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Californication of America
Representative Tim Ryan, back left in tie, organized a bus tour through the Midwest with about a dozen venture capitalists. (via New York Times)
For cancer to survive, once it kills its host it must move on to another healthy body. Forty years of leftist rule ruined the once “Golden State.” You can’t walk through San Francisco without side-stepping human excrement or drive through Los Angeles without navigating countless miles of homeless camps. Meanwhile, California housing costs are unattainable by most everyone.
Now even the enlightened ones can’t cope with the expense and traffic they themselves created so they plan on moving elsewhere. Never learning the lessons of their failures they will, of course, bring along their bankrupt progressive values to rinse and repeat. Watch out Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — they’re coming.
In recent months, a growing number of tech leaders have been flirting with the idea of leaving Silicon Valley. Some cite the exorbitant cost of living in San Francisco and its suburbs, where even a million-dollar salary can feel middle class. Others complain about local criticism of the tech industry and a left-wing echo chamber that stifles opposing views. And yet others feel that better innovation is happening elsewhere.
In the last three months of 2017, San Francisco lost more residents to outward migration than any other city in the country, according to data from Redfin, the real estate website. A recent survey by Edelman, the public relations firm, found that 49 percent of Bay Area residents, and 58 percent of Bay Area millennials, were considering moving away. And a sharp increase in people moving out of the Bay Area has led to a shortage of moving vans. (According to local news reports, renting a U-Haul for a one-way trip from San Jose to Las Vegas now costs roughly $2,000, compared with just $100 for a truck going the other direction.)
For both investors and rank-and-file workers, one appeal of noncoastal cities is the obvious cost savings. It’s increasingly difficult to justify doling out steep salaries and lavish perks demanded by engineers in the Bay Area, when programmers in other cities can be had for as little as $50,000 a year. (An entry-level engineer at Facebook or Google might command triple or quadruple that amount.)
Venture capitalists, who recognize a bargain when they see one, have already begun scouring the Midwest. Mr. Case and Mr. Vance recently amassed a $150 million fund called “Rise of the Rest.” The fund, which was backed by tech luminaries including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Alphabet, will invest in start-ups throughout the region.
I married into a Pittsburgh family (go Steelers!) and over the past 20-plus years have witnessed the renaissance of a dying steel town becoming a mecca of biomedical research and technology. As any city with a growing academic and legal center, we see the ideological betters and their activist cohorts fully intent on ensuring their blue city invades its red state host and spreads their coastal virus.
The incentive of local economic booms will entice you to welcome the invaders, but don’t ignore what they created and are now running from.
Published in General
It’s likely though that Hickenlooper is just talking to the wrong teachers. If they offered the same program there, I’ll bet they would get takers.
Too late for Oregon. We were californicated 30-40 years ago.
I’m not a doctor, but I don’t think that’s how cancer works. For one thing, it’s not contagious, right? Wouldn’t a virus be a better analogy?
Oh, you better believe it! I guarantee you he’s not talking to the teachers in our charter school(s). I suspect for them, though, it’s already a settled subject.
Red states need to pass laws to keep these people from voting in state elections for x amount of years before they turn purple and then blue.
Growing up in Iowa I laughed at the transplanted Californians who wouldn’t move back because of the weather. Now that I’ve lived in CA for 28 years I’ve become what I used to laugh at. Each time I go back to visit my parents in the winter I’m astounded that the midwest was ever settled!
And people still live there!! God bless ’em. Heartland America makes for tough, common sense people.
Same thing happened to us when we went to Texas and my brother when he went to Florida. We lived in Pittsburgh for a while after my brother had long been in Florida, and our first winter in Texas, during a walk to the playground with the kids, I called him to say I had experienced “the moment” which he himself had long described while we were up north.
“The moment” – when you call a relative up north and hear a weary description of a storm coming in and realize that you were completely unaware of it because your winter weather was nothing but pleasant and didn’t need watching.
Hope he’s not a football fan . . .
…and you weren’t in hysterical California with their constant “STORM WATCH 2018” and real-time doppler.
Water from the sky!!! It’s the apocalypse!!!
Yeah, I’m no Dr either but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express (once) so I used the metaphor because several viruses can become cancers (HPV, HepB, etc). The viral engine still needs a host. But got the point.
Move immediately. Or, better, send them abroad to steel their character, to OxBridge for the first two years for general education and then to the Technical Universities at Darmstadt, Karlsruhe, Aachen, Munich, Zurich or Vienna. Afterwards, they can slice and dice another Masters in engineering in Toronto (Trudeau will pas as their family members do) or, if there is the need for homeliness, the MIT. The likes of Musk and all will eat dirt out of their hands. Proper deep research, relevant, core engineering, no frills, no fuss, despite the European softness a solid, hard focus on what works. Then back to the land of the free markets. Oh, yes, and save about 100-120 k per each diaper filler.
Talked to a couple of snowbirds last week from NJ trying to sell their home and move to central Florida. Problem is…all their neighbors have their homes for sale as well so this couple believes they will never sell. As they stated, they waited a year too long to put it on the market. Now, with all the tax changes, everyone wants out.
These folks seem like nice people but given that they are from NJ, I have to wonder if they are Democrats and if they are Democrats…nice as they seem to be…I kind of hope that they don’t move to our fairly conservative little hamlet here in central Florida. Stay home and deal with what your policies have wrought.
Yes, I am worried. Unless you’re a conservative seeking asylum from the east/west coast craziness, folks moving out of their states just need to stay put and live with it. We don’t need you driving up housing costs, changing our schools, increasing our taxes, etc. It’s pretty sweet as it is.
Politics is local and I am seriously thinking of running for city council.
Don’t pay it.
Dave, that is a shocking number for in-state. Ye olde google machine pulled up all in costs for CA schools at $36k in state and $64k out of state. Not being a Californian, I was aware from parents I know about the cost of Berkley as we have lots of kids apply there (we have a HS senior). But for in state – thats seems easily $10k minimum higher than what I would guess the in-state average is for flagship schools in the US (ours is UT Austin @ $25k). And at $36k, you are very close to out of state at lots of fine public institutions elsewhere before any kind of merit. Crazy to think it might be a better deal to go elsewhere, but in a case like CA it just might.
Good luck.
The University of Illinois is very close to that for in-state.
Yup, and then there’s living, dorms, books, etc, etc. I have a counselor working with him which I was told was an investment because they can find little-known scholarships and grants, so hopefully, we’ll save a few pennies. He is looking nationwide right now.
Can you let my household out first?
It’ll have a big beautiful door. With a lock on it.