It's the consequences of this. A shrinking tax base meaning the government has to cut back on programs and services. It means reduced infrastructure spending and maintenance. These have down the road effects.

If you have a shrinking/fleeing population you can see what ends up happening by looking at the rust belt.

If people are fleeing a state that often means that the problems are so bad people are willing to overhaul their entire lives to get away from it. This indicates problems have gotten very bad and now you have fewer resources to address them than before.

Basically when you state population is shrinking it indicates it has the largest challenges it's faced with the continually fewer and fewer resources to address them. At that point it requires a legendary genius and heroic effort to overcome the problems occuring.

> If people are fleeing a state that often means that the problems are so bad

But much of the outflow is quite easily explained by the Covid shift to remote work allowing everyone in the Bay Area to take their high salary savings and buy houses wherever they fantasized about living.

You can’t really directly compare to previous migrations because those all involved making a career-impacting change. This one required merely overcoming the activation energy of a house move. So the signal about the “cost of staying put” is much weaker than in the past.

This is not to claim that Silicon Valley / SFBA doesn’t have problems, just that the analogy to Detroit probably doesn’t work without significant caveats.

It's not a problem immediately but that's the thing when you are talking at scales like this it is a matter of decades not years to forecast issues. If the remote work hypothesis holds true that means the biggest advantage silicon valley had, a high concentration of engineers and founders is no longer there it's dispersed all across the country and the competitive advantage begins to evaporate at the same time VC money is drying up because of an economic contraction.

You can continue to believe and argue that it isn't happening and that Cali is still a great place and continue to cover your ears and scream at the reality but the fact is that when I moved a year or so back the new church I started attending was composed about 1/4 of people that had left California in the past few years, with it moving to 1/3 if we include Oregon and Washington. (And no it's not some sort of sampling bias that Californians love my Church) all of them described the various problems with CA that make it sound pretty much unlivable. So continue to believe there is no problem. It seems that Silicon Valley insists on relearning the lessons of the rust belt.

hyperbole like "unlivable" needs to be expanded. The obvious California problems of expensive and homeless don't make it unlivable.

But, is it comfortable to live in the valley with so many homeless people around? What city is the best to live there now?

I think you have to remember to apply marginal thinking and consider sampling bias.

At the margins, the people who move away are the ones who were already unhappy with “issue x” but had not actually left.

Now that “cost of moving” decreases, or “cost of staying” increases, the cost/benefit of moving becomes positive for those marginal residents, but stays negative for those that love where they are.

Clearly plenty of people don’t find it to be unlivable, indeed it’s still objectively ($/sqft to buy) one of the most desirable places to live in the country even despite the problems.

This is also completely consistent with small towns seeing a large influx of people fleeing CA; it doesn’t take a high % of the most-populous state leaving to make a substantial difference in all of the small desirable towns.

I do agree that the remote trend needs to be followed closely; it’s great for senior engineers at big companies, but I wonder if startups and juniors at large companies are soon going to realize that mentoring and rapid collaboration is really hard remote, and we’ll see the pendulum swing back a bit. Or maybe we will solve those problems and the agglomeration effect of the Bay Area fully dissolves.

I agree. I’m confused when I hear about calls to “address” the issue. People leaving isn’t a problem, the real problems are the reasons people move away.

They don't mean someone should put a fence to stop people from leaving obviously.

"Relax," said the night man "We are programmed to receive, you can check out any time you like but you can never leave"

We had this same thing before and Seattle residents used to call the people moving in from down south Californicators.

Lol if you think the net is outbound. Most of those people were replaced. Who else is going to pay the high rent? The only option when rent is too high for HENRY is to pack in as many poor workers as possible. Viva congestion!

Nothing wrong with decreasing population, but when your richest citizens are leaving, and poor migrants are coming in, then you start having fiscal problems, particularly for a state that has decided to fund itself with income and sales taxes rather than property taxes.

Another reason why property tax is a more stable funding source -- unlike income, you can't take it with you. There is a whole list of reforms that California needs to undertake to recognize the new reality it's in, and shifting itself to being funded primarily by property taxes is one of the biggest necessary changes. The second biggest change is significantly scaling back spending and decreasing its vast administrative bureaucracies.

> when your richest citizens are leaving

But the article says "a majority" of those leaving were middle- or low-income people.

A "majority" of any sizeable group is not going to be rich. What is important for fiscal impact is that the rich are leaving, not that other people are also leaving.

If you want to see data, we can look at IRS data:

"New York’s tax base shrank by $19.5 billion while California lost $17.8 billion as a result of workers fleeing those states during a time when lockdown measures allowed employees to work remotely, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Other high-tax jurisdictions such as Illinois ($8.5 billion); Massachusetts ($2.6 billion); New Jersey ($2.3 billion); and Maryland ($1.9 billion) also saw an exodus of workers during 2020.

The states that reaped the benefits of the “wealth migration” include Florida, which gained an additional $23.7 billion in gross income; Texas, which gained $6.3 billion; Arizona, which took in $4.8 billion more; North Carolina ($3.8 billion); South Carolina ($3.6 billion); and Tennessee ($2.6 billion)."[1]

[1] https://nypost.com/2022/06/06/ny-cali-biggest-losers-as-weal...

Not that California is better, but all those places are stupid places to move to for global warming reasons. At least in the long term.

TX, NC, SC, and TN are bad states for global warming? Please explain.

This report goes into detail why. https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report

Essentially the south and south west have the worst impacts, with PNW least in the lower 48.

That's entirely consistent with 100 billionaires moving out.

Your last paragraph is self-contradictory.

Ending Prop 13 would not cause "significantly scaling back spending and decreasing its vast administrative bureaucracies." Instead it would have the opposite effect. All other taxes would stay the same, but now they'd have this additional source of money.

This may be difficult to understand, and I can accept if you refuse to believe it, but it's possible to say that two steps are needed without the first step also accomplishing the second.

"e.g. 1) switch to more funding on property taxes and 2) reduce administrative bloat"

Shockingly, this does not make the two steps "self-contradictory".

Despite your condescending tone: my comment was what WOULD happen. Yours is what you'd like.

I mean, how do you communicate with someone that has no ability to make quantitative estimates? Yes, getting rid of prop 13 would require the administrative complexity of one specific job of one department to increase. No, this does not contradict the goal of reducing administrative waste. Fire a million bureaucrats (15% of the population of California works for state and local government), shut down 20 departments, and the 1000 people you need to hire for prop 13 rollback will not reduce the overall goal.

And by shifting responsibilities, you could easily do this without hiring anyone else - almost all states have a value-based property tax system, and this includes states with extremely lean administrative load compared to California, so your claim that following their model is some self-contradictory nut to crack is specious.

> someone that has no ability to make quantitative estimates

wow, thanks! Way to patronize.

We don't need "quantitative estimates" -- we just need a qualitative estimate of the propensities of politicians. Especially in California.

I would he very concerned if it were the “rich” tax payers/companies leaving though. Not sure if it is but it could easily start a feedback loop.