High taxes. Stifling regulations. Exorbitant housing costs. Freeway gridlock. Fires and floods.
Hand-wringing over an exodus of disillusioned Californians may be a Golden State pastime, the subject of political punditry and strung-out social media threads.
But the latest data are far from dire. The U.S. Census Bureau, in its newly released surveys for 2017, shows that California’s net migration remained fairly stable. Since 2010, as the economic recovery took hold and housing prices skyrocketed, departures accelerated — but the number of newcomers rose steadily as well.
The state attracts a steady stream of college graduates, especially from the East Coast, even as many less-educated residents moveto neighboring states — and to Texas — in search of a lower cost of living.
Consider that in 2017:
- More people left California (661,026) than arrived (523,131) from other U.S. states. But for the nation’s most populous state, with 39 million residents, that amounted to a tiny fraction in net departures: just 0.35%.
- Among the 25-years-and-older set, the state lost a net 86,890 residents without bachelor’s degrees, and just 4,443 with a four-year degree. It gained 11,653 people with graduate degrees.
- No state boasts more loudly of its attractions than Texas. Indeed, 63,174 people relocated from California to the nation’s second-most populous state, more than to anywhere else in the U.S. But it’s also true that no state sent more people here than the Lone Star State — 40,999.
“The cost of living, especially housing, is what stops the whole world from moving to California,” said USC demographer Dowell Myers, a longtime census expert. “Otherwise, who wouldn’t prefer California? We have superior weather. We have mountains and oceans. And we have better jobs — better paying and more specialized, whether in tech, entertainment, the arts or medicine.”
In the 1980s, Myers said, “millions of people came to California — too many — and that created an anti-growth backlash. But California has been losing people to other states since 2004. We lost people in the bubble because housing prices were so high. We lost them in the recession because our job market was worse than the rest of the country.”
Ask people why they came or left, and the reasons are often multifaceted. A few of them shared their stories: