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Pack Light, Leave Your Progressive Politics Behind
Will the last person to leave San Francisco please turn out the lights? The exodus of the middle class from San Francisco is underway. USA Today tells the story of one couple that left more than their hearts in San Francisco.
Social media influencer Sarah Tripp and her husband, Robbie Tripp, moved to San Francisco in 2016 brimming with optimism.
“We thought, here’s a city full of opportunities and connections where you go to work hard and succeed,” says Tripp, 27, founder of the lifestyle blog Sassy Red Lipstick.
But after a year-long hunt for suitable housing in San Francisco only turned up “places for $1 million that looked like rundown shacks and needed a remodel,” the couple packed up and moved to Phoenix.
They went from paying San Francisco rents of $2,500 for a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment that was far from shopping and other amenities, to purchasing a newly constructed 3,000-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-bathroom home where they’ll raise their newly arrived baby boy.
“It was cool to be living near all those high-tech startups,” Tripp says of her Bay Area years. “But you quickly saw that if you weren’t part of that, you’d be pushed out. It’s just sad.”
To be fair to the Tripps, I don’t know how they vote. One of the things I heard from new residents that had retired to Pinal County, AZ, was how reasonable housing prices were, and of course how benign winters were. Some, even though they were snowbirds, changed their residency status from wherever they came from and became Arizona residents due to lower income taxes. In a subtle way, I would remind them to make their escape complete they should vote to keep paradise a paradise, and not turn it into California, New Jersey, New York — insert your own woke city or state if you like.
I remember one escapee from New York telling me how much he loved Arizona, but he was disturbed by seeing someone in a supermarket carrying a sidearm. How to frame a proper reply, other than, “In Arizona, people tend to mind their own business.” This was not the way to comment on his observation, especially to a newcomer. I told him that he won’t see that too often, but Arizona was part of the West, and things are different here. You’ll get used to it.
Published in Immigration
Someone who is young and moves to San Francisco to be a “Social Media Influencer” probably (and sadly) isn’t going to connect why the cost of living in San Francisco is so high with the politicians of the city, the Bay Area and the state as a whole. They’re more likely to think evil corporate billionaires are jacking up the prices, move to Phoenix and set the stage by the middle of the century for people to be moving out of there, because the cost of living is too high (i.e. — If I saw something a year or two from now about Sarah Tripp joining in the protests that her senator, Kyrsten Sinema, isn’t voting with the Democrats enough and needs to be primaried in 2024, it wouldn’t be a shock).
These escapees are moving to Montana as well, and bringing their ideas along with them, because we are so backwards. I have had a few words to say to these folks, “if you don’t like the way we do things then go back to were you came from.”
Just can’t stand the way things were where we came from so we moved here. Now let us tell you how to do things the way we did back there. There should be a word for that!!
It’s the corollary to the people who claim failed socialist states failed because the wrong people were in charge. In this case, they flee places like San Francisco because of the conditions created by politicians in that area and state, yet somehow think if they elect a different group of politicians with the same general mindset in their new area and state, things are going to turn out differently.
The new San Fran rent control will make things worse.
It’s always fun to watch those folks who move to places like SF and LA and NYC in search of a “cool city,” but who then move back six months or a year later, whining about “it’s so expensive, the crime rate is awful, and it’s nearly impossible to find a good job.”
I live in Orlando, and I’d literally have to triple my rent in NYC or LA – and quadruple it in SF.
There is. Seven letters, starts with an F.
I mean Foolish, of course. What did you think I meant?
We have a lot of “transplants” in Utah, too. We’re growing so fast that it’s hard to keep up with it.
Bay area native (Nov 1969, a.k.a. The Fall of Love), back in the mid-peninsula house I grew up in, considering the “cash out.”
Grew up in the “computers went from refrigerators to boxes-on-desks” period, and saw everything that followed. Never entered that meat grinder, have many friends that did. A few did very well. Somehow managed to carve a living out of writing about musicians, since both parents were SF-based jazz pianists in another age. Now, albums/songs have been nuked due to Napster, and the recent freelance-writing CA law will essentially destroy that gig. (Had it passed twenty years ago, I’d have been done. 35 articles is nothing.) Frankly, the idea that someone came here under the auspices of the Sassy Red Lipstick lifestyle blog…not the wisest choice imho.
Where/when I grew up was a cool college-town vibe, close to Stanford, but now has more transients, here for the degree or $. No knowledge or respect of this area’s history. I’ve joked with service workers who help with my house, that it looks like there is more “diversity” in the bay area, but everyone is the same. (They agree.) Hence the salient aforementioned point, if you’re not part of the coding community, you’re pushed out.
Sadly, am looking to move. Luckily, have a better half who makes it all worth it.
Amen to that!
I moved to NC because I like the way they do things here.
Nothing yanks my string like hearing the escapees from NY, NJ, PN,MA,OH, etc say “that’s not how we did things in X”.
If you want that then stay there and don’t ruin what we have.
Progressivism is a contagious mental disease. It has no known cure. Sort of like the Black Plague in the middle ages – it either kills you(r state) or you are one of the <10 % who miraculously survives.
Someone in Texas did a poll of new immigrants from California. They found that the majority of them were Republicans, which is a relief, and it makes sense.