Well I am in El Dorado Hills and I have noticed the same.
My conclusion is that BECAUSE they are Conservative, that is why they are moving out.
Housing prices are rising here.
I agree with you regarding the reasons people are leaving liberal enclaves. After spending my first sixty-three years in New Jersey, my wife and I sold the house and moved to Phoenix, AZ. Besides the weather, my greatest delight was voting and knowing my vote wouldn’t be cancelled by a million liberal voters in the Garden State.
For those of you who are concerned about your home states being polluted by liberal yankee carpet baggers, relax. The people who are leaving NYC are the open-minded conservatives who realize there IS life outside of the Upper West Side, SOHO, Riverdale and the Theater District. They will be solid citizens of your state and will not be the cause of the liberal debasement of your home territory.
The type of people you are concerned about polluting you state’s politics are the True Believers who will never leave Manhattan or any of the other trendy neighborhoods of the other four boroughs. They’ll never admit that they’re the ones who encouraged all of the disastrous public policies which destroyed the greatest city in the world. Besides, as others have noted, they despise most of the USA (particularly you good people in the south or Midwest) and, like Woody Allen, are prepared to go down with the ship rather than admit any of this was their fault.
I only wish that the rest of the Free Republic community could have experienced New York City in its glory years of the fifties and sixties. It really was “the center of the universe!”