At the high end of moving out (rich people), California is unappealing because it's budgetfucked. Education, transportation, public services, and everything else will suffer for a long time. This leads to their crazy high state income tax and crazy high sales taxes and municipalities doing insane additional taxes for businesses on top of everything else.
The Bay Area may be the best place to create Show Me Your Food 13.0, but I think you can build things elsewhere with nicer conditions.
It seems like there are several additional ways one could spin the data in this report.
From a selfish standpoint, should I, as a Californian in a booming industry that looks like it will remain a central part of the economy for the forseeable future, be too broken up about a lot of people moving elsewhere for jobs? Should I want the metro area I live in to be seeing double-digit-percentages population growth over decades (I don't think that would make it any cheaper, or would make traffic any better)? And even then, the overall populations for the parts of California I'd want to live in are still rising, and jobs and new companies are still being created, and I'm meeting a ton of smart people who've moved here from all over the country.
I certainly have no intention to move back east any time soon. I've found a lot more interesting stuff being done out here, and the weather is worlds better, and the high population density allows a ton of things I like.
So that's why my rent here in the SF Bay Area is decreasing! (Not).
I admit it was kind of nice after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 and the dot-com bust in 2001 to have some breathing room. Alarms about hordes leaving California have the opposite effect on me, as I look forward to uncrowded hiking trails and affordable real estate.
I think this has a lot less to do with taxes than it does with the prices of real estate. Buying a house in California is prohibitively expensive for most people, which eats up a huge amount of everyone's disposable income. In Texas, you make less money, but houses and rent are a factor of 2-4 times cheaper for what you get.
I think there are two main reasons for this: proposition 13 and CEQA. Prop 13 keeps property taxes really low, which makes buying and holding onto single-family homes really cheap. This is a giant subsidy for people who have lived in California for a while, but jacks up the prices for everyone else who gets in after them, since low ownership costs translate to high upfront prices.
The California Environmental Quality Act has a different effect that also raises housing prices: empowering NIMBYs. Because any new development can be pretty easily be slowed down/made more expensive/stopped altogether by a bogus CEQA request, new housing isn't getting built in nearly as much as one would expect given the demand. This makes existing housing more valuable, which increases prices even more.
In addition, some municipalities, notably San Francisco, have an insanely regulated rental market that makes renting incredibly difficult for a landlord, which makes it more attractive for people to buy housing instead of rent. This means there's less rental housing to go around, which makes the rent in SF absolutely insane.
Seems odd to try and focus only on domestic migrations. In 1990 the population of California was 29.9M, in July 2011 it was 37.6M. The total population has continued to climb - https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&...
The net draw to California still seems to be in place.
I moved from California to Utah in 2007. The reason? My wife wanted to be closer to her family there and my job didn't care where I lived.
Their conclusion about density is bullshit, supported by bullshit assertions. Population-Weighted Density is what people experience, not geographic density. Nobody moves out of their 10 acre farmhouse in San Bernadino county because Long Beach is too crowded. Even the Census acknowledges as much. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2012/10/americas-tr... Furthermore, there are plenty of dense cities that are growing more densely as well as in absolute. In fact, the city that is densest (by a factor of 2x), is doing exactly that.
Seriously considering Seattle or Las Vegas, or farther afield, Hawaii or New Zealand, in 2013+.
After just roughly scanning the graphs I'd speculate that the ageing society plays a role. Which could explain why less liberal states are experiencing a rise of population, while the more liberal states are experiencing a decline.
Which is just my hunch (without any source or proof) that people get more conservative with age. And another one, that they prefer to live in places with like-minded folks.
Just wild guessing though. I am not even from America.
This exodus is occurring in Illinois as well (shown). Both states share similar budget problems along with predictable leadership responses -- higher taxes and reduced services.
What Illinois needs is genuine growth and that doesn't happen overnight. In the meantime, people get fed up and leave -- unless they have to sell their home or business.
Along with this study it would be enlightening to see if someone could correlate it to a decline in California's jobless rate:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mo-california-sheds-38...
Of course, you have to take the jobless rate with a grain of salt as it does not take into to account people who have just given up looking all together. I still wonder if population decline in California could contribute to lower unemployment (more jobs open for the people that stay in the state).
Would rather have more parks and forests than more people. Carry on.
There was a recent KQED forum podcast on the rise and fall of California:
tl;dnr
It's so crowded, nobody goes there anymore (after Yogi Berra)
The way the charts are set up, say charts 4 and 5, it looks like people are fleeing places like California and New York, and heading to places like Nevada and South Carolina.
Except the charts are subtracting out-migration from in-migration. California is the most populous state, about 38 million people. New York is the second most populous state, about 19 million people. Nevada went from having 1.2 million to having 2.7 million. South Carolina went from having 3.4 million to having 4.6 million.
Nevada never really had a population base that could have been subtracted in those charts. South Carolina also had a small population base.
What I've seen happen in New York City is large blue-collar families leaving ethnic neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods being replaced by young professionals. Williamsburg is an example - it was a working class ethnic neighborhood, now it is yuppies, hipsters, startups, art galleries, and the like. You can think what you want of it, but it is certainly not a sign of a lack of prosperity.
That's another assumption implicit in the article - that the Duggar family leaving a state, and two yuppie kids moving in is bad economically, because the population decreased. If small populations meant a bad economy then Norway, Denmark, Finland, Singapore, and Uruguay are bad, and Nigeria and Bangladesh are good. Prosperity does not equal population size.
The Manhattan Institute is an explicitly conservative political organisation. That doesn't inherently invalidate any of the conclusions they draw, but readers should be aware that they have been made with a pro-free market, anti-big government mindset. Others may draw quite different conclusions from the same facts.