what we're actually witnessing.

California the place just happens to be 15-20 years ahead of most of the rest of the country on that path to urbanization which is why it's so easy to mistake it for "Californication".

As evidence I would put forth Minneapolis: this is not a place that many Californians are moving to and yet they are experiencing the same kind of anti-zoning housing movement, they bemoan exploding housing prices and they aspire to the same cultural and societal progression that everyone in the Bay Area would recognize.

I maintain they are not experiencing "Californication" - they are experiencing urbanization.

Meanwhile Minneapolis is handling their housing crisis much better than we are. They responded to rising housing prices by liberalizing their zoning code in the hopes of attracting more construction. Portland has done the same thing this year by legalizing the construction of multi-family dwellings on almost any parcel in town. This, of course, is also the secret to Houston's low cost of living.

California today is, for practical analytical purposes, a state with a fixed number of houses. This means we're currently operating in a regime where only the most successful and luckiest people can remain here. Unless we restart our housing production, this will continue.

My take is that its because Texas at least has no natural barriers to contain sprawl, so its just sprawls outward as far as the eye can see. I suspect Minneapolis has similar geography.

Both Northern California and Southern California on the other hand have hills/mountain terrain which constrains suburban development.

"They responded to rising housing prices by liberalizing their zoning code in the hopes of attracting more construction."

Yes, that is what I was referring to when I spoke of an "anti-zoning housing movement". That is a political movement that, I believe, has its roots in California.

And yes, I agree with you that it has progressed further in Minneapolis than it has in, for instance, the Bay Area.

I was both agreeing and disagreeing. In MN they have an "anti-zoning housing movement" but in CA we still have an "anti-housing zoning movement".

How does a state export a cost of living? Or are you referring to price increases due to increase in demand? If so, that does not seem like a notable phenomenon.

Californians in LA/SF are used to paying $800k for a house, and the Cali salaries are high enough to support it. A Texan in Dallas/Austin is used to paying $250k for that same house, and has a relatively lower salary to match.

The Californians, after years of having higher salary, more savings, and a job that lets them move, goes to Texas and offers $400k for that same house. The Californian thinks it's a great deal, because they get the same size house they previously lived in for only half the price! And the seller thinks it's great, because he now suddenly gets a huge premium on his previously-valued-at-$250k-house. All of the real estate responds in kind, expecting to get $400k+ from all the Cali transplants. However, the average Texan, who doesn't have that high paying salary, gets priced out and can no longer afford a house in their city.

This has been happening en masse to the northern suburbs of Dallas, as well as many neighborhoods in Austin. It's gentrification, more or less, and it comes with all the same problems.

I remember in the mid-90s, living in Seattle just as one wave of "californication" was drawing to a close and just before the tech boom would start an even crazier rise in housing costs there .... listening to some local talk radio show. A caller was complaining about Californians coming to WA/Seattle and doing just what you describe. The radio host said "well, it takes two to tango, those prices going up reflect the actions of both buyers and sellers, not just buyers".

The caller was indignant: "It would be un-American not to try to get the highest possible price for your property"

The defense rests.

Doesn't seem like mid-90s property appreciation in Seattle could have been pinned on Californians anyway. Wouldn't it have been more related to Microsoft, a gigantic and extremely successful company with an in-house Porsche dealership among other perks?

I see a similar defective thought process right here in Berkeley, CA. Everyone here blames housing demand on peninsula companies like Facebook, Apple, and Google but it's a fact that employment right here in the city of Berkeley has been allowed to double in the last 30 years while the city built zero net dwellings. We can try to blame it on distant villains but the gentrification, to borrow a meme, is coming from inside the house.

Microsoft in the mid-90s didn't seem like it was having much impact on Seattle itself. If there was a staffing explosion, it just wasn't evident in town. Redmond and the rest of the 405 corridor? Yeah, maybe. But not so much Seattle itself.

By contrast, the "Californication" period (say, 87-94) and the tech boom actually took place in the city itself. Keep in mind that in the 87-94 period, Boeing and UW were still the two largest employers in Puget Sound. Companies like Microsoft were "good" for the economy, but they weren't quite the behemoths that they became as the tech boom happened (and, coincidentally, as I left :)

Yeah I would expect that Microsoft in the late 1980s was paying much more modest salaries for software developers. That job didn't really start paying crazy salaries until the VC money arrived with the Dot-Com wave.

I'm curious if you are old enough to remember this stuff first-hand. Microsoft employees were importing ships full of Porsches. Not a joke. Here is a 1992 NYT article about how Microsoft HQ had at least 2200 millionaire employees.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/business/microsoft-s-unli...

Not really. Was in my early 20s around then, but didn't live anywhere around there. My experience with programming/IT work at that time, was that it was very much a "normal" job. It was a good, solid white collar job, paid decently well, but nothing you'd get really rich doing. That didn't change for me until the late 1990s when I got a dot-com gig for a couple of years (of course we remember how that ended up).

Were the MS people buying ships full of Porches with equity earnings or salary?

Equity, naturally. In those days it was options and not the grants we mostly see today. You're right about programmer salaries being about in the same league as other professional careers, but I don't see how we can overlook the fact that the stock options existed.

Doesn’t Microserfs go into this?

One thing I don't understand, if dwellings weren't built while population grew, where do people live?

You seem to be assuming that all habitable spaces (houses, apartments, etc) are fully occupied all the time. This isn't the case.

> The Californians, after years of having higher salary, more savings, and a job that lets them move, goes to Texas and offers $400k for that same house. The Californian thinks it's a great deal, because they get the same size house they previously lived in for only half the price! And the seller thinks it's great, because he now suddenly gets a huge premium on his previously-valued-at-$250k-house. All of the real estate responds in kind, expecting to get $400k+ from all the Cali transplants. However, the average Texan, who doesn't have that high paying salary, gets priced out and can no longer afford a house in their city.

That makes no sense. If the housing prices in a market go up, it is because there is more demand without an increase in supply. Not because a certain group is paying almost double the market value for absolutely no reason.

The supply of housing isn't a problem in Texas, but "supply and demand" isn't the end of the story. When two Texans want the same house, a bidding war is artificially capped (at, say $300k) because that's all the average Texan can afford. But when a Californian moves in with high net worth and a higher paying job, they can bid much higher, and they don't mind doing so (the mindset I have personally heard from most CA transplants to Dallas is that they don't care if they paid more than the average Texan pays, because at the end of the day they're still paying less than half what they were paying in CA).

And then there's the issue of property taxes. A Texan lives in his nice $250k house and pays $X/year in property taxes. Then someone comes in and buys the house next to them for $400k/yr. Suddenly this neighborhood is now appraised at a much higher value than before, and the Texan's property taxes are now twice as high, bordering on the edge of unaffordable. I've personally seen several people be priced out of an area due to this.

> And then there's the issue of property taxes.

That seems like a Texas problem being blamed on Californians.

I'm sure a lot of Texans are very happy that their houses have shot way up in value.

> I've personally seen several people be priced out of an area due to this.

Ask a Californian about prop 13 ;-)

Which is the root cause of the majority of urban/suburban California's issues.

Texas won't become California, even if 100% of CA's population moves there, because they don't have the same pants on head dumb proposition system.

From the outside I like the proposition system, but not prop-13 specifically.

Individuals overpaying is not enough to raise average values of houses in a market. In you example the person who owned the 250k house got a nice windfall selling their price above market value but that is not enough to raise the value at large of houses in that market. It would take people systemically overpaying and overpaying in large volume for it to affect housing prices and there's simply no evidence of that.

Feels like the solution here is to pay income taxes instead of property taxes. ;)

Yes, all the no income tax states are severely regressive and are bad for people with low incomes and good for people with high incomes, obviously.

> they don't care if they paid more than the average Texan pays, because at the end of the day they're still paying less than half what they were paying in CA

I don't understand not caring about 6 figures of money. Is that really the outlook of the average California tech worker?

The average California tech worker maybe not, but plenty of them are sitting on $500k+ in cash with yearly incomes in that same range. At that point what does $100k mean? $100k makes no difference in the person’s day to day life. If you like the house and you end up in a bidding war, the $100k is more than worth it.

Only a very small fraction of the housing supply is up for sale at any given point in time. Prices are set at the margin.

The real estate market (and well, most real markets) cannot be completely explained by simple supply/demand calculations covered in a high school economics course. Nor can they be entirely explained by a highly-trained economist. There are many factors at play that complicate matters.

Like what?

For example, Prop 13 in CA caps property tax increases on primary residences, which keeps people in their homes longer than they would otherwise stay, which in turn reduces the for sale inventory.

Another example is Trump's Tax Act, which capped "SALT" deductions (State and Local/Property Taxes). This impacts housing prices relative to rents because you can't deduct the full amount of your property tax in high value states like California.

These are two examples...

>The Californians, after years of having higher salary, more savings, and a job that lets them move, goes to Texas and offers $400k for that same house.

Nobody pays more for something just because they have more savings. They pay more because they might be getting outbid by someone.

I don't see the purpose of characterizing that as "California exporting higher costs of living".

People with more money outbid people with less money all over the world all the time. You can say "Americans are exporting higher cost of living" by purchasing avocados from Mexico, or factory capacity in China, etc. and depriving the locals who can't afford to pay the same.

I'm sure the people in the poorer neighborhoods of Dallas and Austin are complaining about the richer neighborhoods exporting a higher cost of living.

>Nobody pays more for something just because they have more savings. They pay more because they might be getting outbid by someone.

No, they pay more because they can afford it. When a bidding war starts between a Californian and a Texan for the same house, the Texan loses every time because they can't bid as high as the Californian.

It isn't just housing, either. When a new grocery store opens up in one of these neighborhoods, do you think they just sell their goods as cheap as they always have? Of course not. They want to make a profit, so they up their prices because they know the Californians are more than willing to pay for it. The Texan who now struggles to make ends meet because food is more expensive? They get pushed out.

> You can say "Americans are exporting higher cost of living" by purchasing avocados from Mexico, or factory capacity in China, etc. and depriving the locals who can't afford to pay the same.

Yes, that is exactly what is happening. Have you ever been to any of these countries where Americans-with-money swoop in and starting buying up goods or property? They hate it, just as much as Texans hate the Californians who are moving in.

It seems like we're saying the same thing, except that I am claiming it is unremarkable, or trivial. People with more resources have been outbidding people with fewer resources since forever, and whether they're from China or California or Kansas or the other side of town is irrelevant.

If you think discussing the effects that people moving from CA to Texas has is irrelevant when we are literally in a thread specifically about the effects of people moving from CA to Texas, I dunno what to tell you.

That is true, I did lose sight of that. I think the more interesting statement would be California is exporting lots of high income / net worth people, which would prompt the questions of what causes CA to have lots of high income / net worth people, and what causes them to leave?

E.g. Are CA's policies more conducive to wealth creation, and then are people taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities elsewhere to guard that wealth?

At least in Denver, it's common to see Californians come in and for the first offer drop down 20% over asking. No bidding war. They want to guarantee they get the house _without_ having to deal with a bidding war, and have enough savings that the marginal cost of each of those dollars is less than those living and working in Denver.

The extra 20% is the bidding war. If they thought there was a reasonable chance they would be able to purchase without the 20%, they would.

The term "bidding war" doesn't typically apply to initial offers.

The concept of bidding war includes having to pay more than someone else to obtain something. If a market is so hot that the seller has no reason to even wait for competing offers, then the initial offer has to be high enough to make it worth their while. The initial is your bid, and because you predict other buyers will be able to satisfy the seller's demands, you bid defensively by bidding extra.

A single shot isn't a war.

A single shot that decides the outcome is an assassination, and that's generally done to avoid a war that will have worse outcomes, if we want to stretch this metaphor to the breaking point.

As a seller if I got an opening offer 20% over my ask, I'd counter at 40%. Might as well take while the taking is good.

Yeah, I mean people with money buying stuff in the free market and prices going up because of increased demand! Yikes! That's California Communism coming to Texas clearly right there!

It's almost like the cost of living is driven by MONEY, and problems result from income inequality, more than left-vs-right policies - and if the Californians getting priced-out of CA still have more money than where they're moving, then it cascades.

I moved from Austin to SF in November 2019 (horrible timing, I know). Before I left I was at a piano bar downtown and some of the bartenders had shirts that said "Don't forget to leave" written on the back, I also worked with some native Austinites, this mindset is getting stronger.

If people had more freedom in being able to live and work -from- wherever they wanted, we'd have more enclaves of different lifestyles based on like-mindedness and choice than circumstance.

That songs gonna be stuck in my mind the rest of the night

All I can say now is Keep Houston Weird.

You're confusing supply-and-demand-driven cost of living with liberal vs conservative politics.

NIMBYism and desires for high-paying jobs cut across the American political spectrum.

(Existing property owners in Austin, however, may be ecstatic if their property is suddenly priced like SF value... but that doesn't mean they're gonna want to relax zoning and increase density and change the shape and character of their neighborhoods, like we're told is the answer for SF.)

(And of course, fleeing higher prices by nature means that *demand is overall higher in the place you're leaving. Which makes it hard to say it's been "ruined.")

The locals have been mostly gentrified. There is no Prop 13 in TX, it’s a low-service state, so it all rolls down to property valuation and tax rate.

I am not sure what you mean by “low service.” I have lived in both places and I greatly prefer not paying $800 a year to register my car. And the roads in Texas? Far better than California. And gas prices? Dramatically cheaper.

If low service means that, then yes, sign me up. I don’t see much value in California “services.”

I'm not sure what you're saying. Do you think those things make Austin immune to any problems that could be caused by increased income inequality?

When I went to UT, you could be poor. You could be retired and live in Travis Heights. You can’t do those things now, because there’s no rent control, and your 1400 sqft bungalow is valued at $1.5M and your tax rate is $2/$100 valuation and going up 20% next year.

The difference is Gov. Abbott will eventually drive those icky poor/homeless under the overpass out by taking over APD and busing them to CA. Progress. /s

I was thinking that Austin didn't have zoning, but that's actually Houston.

No, I'm specifically worried about things that coastal California residents tend to support, beyond things like increasing cost of living. Higher taxes and firearms restrictions are probably the two highest among them.

Wait until they learn about cedar fever. Juniperus ashei pollinates in the winter, starting right about now through February. Pollen levels are still relatively low, but by January the trees explode and people are miserable. Last January they were reporting almost 28,000 cedar pollen grains per cubic meter of air in the Austin area. Misery. Pure misery.

https://www.kxan.com/top-stories/cedar-pollen-reaches-highes...

Just northwest of the city it’s crazy. When the wind gets up in January there will just be thick yellow clouds of pollen blowing off the Mountain Cedars, and everything is covered in it.

Heh, exactly where I live. It about kills my wife.

Why suffer through that.

You left out scorpions.

In 12 years in Austin I have encountered zero scorpions indoors, and maybe a single-digit number outdoors. This despite essentially constantly walking barefoot in both. In my entire life in Texas I've been stung by a scorpion exactly one time.

We get about one or two a month here in the summer, in the house. There’s plenty more in the yard. We found one in our daughter’s crib and another stung my wife while we were asleep in bed. We’ve got brown recluse, black widows, and rattlesnakes too. Welcome to Texas!

I’ve lived here 6 months and already found 2 in my house. Depends where you live I guess!

There's a reason we wear shoes indoors in Texas...

And a reason we turn our boots upside down before we put them on!

Average high/low temperatures in the summer for Austin are:

June. 92° / 72°

July. 96° / 74°

August 96° / 74°

Average high/low temperatures in the summer for Cupertino are:

June. 75° / 55°

July. 76° / 58°

August 76° / 58°

Austin will never, ever be like Silicon Valley because of this. The freedom you get from cooler weather is great from an energy utilization stand point and for allowing safer and more desirable conditions outdoors. Not to mention you have much more beautiful choices of nature in Northern California. Think about whenever you travel to Austin for conferences, it's oppressively hot and you basically travel from one air conditioned building to the next. Now imagine 10 years time of increased global warming. California will still be coastal to one of the coldest waters in the world at this latitude, which is a natural air conditioner. To me this spells the end of Oracle's supremacy in anything other than selling smaller and smaller volumes of mainframes.

Bay Area had 99 straight days of poison air in 2020 and there's no reason to expect 2021 to be any better, especially considering that so far the 2020-2021 water year has been the driest ever recorded in human history.

In the midst of the pandemic, it is easy to overlook California's yearly water supply. The snow-pack numbers this year do not bode well for next year.

It's easy to forget about the drought when the pandemic is raging and half of the states are trying to get the Civil War started again, but for a Californian the drought should be the main thing on their minds. Large municipal water systems are likely to be fine, at least next year, but just due to the nature of stochastic processes we can expect at least a few small municipal water districts to go dry, and some irrigation districts are probably not going to get any water deliveries at all.

Texas - Famous for not having wildfires.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Texas_wildfires

Right, and how many have we had since one of the most exceptional years on record? Also our flatter land tends to avoid temp adversions that trap smoke and really reduce air quality.

That said, the pollen is terrible.

The worst one in history was 9 years ago and 4 million acres burned.

That’s almost as much as California this year. If you have that much hubris as to think another event won’t happen like that in Texas with increasing frequency, then I guess enjoy Austin?

How much forest is left to burn at this rate?

> Think about whenever you travel to Austin for conferences, it's oppressively hot and you basically travel from one air conditioned building to the next.

Commentary from someone who only visits Texas in the summer is bound to be one-dimensional.

> To me this spells the end of Oracle's supremacy in anything other than selling smaller and smaller volumes of mainframes.

True because average regional temperature has always been a solid predictor of company success, which is why companies like 3M, Cirrus Logic, Dell, Indeed, National Instruments, and Silicon Labs all collapsed after establishing their headquarters in Austin due to talented employees leaving en masse for the beauty of other regions /s

Used to live in Texas for several years. 3M has little in common with Silicon Valley but those other companies are legit so I am willing to say I don’t know enough and I am eager to see how this turns out. I was trying to appeal to others experiences of Austin when mentioning conferences. I assume more people visit than live there on this site. For me, Austin would be pretty awful to live in year in and out by comparison to Silicon Valley even with having to wear N95 masks during fire season.

Also just wait for Analog Devices to buy Cirrus and relocate them back to SV. (Totally kidding)

> Not to mention you have much more beautiful choices of nature in Northern California.

You're making the mistake of assuming access to nature is a priority for everyone, which I think is a consequence of the cultural bubble that Silicon Valley is in. Most people who are part of the scene are into nature stuff, and they assume everyone is because they don't know anyone who isn't. I have definitely heard of people who moved to SV/SF for a job and then being looked down on and sometimes even bullied by coworkers for not having any interest in nature activities. There is very much an attitude that if you don't partake in the Standard Silicon Valley Hobbies then something must be wrong with you.

By contrast, I've lived in Texas all my life and I don't know many people who's really into going hiking and stuff all the time. A couple of people, sure, but most people I know are content to only do the kinds of activities you can do in an air-conditioned room.

I would imagine there are a lot of tech people who moved to NorCal for work but aren't comfortable with the culture there. They don't care about nature and would be happier if they got to socialize with coworkers who had similar interests, and so they might be much happier if their employers relocated to Texas or something. And while I can't really speak to Austin, my experience in Dallas is that the tech scene (which is thriving and active) is much more enterprisey and doesn't really attract people who would prefer a more SV-like culture.

I don’t go out nearly as much as I should but if I lived in Texas (as I have for several years previously) I would never enjoy being outside other than in the winter. That’s just not healthy.

In Austin I can go golfing on Christmas Eve and play outdoor basketball that afternoon. Yeah, it’s hot in the summer, but 96 isn’t oppressively hot and by the time you’re out of work at 6pm the weather is in the low 90’s.

I agree with most of your post but the last bit is really a non-sequitur. There is no relationship between Oracle fortunes and Californian weather; if there ever was, it has definitely not been a factor for 20 years. What matters is what they buy and how they repackage it. Mainframes are not even on their map, really. Their HQ in California was basically an empty white elephant for years, I believe most of their programmers are in other (lower-cost) countries by now.

This won't last much longer for the SF Bay Area. The climate has changed already and average temperatures are rising. The place where I live used to be foggy. It hasn't been like that for over 7 years now. It's much worse in the southern part of the Bay Area. Air conditioning is starting to be requirement.

It will get warmer in the bay area, but unbearably hot in Austin. Temperatures are rising there too rapidly:

"Austin Makes Top 10 List Of U.S. Cities With The Greatest Increase In Hot Days" -> https://www.keranews.org/2019-08-22/austin-makes-top-10-list...

Not just temperature but also humidity, isn't Austin unbearably humid in the summer?

re: the nature access - to add to what others have said about this ... I suggest you get out and explore Texas state parks. There's a lot of things I don't like about Texas (I don't live there, but spent a few months there a few years ago), but wow, the state park system is just amazing. So many incredible places, and with frequently pleasant winter weather meaning that they are still enjoyable in February.

My favorite are the river parks in New Braunfels and there are a lot of other beautiful areas that all pale in comparison to California.

>Now imagine 10 years time of increased global warming.

Wow, 0.1 degrees more, that will really tip the scales

You realize this is BS, right? That's an average.

I live around Oakland. The number of days, in the last decade where I wished I had AC went up 10x. I literally had days where I camped out in my basement. With a fan blowing on me. That never happened a decade or more ago. Ever.

> How long before all the Californians make Austin the exact same place they fled from?

That is a concern.

But part of SF's problems is structural: transportation and new construction are constrained by water. That is much less of a concern in Austin.

Have you ever been to Austin? It has the worst transportation network in the entire state of Texas, and that's a really low bar. The bus network is mediocre at best, the rail system (actually only one line) is practically useless, and there's only two highways that are notoriously gridlocked at all hours, even in non rush-hour.

The context of SF and Austin are obviously entirely different in terms of direction, momentum, it makes sense Austin wouldn't yet have a great public transportation system.

Austin TX wasn't rich 20 years ago, where was the money going to come from to build a nice transportation network? It's booming at present and will be very rich 20 years from now (most likely). It has a bad transportation network because it was underdeveloped for the prior decades as with much of Texas. The question going forward is what they'll do with their growth and rising affluence, how they'll utilize that (or not).

Yeah, but they just passed Project Connect so expect that to change quite a bit. https://www.capmetro.org/project-connect

I'm excited about Project Connect, but let's not kid ourselves: construction on the rail lines and highway improvements isn't even going to begin until 2024, with completion dates (barring no delays) in 2029, with most of the completion dates in the mid 2030s.

At Austin's current rate of growth, by the time Project Connect makes any material progress, it'll already be obsolete and overburdened.

New construction in San Francisco (and basically everywhere else in the United States) is constrained primarily by policy. If it were legal to build more, then developers would surely build more.

Yes and no. For increasing density of existing areas, yes, that's basically a universal in the US, not a Republican-vs-Democrat thing, but in Texas cities you can (and do) keep going outward, so you can (and do) keep building single-family-homes. Can't do that within commuting distance of SF anymore.

Is public transit good in Austin?

LOL no. SFMTA alone carries almost 10x as many weekday riders as Capitol Metro and that's not even counting BART, which is seems like you'd need to count BART to get to an equivalent service area population.

Not really but a big transit bond just passed that intends to expand the light rail system, eventually linking the airport to downtown and downtown to more of the central area. There's going to be some sort of huge construction project on the interstate that bisects the town but the particulars have not yet been decided on that.

Will probably take 10+ years to build?

Just get a big truck like everyone else and you’ll be fine.

It’s brutal.

It's a relevant worry, at the same time I think political inertia is a thing.

Just look at NIMBYISM in California, that's not the product of the newcomers, but of people that have been there for 40/50 years. So it takes time. Maybe in SF the turnover is faster, but not necessarily in the whole valley

People show up in new area because its better than where they left and decide to vote for the same politicians that screwed up their old area. Happens all the time as logic is hard.

or to put it like one of the folks here: "you peed in your pool and moved to ours, don't do that again"

The high cost of living in California has almost nothing to do with liberal politics or whatever you're trying to insinuate.

The high cost of living is almost entirely driven by land use restrictions and zoning. I don’t know if that’s “liberal politics” but if San Francisco adopted the housing and zoning of Houston it would be way cheaper.

If anything you could argue that's an anti-liberal attitude. It's great the Bay Area is so tolerant of different folks. Except that doesn't help out the black transgender teenager from Mississippi who can't move there, because he's priced out of even the lowest-end apartment. All because some millionaire home owners don't want to see their property values appreciate at a slightly lower rate.

> The high cost of living in California has almost nothing to do with liberal politics or whatever you’re trying to insinuate.

It has a lot to do with economic success and the wealth produced thereby. The extent that has to do with the distinctive local politics of the state is another argument.

Yes, that's a much better way to put it. It just seems ironic to me that after decades of policies leading to a wealthy California the same detractors are claiming that the liberalism was the problem. My most charitable interpretation they think recently the policies have gotten too progressive and that's causing the exodus, as opposed to the wealth causing the high COL.

A lot of places are more wealthy or as wealthy as California. Why don't they have the same cost of living or higher?

Can you name such places? Someone mentioned Houston, but I honestly don’t know if their zoning laws are more liberal than ours (LA).

> "you peed in your pool and moved to ours, don't do that again"

The book _Ishmael_ had an interesting perspective on that.

"They ideas are good, they just happen to be implemented wrong every time. But this time is different"

SV resident and former Austinite here: During the time I lived in Austin large developments full of McMansions sprang up. The answer to peoples' question "Who can afford all these places?" was "Californians."

Also, if you saw big new house with a wall of glass facing the sunset, an Austinite would ask "Don't they realize how high the A/C bill will be? Who would buy such a place?" The answer" "Californians."

If the typical person leaving California for Texas is doing so explicitly for the lower cost of living and lower tax burden, why would they vote for policies that go against that goal?

You could argue that it's the longtime locals in the Bay Area, those who bought homes cheaply in the 60s/70s, that are usually the NIMBYs voting for the policies that caused the current state of things.

Those same people are the least likely to be the ones leaving for Texas.

I think people moving may like the politics of where they're moving to, in the abstract. But they get there, and they decide they'd like something between where they are and where they came from - say, 25% California and 75% Texas. But that's still trying to move Texas, not all the way to California, but in that direction. To those already in Texas, that raises hackles.

Anecdotally I've heard just that come out of peoples mouths...

"It's cheap here in Texas but why don't you have ___thing that costs millions in tax dollars___"

I mean, Austin is pretty close already. Their housing prices have been sky-high for a while now, especially compared to Dallas and Houston.

Consider this as load balancing. It is freeing up space in the bay area.

Oracle's leaving will free up office space for Snowflake to expand into. They're taking business, might as well take offices too.

Judging by the increase and pervasiveness of homelessness, reduced police funding, and rent increase in the city this is already done. Fortunately for Texas it is limited to just Austin.

Living on the perhiphery of "Mormon Land" a while back had Californication-immunity as a benefit.

So sad for the Texans, but they had better not relocate to the Ozarks...

This is a popular joke among conservatives, of course, but the reality is the opposite.

There are two types of people moving from Cali to Austin: people who can't afford living there anymore, and people who can easily afford it but are tired of paying high taxes. The latter group tends to be on the more conservative side (essentially the FYGM section of the political spectrum) and their wealth does give them the ability to influence local politics.

So, if anything, Austin, one of the most liberal cities in America, is more likely to shift to the right as a result of these migrations from California and other blue states.

edit: downvotes by conservatives are laughable lol, keep them coming guys!

But with much worse weather.

Migration from California is why Texas is still a Red state. Native Texans vote Blue.

Joe Rogan was talking just about this[1], how he doesn't want to disrupt the culture and environment and hopes all the people fleeing California don't try to impose the same values and politics that caused them to flee California in the first place.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iajyvVaeFS4&ab_channel=JRECl...