Posted on 12/10/2006 10:28:48 AM PST by NormsRevenge
Wayne Brown gave up $40,000 in income to move from the Bay Area to Kansas. And he feels great.
It got to be too much last year for the college information-technology officer: the commute to downtown San Francisco that sometimes took two hours, the housing-price spiral and the high-wire borrowing that paid for it.
``I would find myself sitting in traffic,'' Brown recalled, ``screaming at people.''
When the Kansas job came up in early 2005, Brown and his wife, Teresa, sold two Bay Area homes and happily settled in a suburb of Kansas City. They have never looked back.
The Browns are an example of what demographers say appears to be an unprecedented phenomenon -- even in a good economy, more people are leaving California for other states than are arriving from the rest of the country.
Between 2004 and 2005, the migration flow into California from the other 49 states started flowing the other way. Data from the state Department of Finance shows that, for the first time this decade, more people left California in 2005 for another state than the number who moved in. Mary Heim, a finance department demographer, says this particular kind of outflow will continue for the foreseeable future.
Unlike the tens of thousands who left Silicon Valley following the tech bust earlier this decade, the new migration is about the quest for something besides a job: a better quality of life at a lower cost of living.
--snip--
... California's population of 37 million people is still growing, because of a surplus of births over deaths and because of foreign immigration.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
God was it ever nice to leave California after 50 years and move back to the United States of America.
mmmm scuse me but we have owned our land on the Big Island since 1974! We have always had the intention of retiring there and have spent alot of time there.
You are right though, they are building fast. We were there again in September and was amazed at how much our subdivision has been built up. Guess we will build in the middle of our 2 acres and just hunker down.
It is still a heckuva lot better than California!
I've been to a lot of places where I would live. My wife's family is all here, so we probably will stay. I actually like it. My job lets me set my own schedule. It's commute traffic and stupid judges I hate the most.
My sister and my mom never liked it here and eventually went back to West VA.
Best Wishes!
**Californians are migrating to Nevada, Oregon, and Arizona, and are ruining those states as well.**
Already happened in Oregon!
Just eyeballing the front, using the entry door as a 36" reference, the house is about 24 or 25 ft. wide.
At one story it would have to be 120 ft long to get 3000 sf gross.
Why not move to Kansas City? We have more seasons, the same crappy ass box stores as the rest of the nation and the cost of living is probably 1/3 third that of California.
One thing I never get tired of.... one more idiotic "I hate California" thread. Yessir. A plethora of stupid posts. You can almost see them scratching their butt and burping.
I'll update the old parable a bit, because it applies to a lot of the posters on this thread:
A traveler met a wise old man sitting by the side of the road. He asked, "O Sage, what are the people like in California?"
The sage asked, in turn: "What were the people like in the town you just left?"
The traveler answered: "Oh, they were awful! Liars, thieves, cheats. Criminals of every sort. I hated them all!"
The sage said: "The people in California are the same."
Later that day another traveler came along the road, and he also asked the sage about the people in California. Again, the sage asked him what the people were like in the town he had just left.
"Oh they were wonderful!" the traveler answered. "Everyone was kind and friendly and helpful, and I loved them all!"
"The people in California are the same," the sage told him.
A great truth is that "You are what you hate." The California-haters are really upset at that part of themselves which secretly wants to move to California and live the hedonistic lifestyle that they imagine we are all engaging in. ;)
True, what I haven't seen posted on this thread is that almost all Californians came from practically every other state in the Union, or from overseas.
Therefore, one could conclude that CA got polluted into a socialist sewer it is by all those folks moving here from other states.
SZ
why do you assume that everyone leaving CA is a lib?
are you interviewing them all as they leave?
I can't think of why they'd leave sunny California.
Could it be the traffic?
Could it be the invasion of illegals?
Could it be the invasion of freaks and homos?
Could it be the insane, obscene, exorbitant, stratospheric cost of real estate?
Could it be the taxes?
Naa. Can't see why they'd leave.
/sarc
I left in 1994. Left nothing there I need to go back for.
All the places you mentioned are the last remaining Cities on the LA Grid Map that hasn't been taken over. Someone posted a series of maps here a few months ago showing Los Angeles in the 50's, 70/80's and now.. its dramatic and you can't spin the facts, the white areas are shrinking, the black areas are staying about the same and the hispanic area is spreading everywhere.
Is what you describe a model of what Mexico looks like? Last week they said 10% of Mexico now lives North of the border, all we're doing is making the USA more like them not vis-versa.
That's when we left. Now all but my sister have left and, like you, we only go back if we absolutely have to.
As a beleagured conservative Californian, your post made my day. Welcome to the fight!
Yep. I watched it happen. People don't change, demographics do. Prior to Clinton-Bush in 92 California was the most reliably Republican electoral block going back 50 years (with one exception).
Watch old Dragnet reruns. That's the California of my youth. Cops were respected, hippies were reviled outcasts and Reagan was in charge.
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