Sound familiar? I "fled high costs, heavy traffic" but it seems there is always someone to take your place......in fact, Ten took my place. <g>
Many Californians flee high costs, heavy traffic
By Mike Swift
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. — 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 the outflow will continue for the foreseeable future.
Unlike the tens of thousands who left Silicon Valley after 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.
For 150 years, California has been seen as the Golden State of opportunity for millions of migrating Americans.
Other than recessions in the 1970s and 1990s, "I don't know if California would ever have been in a position where it was losing people to other states," said Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. "This is very new and very different."
That doesn't mean California has lost its luster entirely. As the most populous state, California is experiencing an out-migration that is more about maturation than decline, historians and economists say. The state's population of 37 million is still growing, because births are outnumbering deaths and because of foreign immigration.
"What California was in the 1960s and 1970s — a place of growth and expansion — that California formula has been taken to so many other places" in the Sunbelt, said Kevin Starr, a professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in the state's history.
Increasingly, the coast from San Diego to the Bay Area is like the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Starr said, a place that selects the most talented and wealthy.
"It's become an extremely competitive and elite society," he said.
The most common destinations for departing Californians in recent years are five Western states: Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Washington and Oregon, IRS data show.
"It's to some extent a continuation of a really old California story, which is that California helps populate the rest of the West," said James Gregory, a historian at the University of Washington who studies Western migration. "It has been sending people to its neighboring states for 150 years."
A new group has joined that movement in recent years.
The flow of Latinos out of California is fueling a Latino diaspora across the United States.
This movement, which began in the mid-1990s, has grown into a full-fledged phenomenon, populating places such as the Northeast, Midwest and South, where Mexican Americans only recently have lived in significant numbers.
Johnson's analysis of census data shows that between 2000 and 2005, about 320,000 more Latinos left California than arrived from other states.
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