Daily Post Editor
If you haven’t noticed, people are leaving the Peninsula and California in droves. The state’s “net outmigration” — demographers lingo for more people leaving than moving here — reached 407,633 in 2021, the most recent year for which there was Census data of this type. That’s up from net outmigration of 173,347 in 2019. These numbers are from the Orange County Register, which analyzed the Census data in a report printed June 9.
The decline should get state and local political leaders to rethink two assumptions.
1. Why should cities pour billions of dollars into new railroad bridges over streets (called grade separations) for a railroad whose ridership is one-fourth of what it was before the pandemic? Ridership is down because people are moving out of the Bay Area and those who remain are working from home. Also, a train to San Francisco isn’t as necessary as it once was given the number of employers who have abandoned the city given its well documented problems.
2. The state is demanding that cities and counties come up with zoning plans for thousands of new residents. Each city and county must meet a quota of new homes. Yet demand for housing is sagging. The vacancy rate is increasing. “For rent” signs are common. It’s time to slash the quotas. These new stack-and-pack homes you see along El Camino Real may end up sitting empty, like those infamous “planned communities” China has built that have become ghost towns.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays in the Daily Post. His email address is [email protected].
I strongly agree.
Respectfully, I think you have this backwards. People are leaving California because there are not enough homes. If we build enough homes, people will stay in California. Our great state has it all — great weather, great people, lots of jobs. All that’s missing is enough homes. Let’s build enough homes so that our friends, neighbors, and families can stay!
Our state has it all, no question there. We’ve got high grocery costs, high rents, high gas prices and the highest poverty rate. We’re first in homelessness, drug overdoses, retail theft and violent crime. We’ve got the highest utility bills, income taxes, gas taxes and sales taxes. With all of these Democratic Party accomplishments, of course people want to stay!
Adam, we have homes. What we don’t have is lower cost homes.
How are we going to build those?
Adam. You’re wrong they’re leaving because of crime and drugs, woke policies and politicians. High cost of living and more housing won’t cure that. Electricty costs that are almost 3 times the cost of let’s say North Carolina.
The cure for some of our woes is reign in the woke politicians and DAs, population control as in too many people. Ah heck it’s just about hopeless.
Dave Price, you are a nincompoop if you are basing long term decisions on a temporary hitch that was caused by, for most means and purposes, a once in a lifetime global pandemic.
This is California. This isn’t North Carolina like that the other nincompoop in the comments thinks. People want to live here. Unfortunately, cities in this region like San Francisco were swayed by techies money more than natives money. So much so that the city pushed them onto the streets.
Now techies don’t want to live here. Now, you can use your mindless line of reasoning and say “California is dead” and maintain that SF’s problems have nothing to do with techies pricing people onto the streets (go ahead, you have your 1st amendment right). Or, you can you admit SF got drunk off tech money and it takes time to sober up and admit real estate prices were sky high because techies were getting 350k packages to start at Twitter.
Growth is not a singular bad data point, nor a few bad data points that suddenly appeared because of a global pandemic. Growth is long term. You writing this article implies otherwise.
Grow up.
Dave Price, you are a nincompoop if you are basing long term decisions on a temporary hitch that was caused by, for most means and purposes, a once in a lifetime global pandemic.
This is California. This isn’t North Carolina like that the other nincompoop in the comments thinks. People want to live here. Unfortunately, cities in this region like San Francisco were swayed by techies money more than natives money. So much so that the city pushed them onto the streets.
Now techies don’t want to live here. Now, you can use your mindless line of reasoning and say “California is dead” and maintain that SF’s problems have nothing to do with techies pricing people onto the streets (go ahead, you have your 1st amendment right). Or, you can you admit SF got drunk off tech money and it takes time to sober up and admit real estate prices were sky high because techies were getting 350k packages to start at Twitter.
Growth is not a singular bad data point, nor a few bad data points that suddenly appeared because of a global pandemic. Growth is long term. You writing this article implies otherwise.
Grow up.