Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded
Michael Barone on out-migration from some Blue states.
Michael Barone’s column in the Washington Examiner (COVID only accelerated the blue state exodus) hit me in the pet peeves. The main peeve is just generally poor analysis: wanting to fit outcomes into very specific partisan narratives without sound arguments. The secondary peeve is the weird obsession a lot of conservatives have about California (and often large urban areas in general).
The basis of the column is factual.
Domestic out-migration — the number of U.S. residents leaving the state minus those entering — in 2020-22 was 3.3% of the 2020 population in New York state and 2.2% in Illinois and California. These are staggering numbers, far higher than any other state. The losses are undoubtedly concentrated in central cities, as suggested by the District of Columbia, where pre-COVID population was growing but in 2020-22 was down 3.8%.
Whether these numbers are, in fact, staggering, is a judgment call, but they certainly are noteworthy. And, I think that without any doubt whatsoever, the pandemic has something to do with these figures. At a bare minimum the increase in remote work options means people can live, at least in theory, wherever they want.
I certainly think Barone is correct when he notes the housing costs are also part of the explanation for these shifts. But he conflates a number of issues and then over-generalizes:
Not coincidentally, these states have some of the nation’s highest state and local tax rates and high housing costs due to restrictive regulations. That has spurred out-migration for more than a decade. The post-COVID woes — lockdowns and masking mandates, the post-George Floyd upward zoom in violent crime, and the spread of homeless encampments — have sparked a larger exodus that seems unlikely to be fully reversed.
We have quite a parade here. First I am struck by the fact that lockdowns and masking mandates were pandemic woes, not post-pandemic woes. And a lot of places had both lockdowns and masking mandates, not just California, New York, and Illinois. And while I know there is some at least anecdotal evidence that people moved to less restrictive states, I would like to see more than just speculation at what large numbers mean.
The assertion of a “post-George Floyd upward zoom in violent crime” is all kinds of problematic. And while homelessness is an important issue, I would need more evidence of its effects than is given here. Indeed, both issues feel more like cable news chatter than actual explanatory variables.
Indeed, it seems pretty straightforward the existing trends linked especially to housing costs have simply been augmented by the chances for remote work options.
And as I have noted before, if the issue was just people looking for lower taxes and cheaper housing then why haven’t Alabama and similarly situated states seen a massive in-migration? Clearly, this is more complicated than presented.
There is also an assumption being made (the whole casing this as people leaving blue states bit and linking it to COVID policies) that this represents political migration, but it is almost certainly the case that the folks on the move are a mix ideologically speaking. Indeed, given the partisan breakdown of California, the odds are higher than not that the migration out of the state means the states being migrated into are getting more new potential Democrats than Republicans. (Although probabilities also dictate that a lot of them are non-voters).
As such, the complexities of reality make this all less of some cautionary tale about blue state policy failures than Barone and others might prefer.
That brings me to the California part of my pet peeve. For going on four decades I have heard caterwauling from conservative circles that California is going to do itself in. Now, don’t get me wrong, California is crazy expensive. In fact, when I was looking for faculty jobs back in the mid-to-late 1990s, I mostly avoided positions in the state because I knew that the cost of living would outpace potential salaries. And, quite frankly, it is too crowded for my tastes (I finished high school and did my undergraduate schooling in the state, so I had direct experience, all of which was reinforced when visiting family over the decades).
But let’s focus on the “too crowded” aspect because when conservatives talk about mass exoduses of the state I always think about Yogi Bera’s observation that “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” I mean, call me when traffic flows freely on the 405, I don’t have to wait at least 45 minutes to get a table for dinner, and the line at CostCo isn’t ten people deep.
But I have been hearing how places like Texas were going to drain CA for decades. I saw some of this in action when I was in Austin in graduate school in the 1990s. Austin’s tech boom was in a nascent phase when I arrived to start my Ph.D. in 1990 and was in full swing, but not yet at its peak when I left the area in 1998. And yet, Austin’s tech boom (and the growth of other tech hubs like the Research Triangle in North Carolina) didn’t mean California’s downfall, so clearly this issue is more complicated than just who has cheaper taxes and housing (not to mention that growth in Austin has been a huge surge in housing costs and while Texas doesn’t have income taxes, its property taxes are nothing to sneeze at).
I would further note that things like infrastructure, including schools, airports, and other amenities affect where companies can and will locate. And, weirdly enough, higher tax locations often have better infrastructure. And general amenities require a certain population level. And so, a lot of this migration out of blue states is into blue population centers of even the red states in question.
So, again, kind of complicated. Certainly more complicated than Barone’s conclusion:
What the census numbers show is that COVID lockdowns, piled atop high taxes and restrictive housing regulations, got several million people on the move in the 27 months from April 2020 to July 2022.
Those who moved are likely to be better off, but the self-damage inflicted on the places they left will be hard, in some respects impossible, to repair.
I mean, the census numbers just show the movements, they decidedly don’t show the reasons for those movements. And while I am certainly willing to accept that this might, finally, be the predicted collapse of liberal states, this seems rather unlikely. While there has been some significant movement of people in the last couple of years, we are still talking about a small percentage of the overall population. More likely than not this is a broader effect of the pandemic than it is anything else. Indeed, it seems quite likely that it will be years before we fully understand the pandemic’s effects on the broader society.
Still, it seems likely that California, which is attractive in multiple ways, will continue to be the largest state by population for the foreseeable future and continue to be a massive segment of the national economy. And place like NYC and Chicago will remain important and attractive as well.
And, no doubt, stories about how their policies are leading them to the brink of destruction will also continue unabated.
A nice side-note illustration to all of this (and which fits my own personal connection to Austin’s experiences) is a piece from Texas Monthly from almost exactly two years ago: No, Austin Won’t Become Silicon Valley 2.0.
A 1990s upswelling of Dellionaires in Austin gave way to a burst dot-com bubble in the 2000s, with the concrete hulk of the Intel Shell reminding downtown visitors what dreams had failed to come. Meanwhile, mega-firms such as Google, Facebook, and Apple roared out of Silicon Valley to define a new, twenty-first century age of billionaire industrial barons starting in the second Bush administration. Austin was stuck in the relative bush leagues, with Dell hitting a rough patch.
Austin’s current place on the tech-world map has lately been defined by its many secondary campuses for major tech companies—most significantly Apple, IBM, and Samsung—employing tens of thousands of people in the region. This trend has heated up in recent years, with more and more investment from outside firms, until one such secondary campus, Oracle’s, was rechristened last month as a Fortune 500 corporate headquarters.
In regards to the pandemic and remote work:
There’s no question that the Oracle move is huge for Austin. Still, it’s worth keeping in perspective what it means, both for the company and for its new home city. Oracle’s revenues are on the decline. With no state income tax, salaries go notably further in Texas, creating an opportunity to cut payroll without cutting employees’ take-home pay. The move is especially easy to make now, as a work-from-home “new normal” means there’s no need for Oracle to force all its deeper-rooted California employees to make the move. Indeed, Oracle announced its relocation alongside a shift to a “more flexible employee work location policy.” The company seems to want to have its Texas cake and eat it in California too.
And in regards to what decades of growth in Austin’s tech sector has been compared to Silicon Valley’s:
Oracle isn’t choosing Austin because the city is poised to overtake the Bay Area as the capital of the U.S. tech industry anytime soon. In 2019, according to the Computing Technology Industry Association, the San Jose and San Francisco metro areas combined for over $333 billion in gross tech regional product in 2019. Austin managed just over $33 billion. That’s an order-of-magnitude difference.
So, yeah, all a bit more complicated than mean blue states making businesses leave places like California.
The whole piece is worth a read if this topic is of interest (it is also a reminder of what a quality publication Texas Monthly is–every time I have cause to read their stuff I am reminded of its quality and am mildly surprised that such long-form magazine journalism continues this deep into the 2000s).
Also of possible interest via the NYT in May: For Second Straight Year, California Sees a Population Decline.
One thing to note here is the split between where Management wants to locate and where the Workers want to locate. And given the power imbalance, Management may end up getting their way, but the reasons Management wants to leave CA for TX is precisely the reasons most of the workers don’t.
e.g. Elmo is in big trouble in CA for trying to run his factory as a racist sexual assault slave camp. Of course he wants to move the factory to TX, because TX will be happy to let him get away with that sort of behavior.
Then there was this article yesterday. The End of the Silicon Valley Myth
Apples last big idea was the iPhone, Google and Facebook are advertising companies. All these companies have tried to innovate and find the next big thing and have mostly failed. Yes there have been some successes, but none as successful as the original business.
There will be another innovation boom, maybe it will be AI or medical technology, but it would be a not so risky bet to assume that the successful innovator will be someone other than the big 5.
Wait. DC is one of his examples? And it was growing before 2020? So his analysis on what is wrong with DC is based on 2020-22? Gee, I wonder what would have happened during that time?
When my daughter’s Brooklyn lease expired during the pandemic she moved back home with us in Baltimore and continued working remotely without a hiccup. But once she felt safe she moved right back to NYC.
When Californians move to Texas, they move to the most California part of Texas, which is Austin. They don’t move to Waco. Having lived in both places the single biggest difference between living in Austin and living in, say, San José, is that Austin has cockroaches. And humidity.
This is interesting:
Of the top ten loser counties, six – Plumas, Lassen, Butte, Del Norte, Napa and Shasta are decidedly rustic, most up in the far north, not over-crowded or even wildly (by California standards) expensive, and politically rather more Red than Blue. Lassen County went 83% to Newsome’s GOP challenger. Of course these counties have small populations, so if three guys move it’s an event.
Looks to me a lot less like the state is emptying out and more like growth has stopped. 70,000 people out of the 12,000,000 LA metro is a rounding error, not the start of a mass migration. Let me know when housing costs actually drop a significant amount and I’ll be convinced. Even though the market has cooled, LA home prices still managed to rise by 3% in 2022.
The influence of housing prices is quite real. The influence, in California, of property taxes is inconsequential, because of Prop 13. Nobody who owns a home in California leaves because their property taxes are too high. Their property taxes are pretty much the same as when they bought the place, and each year they stay the deal gets better. The CA property tax structure discourages people from moving, not encourages.
But yeah, lower housing costs is a thing. I expect that AZ is turning blue because of Californians moving there. Probably NV, too, and CO pretty much is already there. I’m not sure about NM. What about GA? Migration from NY and Illinois? Not sure about that….
@Sleeping Dog: Well, I mostly agree.
Google still does search. Google still does search very, very well. I use it every day. I remember what the world was like without it, and I don’t want to go back.
If the point is “what have you done for me lately”, fair enough. That goes for the iPhone or mobile phone/tablet/whatever.
There’s no timetable for world-changing inventions.
@Michael Reynolds:
Overall population is a pretty crude indicator of the life of a city, especially if you look out long enough. Take my neighborhood in Baltimore, full of row houses. In the 1950’s and 60’s each 1100-1600 sq. ft. house would hold a family with 2-5 kids and maybe a grandparent or two. Today, they hold one or two people and a dog. On the other hand, the latest trend is to knock down the old industrial sites and put up apartment buildings four or five stories tall with several hundred units, so that works in the other direction. You would really need to understand these trends and a few dozen others in order to understand whether a city is withering or blossoming.
By the way, Larry Ellison of Oracle was far more important to Robert Downey Jr’s development of the Tony Stark character than Elon Musk was. Though Musk got a cameo in IM2.
And it always amuses me to see how “Silicon Valley” often means companies that aren’t headquartered here and have no presence here. While lots of the stuff that does go on here is really important but doesn’t make headlines because its unsexy and just does things like make the mask size for semiconductor fabs one micron smaller.
That huge, but it is expected and doesn’t make headlines. It’s also an example I pulled out of my head, not something literal.
We interact with stuff from the big guys every day in a branded way, so that’s what most people think about. Yet the people I know working as engineers work on projects that make everything run better but have names you’ve never heard of.
This is not going to stop any time soon. It might diffuse out to other parts of the country, to some extent. I don’t think we really have a good grip on the impact of working remotely. It seems like a good idea, but then again, why does independent study, for colleges and universities, so slow to be adopted?
There’s this thing called “social truth”. Also known as “everybody’s doing it” but it’s more sophisticated than that. Does working remotely destroy it, or mute it, or amplify it via social media? Hard to say, really…
There is a lot of confusion in these assertions, I prefer to look at the total growth by state historically. Brookings has this nifty excel spreadsheet of decadal census data that I think lays things out pretty well.
The Northeast and Midwest have comparatively anemic growth rates. The South and especially the West are seeing much higher population growth. California is one exception, with the lowest growth over a decade ever – but it’s still growing. It’s probably peaked though, and will follow the midwest and NE in slower growth rates.
Two interesting cases are DC, which lost population over much of the 20th century, but has grown since 2000 – something I’d attribute to 9/11 and the explosive growth of the national capital region generally.
The second is West Virginia, which has also lost a lot of population since the 1950’s.
And looking at the last 100 years, these are the top states in total growth:
– Nevada
– Florida
– Arizona
And the three with the least growth over the last 100 years:
– North Dakota
– West Virginia
– Iowa
And regionally, the northeast grew the least, and the west grew the most (about 4-5x the growth rate of the NE).
Anyway, I think California is a great state that is a victim of its own success, combined with bad policies that have made it a very expensive state to live in for anyone in the middle class. The economics, IMO, trump other factors – it’s simply a very expensive state on all sorts of metrics compared to most other places. If it weren’t for key industries, extremely favorable geography, and extremely wise water-related agreements and decisions made a century ago, it would probably turn into Illinois. And it’s not surprising that a lot of the outmigration is going to other states in the west that have similar amenities, and lifestyles, but are much less expensive and less crowded.
I have family, friends, and a great job that keeps me in California despite the costs. As an evil liberal, I am grateful for California‘s politics. I have a politically kindred brother with family, friends, and a great job who lives in Indianapolis and he hates Indiana‘s politics. I don‘t think I‘d want to have a beer someone who would move between states based primarily on state level politics.
The Census Bureau announced its new definition for rural. (More censuses than not, the Bureau changes the definition.) About 4.2M people who were classified as non-rural under the old definition are now classified as rural.
@Scott F.:
The politics is important. I have a trans daughter and a Chinese daughter. There are fewer and fewer states where they’d be reasonably safe from interpersonal or institutional bigotry. California is the antipode of White Christian Republican Gilead. In California it is still legal to be different.
@Andy:
Dear lord, I hope so. Forty million people is quite enough, thank you, although shortly after Earl Warren was elected governor, he was told that California’s population would reach 50 million. It was 8 million at the time. I’d be quite satisfied to miss that mark by 10 million.
Also wanted to mention: California has had negative population growth to other states for a couple of decades. Until COVID restrictions, those population losses were made up by people moving into the state from other countries. Birth rates were also lower during the pandemic. These trends aren’t new. As travel picks up, migration resumes, and birth rates recover, I would expect California’s population to stabilize.
Like Steven, I’ve been hearing that California is on its death bed for decades, and yet, somehow, we still manage to be the largest state in terms of population, economy, and jobs. We’ll be fine, no matter how often we hear our doom confidently predicted.
@Michael Reynolds:
Oh, I agree with the importance of the politics, especially where politics impacts family and friends. I see this as a nuance to the priorities I’ve described. I wouldn’t want to live where my family and friends weren’t safe from bigotry. (My brother lives in one of the few liberal oasises in Indiana or he wouldn’t still be a Hoosier.) I just see that as prioritizing family and friends over regulation, taxing, and other political considerations. I get that the personal and political are often inseparable, but I find Barone’s thesis – that people are fleeing blue states because of vaccine mandates and BLM – as incomprehensible.
@Andy:
Illinois is a dark red state (rural and religious/conservative) if you pull the Chicago area out of it (and like two other counties). You won’t see that happen in California. The weather difference alone ensures that demand for housing and such would always be vastly higher.
@Matt: Sure. But the population of the Chicago Metropolitan area is 9.5M while the entire population of Illinois is only 12.7M. If you pull Chicago and its surroundings or of Illinois you would have, well, Iowa.
@Michael Reynolds:
Add in the increases in interest rates, and the actual monthly mortgage cost is still up double digits (guesstimate, rather than a calculation, if anyone has better numbers, please correct me).
This is a pet peeve of mine — housing costs generating massive problems from homelessness to an urban semi-flight that encourages suburbs and exurbs, which don’t contribute to the tax base of the city they depend upon.
But, relevant to this post, it’s amazing how much people are willing to pay to not be surrounded by Republicans.
@Jay L Gischer: On the other hand, I’ve never been a Google user. I do use Google when I’m at schools but that’s because I’m using other people’s computers and that’s what they have set up. I suspect that I didn’t get into the Googling habit because my first internet ready computer (I think the third I owned) had Yahoo as the default and I never changed to Gmail because I didn’t care for the user agreement, to the extent that I remember having a reason. My original email was with Hotmail, which I discontinued because the spam filter was very poor. Additionally, at the school at which I was teaching, we used Pandora for email and Yahoo Mail seemed to interface with Pandora more readily. But as I recall, I looked at Gmail and Yahoo Mail both and preferred the Yahoo user agreement, though I can’t imagine why anymore.
@Scott F.: “but I find Barone’s thesis – that people are fleeing blue states because of vaccine mandates and BLM – as incomprehensible.”
Barone’s thesis isn’t intended to be comprehensible. He’s writing to resonate with a conservative audience–an a relatively insular, unaware one at that.
@Jay L Gischer:
I miss the old, old, ancient Yahoo! search engine. It displayed results with categories, so it was less of a fishing expedition then. You could also browse categories.
Granted that was when the web was far, far, far smaller.
Google as is right now is less than ideal for me. Often I search for specific sizes of products, or for the manufacturers, and most of the time I get links to stores that sell these items. Same when I search for flights departing today, say, for Guadalajara. It tries to sell me tickets, when what I want is to see when a colleague left and an estimate of when they’ll arrive.
For other things it tends to work better, but not all the time.
Maybe it’s me, but on any given day, I’ll search for things like “what was the population of California in 1950” and I’ll find out instantly with Google. I mean, without Google, there would still be the internet, but Alta Vista … yikes.
Yahoo was pretty cool, it’s true. But there are too many links out there for a link dictionary to be much use any more.
@Matt:
I don’t think IL is as dark red as that. I get that Chicago and the collar counties have a lot of pull over the rest of the state. I suspect, though, that if the whack-jobs (myself included) were to get their way and Chicago/collars became their own state it would be much bluer than IN or IA. I don’t really have much to back that up though.
Personally, I think IL will be fine. The weather sucks and we’re all nuts here, but the one thing this state does exceedingly well is muddle along. We have a deep farming base and a massive tech/finance hub to sell it all through. How much money is flowing through IN or IA vs how much flows through here.
Also, as an aside, I have blocked Fox and most right wing news sites cause they’re too distressing. I’ve left Washington Examiner unblocked just because they are so freaking insane. Their headlines are a good idea of what nonsense is gonna appear on Fox next week.
@Matt:
I specifically mention California’s inherent geographic advantages, which include weather. I agree that shouldn’t be underestimated, which is why I pointed it out as one of the reasons California won’t end up like Illinois.
But if you want to look at Chicago, it’s not doing well. Chicago itself has lost about 25% of its population since 1950. Thanks to growth in the suburbs and surrounding counties, the whole metro area has continued to grow, but just barely.
Finally, I don’t think the red vs blue point is very relevant. California has rural red areas two. Both states are reliably blue as a whole. It’s other factors that determine their different trajectories.
Barrone’s thesis doesn’t seem to hold here. There seems to have been a fair bit of high end migration during Covid (and immediately post) and associated increase in housing costs here in Hawai’i. Chatter from friends trying to buy is that Hawai’i island has been particularly hard hit by price increases. We had some of the most restrictive Covid regulations in the country and it is about as blue as blue states come.
@Andy:
in 1960, the average household size in the US was 3.33 and in 2021 it was 2.50. In other words, in a densely populated city with no net gain of household units, population would shrink by, oh wait, 25%
Yesterday, I golfed at Sand Canyon, in Santa Clarita. It was 70 degrees, clear, with a slight breeze. 1/3 of the country hasn’t been able to go our for a week due to weather yet I played golf in shorts yesterday. Our foursome joked about the “California Weather Tax” (AKA housing prices) that we pay for days like yesterday.
It’s a big tax.
I’m happy to pay it.
@Jay L Gischer:
The internet monsters ate my previous post, so if it appears, please delete this one.
Do not underestimate a 30% tax credit for Film and TV production for the last 14 years in Georgia. I recently counted for another project, I know 314 people who have moved permanently from Los Angeles to Atlanta strictly to work in film and TV.
I see Georgia in 2022 similar to where Virginia was in 2008. I think it’s just 2-3 elections before the metro areas of Georgia; Athens, Savannah, Columbus, and Atlanta will can overtake the rest of the rural areas of the state. It will follow the path of Virginia, and, more recently, Michigan.
Film and TV are so big in GA right now, that it’s changing the state. Making union Hollywood crew money in a place like GA is like winning a jackpot. There is a joke in our business: “If you’re a crew member in LA, you’re lucky to live in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Valley. If you are a crew member in Georgia, you own your house, a big ol’ truck, and a second house at the lake, with a boat nearby.”
Sad, but true. $100K in Los Angeles doesn’t get you to middle class. $100K in Georgia gets you two houses and a boat, along with your big ol’ truck.
@MarkedMan:
Chicago’s population dropped almost 20% from 1970 to 1990, along with a change in the racial/ethnic makeup of the city that suggests the decline was almost entirely whites. For me, the big demographic story there from 1990 to 2020 is that African-Americans dropped from the largest racial/ethnic group to only the third largest. If the trend continues, in 2030 the largest group will be Hispanic.
@Grewgills:
Andy covers Colorado from time to time. Worth saying that the big swing from red to blue here coincides with explosive population growth. Not just Californians, although they’re here. In the academic literature on education, there’s an actual thing called “the Colorado paradox.” We do only a medium sort of job at getting our kids through high school and college. But we attract a lot of young adults with college degrees earned elsewhere, so have one of the most educated work forces in the country. Those young folks also lean strongly left.
“but the self-damage inflicted on the places they left will be hard, in some respects impossible, to repair.” Hyperbole much?
Mr. Barone should always be taken with several grains of salt. The way back machine shows he’s been wrong for quite a while.
Yes, yes… If you are unhappy in California, feel free to leave. When I was a kid, there were 4 million people in the Bay Area. Now there are twice as many, and the quality of life has declined noticeably as a result. Texas and Florida await you, oh dissatisfied residents. Bonne chance!