12 responses to “California exodus accelerates in 2022”

1. Joe

   October 29, 2022

   Speaking of things that don’t get much press. Check this laundry list of wildfire perpetrators out; courtesy of a little weekly paper in North Lake Tahoe–Moonshine Ink:
   A father/son duo and PG&E reportedly caused the 2021 major wildfires in our region. What’s the status on these cases? And what about the professor?
   The Dixie Fire, which burned nearly 1 million acres in Northern California last year and sent smoke to the Lake Tahoe Basin for weeks, was caused by a decayed tree falling on a PG&E powerline, which then remained unaddressed by staff for 10 hours. PG&E has since expanded powerline safety settings across the state and is working to underground other powerline stretches this year.
   In the vicinity of the Dixie was alleged repeated arson by Gary Stephen Maynard, a former faculty member at Santa Clara and Sonoma State universities (according to The Sacramento Bee). The U.S. Attorney’s Office Eastern District of California reported Maynard was responsible for 2021’s Cascade, Everitt, Ranch, and Conrad fires. “Some of the fires Maynard set were new fires behind the firefighters fighting the Dixie Fire,” the report included. Maynard remains in custody, with a status conference set for Nov. 29.
   David Scott Smith and his son, Travis Shane Smith, are accused of reckless arson in connection with last year’s Caldor Fire, which burned 221,835 acres across El Dorado, Amador, and Alpine counties. The Smiths attended their preliminary hearing on Oct. 11 (after Moonshine’s press date) in El Dorado County.
   In case CR000038 (the Butterfield fire), Ellen Lindsey Walters is charged in count one with a felony violation of Penal Code Section 451(c), arson of a structure or forest, and charged in count two with a misdemeanor violation of Penal Code Section 148(a)(1), willful resistance, delay and/or obstruction of a peace officer. The defendant remains in custody with bail set at $100,000. The next court date is Oct. 18 at 1:30 p.m.

2. Everything’s jake

   November 1, 2022

   There are so many homeless people (addicted/mental illness) existing in the parks and BLM lands–fires are inevitable. Also, Newsom hesitated on controlled burns throughout the state which contributed to the problem we faced in the last few years.
   We are a one party state and politicians do not worry about their constituents. Vote them all out next week!

3. Spurinna

   November 1, 2022

   So easy to fix this.
   Vote them out for people who will work for their voters.

4. MBGA

   November 2, 2022

   “So easy to fix this”.
   I-don’t-think-so.
   Voting out democrats is only the first step. And it will do effectively nothing if the republican alternatives turn out to be of the Republicans In Name Only type, like we got with Arnold.
   But even if we were somehow able to get people with common sense traditional values back into the elected political positions the whole government is fetid with employees that will be working against the corrective changes necessary. We will still be fighting the entrenched non elected progressive appointed-for-life judges that are sitting on the bench making our streets more dangerous, and woke teachers that will continue to indoctrinate children, and administrators that encourage that, and the teachers union to protect them, and all types of resistance from everyone who gets a guaranteed paycheck from this broken (D) system, and massive amounts of bureaucrats and public servants who work to serve themselves not the public. (it’s too depressing to try to structure that previous sentence.)
   I have yet to hear a game plan for how to remove them.
   Certainly voting out ALL Democrats is absolutely necessary as a first step but we will have to figure out ways to rip out those rotting the system from within if we are going to fix things. I’ve yet to hear how this can be done because it takes talking about defunding a lot of institutions, services, agencies, and government departments, otherwise without doing that those people will never willingly go away. And that’s where the real fight is going to be.
   But yes, never vote for a Democrat.

5. Joe

   November 4, 2022

   From today’s news we get the funny thought that people who have been working at Twitter, get laid off, get recruited to work in SF city government—WOW!
   Starting today, Twitter CEO Elon Musk is planning to cut roughly 50% of the company’s jobs, according to Bloomberg — and San Francisco Mayor London Breed is trying to recruit some of those employees to fill nearly 5,000 vacant posts in city and county government. Other Bay Area companies are preparing for mass layoffs: Ride-hailing giant Lyft is slashing 13% of its workforce, or nearly 700 workers, while Stripe — the country’s second most valuable private startup — is cutting 14% of its staff, or more than 1,000 workers, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Amazon, meanwhile, is putting a pause on corporate hires.

6. resident

   November 16, 2022

   Is it just me or does it seem like a lot of the residential projects in town have stalled? In the last week I have gone past at least six or seven where no work has happened in a week or two or more.

7. Joe

   March 22, 2023

   Dan Borenstein at the Bay Area News Group (as published in the Merc on 3/17):
   California’s years of major population growth have ended, and a state forecast suggests that the numbers might peak by as early as 2030 and then start to decline.
   At the turn of the century, when the population was about 34 million, state forecasters were predicting 45 million by 2020 and 59 million by 2040. That isn’t happening.
   Instead, California’s population hit 39.5 million in 2020, dipped down to 39.0 million in the first two years of the pandemic and, according to data published by the California Department of Transportation, will max out at about 40.5 million by the end of the decade.
   Whether it’s talk of a new BART transbay tube, keeping underutilized schools open or continuing to sink billions into high-speed rail, it’s time for local and state government officials to recalibrate. Projects that were conceived based on the assumption of an expanding California population will no longer make sense. We shouldn’t keep planning and budgeting as if the state’s numbers will continue to grow significantly.
   ———————
   Time to rethink a lot of things including the “housing crisis”.

8. Joe

   April 30, 2023

   We get the real data for 2021 via an editorial in the WSJ:
   The IRS each spring publishes data on the movement of adjusted gross income (AGI) and taxpayers across state lines from year to year.
   California lost $29.1 billion in 2021, more than triple what it did in 2019.
   Californians represented more than half of Texas’s income gain in 2021. The Golden State also sent $4.4 billion to Nevada, $2.7 billion to Arizona and $2 billion to Washington. Nevada and Washington don’t tax wages, and Arizona is phasing out its income tax.
   ——————–
   13% of $29.1B is $3.8 billion in 2021…and 2022 and 2023 and 2024…you get the idea.

9. Joe

   October 26, 2023

   Maybe Newsom went to China to discuss climate change so he would not be available for comment on this:
   While Gov. Gavin Newsom polishes his foreign policy credentials with visits to Israel and China, California is experiencing an economic slowdown that could bode ill for the final three years of his governorship.
   The state’s latest employment report, issued last week for September, found fewer Californians employed than there were a year earlier, while the jobless ranks had increased by 144,100. The state’s unemployment rate creeped up to 4.7%, the second highest of any state, while the labor force — Californians working or looking for work — continued to decline.
   “Census figures released this week reveal the extent to which households continue to leave California,” Taner Osman, research manager at Beacon Economics, said in an analysis of the job data. “The state’s population has fallen by half-a-million people over the past three years and this is filtering through to the economy, where the labor force has shrunk and employers are struggling to find workers.”
   The darkening employment picture is particularly evident in the San Francisco Bay Area, traditionally the state’s most prosperous region, whose high-income technology workers have been a major source of income taxes.
   he state’s population loss, cited by Osman of Beacon Economics, has taken on a new and ominous aspect, according to recent research by the Public Policy Institute of California. In the past, PPIC’s demographers have said that losses generally were in lower-income Californians seeking lower costs of living. But they now see a significant outflow of higher-income workers and their families — the people who generate the lion’s share of California’s tax revenues.
   The PPIC found that “an increasing proportion of higher-income Californians are also exiting the state. The ‘new normal’ of remote work in many white-collar professions has enabled some higher-income workers to move. Politics might also play a role, as conservatives are much more likely than liberals to say they have considered leaving the state.”

10. Peter Garrison

    October 26, 2023

    Just drove through Union Square and the empty dusty windows stretch from there to market Street.

11. Joe

    November 30, 2023

    I saw the VMware layoffs coming as soon as China signed off on the acquisition. Didn’t take long
    PALO ALTO — Tech industry job cuts in the Bay Area have reached two new grim milestones with the disclosure that the Broadcom purchase of VMware will spawn well over 1,000 more Silicon Valley layoffs, documents show.
    With the latest revelations of upcoming layoffs, the tech industry has now disclosed plans to chop twice as many Bay Area jobs in 2023 than they reported for 2022, according to this news organization’s review of hundreds of official filings with the state labor agency.
    Plus, Bay Area layoffs in the tech industry have now rocketed past the 31,000 mark for a period stretching from January 2022 to the present. Only a few days ago, the total layoffs for the 23 months was roughly 30,000.

12. Joe

    December 20, 2023

    The latest numbers are in and the exodus continues. We lost the fourth largest number of residents (on a percentage basis) in the country.
    California’s population shrank by 75,423 residents in 2023 to 38,965,193, a drop of 0.2% from 2022. But the so-called California exodus is slowing. The drop is less than the 0.3% annual decline in 2022 from 2021, and the 0.9% yearly drop in 2021 from 2020, when 39,503,200 called the Golden State home.