That’s a ridiculous take. There’s a lot of technical talent trapped in the Bay Area and I welcome it in my region. Treating every resident as if they agree with the repressive SF politics is over generalizing.
And who’s full? The main thing the flyover states need is more people.
The irony is it's the 'fuck off we're full' people that have made CA policy shitty.
It's the NIMBY anti-change response to policy.
The people that want a strong economy, incentivize building housing, and adapting lead to positive non-zero-sum outcomes.
The people that say "fuck off we're full" block any policy and create perverse incentives that create a dysfunctional mess.
This is ignoring the selection bias that the people leaving now are probably also the people not interested in CA anti-housing, high-tax policy and would likely be a better fit on these policy issues in Austin than the commenter thinks.
Largely I think comments like the one you replied to are just responding to what they see as the enemy tribe in the political culture war.
It's not just a california problem. Upper middle class suburbanites do this (with the best of intentions) everywhere they go. For every coffee shop their money keeps afloat there's two local businesses getting screwed by new local ordinances.
Sure everyone's land is worth more (as if selling the home you own or the land your business is on is actually an option when you can't readily replace either) but at the end of the day but everything winds up inflated and your standard of living flat-lines or decreases despite the increased stress.
One guess I'd have is that an influx of new people creates that anti-housing response anywhere which can lead to some of the same problems. I suspect that's less about CA policy and more about bad incentives around housing being an investment in the US.
If you mean that most people from CA don't like Trump (or the Republican support/defense of him), then yeah I think you're probably right about that (but that's not really CA policy). A lot of people I work with are more center or center-right than the general narrative about Californians would have you believe, I'd suspect those leaving to be more from that camp.
It's not anti-housing. It's never anti-housing. Nor is it ever "neighborhood character" or whatever. The places that people are moving to have plenty of land to build.
What people don't like is that when upper middle class city and inner suburb types move in local ordinances that restrict what you can and can't do on your own land seem to always follow. And given a generation or so of change in that direction, it gets you the same overpriced, impossible to develop hellscape that those people were seeking to flee in the first place. This isn't unique to CA. Their stupidity isn't special. This pattern has played out all over the east coast and midwest.
It's not as pronounced here in WA as it is in say Nevada. But, things that I see in WA, off the top of my head (not all government policy):
1 - anti-housing like you say. You see lots of signs in my neighborhood wishing against more-dense housing, despite (relatively) astronomical pricing. At least in Seattle, we do have an issue where we're constrained by water so there isn't a lot of places to build that aren't very far out. So density really is the only solution if you're going to keep computes reasonable. The only people who can afford to buy the existing not-dense housing have a ton of money or income (or both). A >$1m SFH is just not affordable in a city where median household income is $100k.
2 - push against increasing property tax. Sort of a corollary to the housing bit. Which gets doubly odd because we have no income tax in WA. Weirdly regressive.
3 - the strange and ineffectual CA-style push against "assault rifles" as the main item of gun control, despite the fact that all rifles nation-wide kill ~300/yr while pistols kill 30,000/yr, 10k of which are homicide. I say ineffectual because Amdahl's law is a thing, so even if you did magically disappear all riles in the country, it would have a ~1% impact on gun violence.
4 - restaurants heating the out of doors. This spiked a lot with coronavirus so it's hard to talk about now. (This might also be me projecting because I myself am an implant from the Midwest (yes I am a hypocrite), and heating the out of doors is just complete insanity to me)
5 - Many more good restaurants in general though. Sadly, still not a lot of good mexican restaurants.
6 - a change in coffee styles. Take from that what you will, people are kinda religious about it here.
It's really hard to pick out what's actually influenced by CA implants, vs what is just homegrown.
Like I said that might be just me with a personal pet peeve
But it is crazy inefficient to pump heat into the outdoors. It's not as inefficient in most parts of california, even northern california. But when you move north it gets down under 40... (In the Midwest where it gets below 0, it's complete lunacy)
It's a weird thing to be simultaneously in favor of environmental controls and trying to raise awareness for climate change (and doing things in Seattle like banning the use of natural gas for heating?), while also being totally ok with heating the outside for dining.
Ah, fair, it does seem like a valid criticism from an environmental/efficiency point of view. Though maybe it can be made less wasteful if establishments also add tents and other shelters that can better trap that heat.
I wasn't thinking about Trump at all. I don't think he (or any President) is very relevant at a local level, at least not on a short time-frame. The influx of people probably has something to do with it, although in Utah (where I live) there is not much anti-housing response. There is lots of construction going on both in Salt Lake City and in the surrounding areas, and lots of political support for it.
The real problems I see are more cultural ones. Homelessness is rising (as it is throughout the US). Utah had handled homelessness much better than other places due to a unique balance between the local government, the police, and the LDS church (I'm not a member FYI), but changes in the mayor and chief of police disrupted that balance.
I also perceive an arrogance on the part of some of those moving here. The idea that they can just start changing things without understanding how/why things were the way they were before. I don't think I'm against change--it's impossible to stop it in any case--but I also don't think coastal values are right for every area.
> The idea that they can just start changing things without understanding how/why things were the way they were before.
Not exactly a novel proposition. The Europeans who arrived in what is now New England, or the Caribbean or yes, even Utah, felt much the same and acted like it too.
In my experience Californians move to a new area, often more rural or with a differing local culture and want the same chain-store consumerist culture they left behind in California. And sure, there may be some political differences between their old home and the new place but it's more about the lack of respect for where they're moving and pushing their old culture onto the new place with no disregard to what made the new place nice in the first place. Change is inevitable so I can't complain about it too much but there are fewer and fewer places to escape to that aren't becoming Californicated. Or New Yorkified. Or Floridiated.
The first "we're full" bumper sticker I ever saw was Austin in 1998. RIP Travis Heights, East Austin.
It's not like most of the SFBA fleeing refugees here were natives. They were kids from schools MI, NY, PA, IL and TX. The Menlo Park, Mountain View equivalents entrenched in West Austin are pretty fed up already so we'll see how it all turns out in 5 -10 years as the nextgen 3.0 descend on Silicon Hills.
To be fair, y'all did your best to dissuade expansion by intentionally avoiding some infrastructure improvements in the 90's and 00's. But then people came anyway, and it became impossible to ignore forever. This isn't to cast aspersions on either people who were fighting for better transit across those decades, or people who wanted to keep Austin somewhat smaller. Just my observations from across my life, with family/friends in the area, spending good amount of time there each year.
The ACT stuff is long-overdue and the new CapMetro Connect project is great. Hopefully it gets funded and built with fewer bumps along the way than Houston's 5-line rail network (which is still sitting at only 3-and-a-half of 5 lines built).
France has taxes around 45% of GDP, California has (including all levels, including federal) around 30%, the US as a whole (again, counting all levels) is around 25%. California is one of the higher overall tax jurisdictions in the US, but unless your argument is that the US as a whole has unreasonably low taxes, I don't get how you can say California makes France look reasonable.
Yeah, let's just say my household income is in the top 10% in the state, so no.
> or are just being cussed.
If by “being cussed” you mean “understand the difference between total tax rates and top end marginal income tax rates in a progressive tax system”, then, yes it must be this one.
If not, you've missed at least one important possibility.
> The US top end tax rate is 37%, plus California is .... what? 13? You're already up to giving away half of what you make in California.
If you make enough in regular income that essentially all of your income is taxed at the maximum marginal federal and state, sure.
But virtually no one does that , one, because, first, you have to make a huge amount of income for that to be the case, and, second, if you make enough income for that to be the case, you probably have plenty of opportunity to structure how you make income so that, again, it's not. (Of course, while France’s top marginal income tax rate is “only” 45%, it makes a lot more of it's revenue from non-regular-income taxes than anyplace in the US, with a 20% standard VAT rate and a 42.2% top tax rate, including surtaxes and social charges, on capital gains.)
> Meanwhile you have to pay taxes on physical property like your house, and your house is valued at 7 figures if you live in the Bay Area
You don't have to pay full-value on the house except in the year you bought it, assuming market appreciation of > 2%/annum because prop 13.
> Finally, there was a VAT the last time I lived there
There has never been a VAT in any part of California. There is a sales tax, which is not a VAT, which is not a VAT, and the maximum sales tax rate in the state is 10.25%.
Oof! Please don't post to HN like you did in this thread. Most of your comments are great but we just can't have this kind of thing here—we're trying against the odds to have HN hover a little above internet median and this kind of thing just sinks us. It isn't only the damage the specific posts cause—it's what it invites from others. I recently wrote a longer explanation of why we moderate this way, if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25130956
There are other HN users with fire-breathing powers and formidable writing skills whom we eventually persuaded not to post in the enemy-incinerating style here. The argument boils down to trying to have a site that remains at least moderately interesting. There exist communities in which members kick the shit out of each other (or let's be nice, out of opposing arguments) and are higher-quality for it. I like to compare this to rugby teams who beat each other up and then go out drinking together: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
HN can't work this way because it's much too big and incohesive—the average quality of contribution is much lower, and there are no relational ties to mitigate the downside. If people start posting in that style here, a copycat stampede will result, only without any insight or wit. We'll end up with mass battles on scorched earth, which is interesting to none of the users that we actually want to have here. Trying to stave off that fate for as long as possible is actually the founding idea behind HN:
> The rest of it: I'll let you have the fact that the VAT in California is called "sales tax"
No, the sales tax is called sales tax. VAT and sales tax are structurally different.
> it's the highest in the US, FWIIW.
That's true if you talk exclusively of the state-only rate, which makes no sense to use as the basis of comparison; for statewide average combined state and local sales tax rate (the average rate people actually pay for sales tax in the State), California is #9, behind liberal utopias like Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama, among others. (Not only is California not the highest for average combined state and local sales tax, it's nowhere close to the highest for peak combined state and local sales tax, that is, the maximum people actually have to pay; the source I have doesn't rank this way, but from inspection it looks like Illinois with a statewide 6.25% and a peak local additional of 10.00% is the top there.)
An influx of coastal refugees has driven real estate up and out of reach of many locals where I'm from. Those are the types of places that are "full", even with loads of building.
You can buy a home cheap in Detroit, that’s not a good thing. Wouldn’t rising home values signal economic growth? As long as there’s room to expand I don’t see the problem. SF’s issue isn’t high prices, it’s archaic zoning laws that limit supply to keep prices high for home owners.
Economic growth that isn't evenly distributed is not good.
If you're a poor person, you'd (probably) rather have a cheap home in a poor city surrounded by other poor people, than be the poor person stuck in a gentrifying neighborhood which is getting increasingly hostile to your presence.
I think there are two issues here. First, housing is somewhat inelastic in that it takes multiple years to respond to a rise in demand and plan out and build new housing even with a reasonably fast permitting / approval process. Second, due to labor and materials costs, the price of housing in many areas is far below the cost to build new housing so housing prices will necessarily go up even with maximum build rates. This can create affordability difficulties for the lower rungs of income.
>Second, due to labor and materials costs, the price of housing in many areas is far below the cost to build new housing so housing prices will necessarily go up even with maximum build rates.
Specifically, the cost of land is what causes the cost to build to be so high. Owning unproductive land is cheap, and incentivizes simply holding onto it until it appreciates sufficiently.
Well the cost of land worsens housing prices, but even assuming the land is of negligible value the cost of construction itself will make new houses quite pricey compared to older homes in non-bubbly markets.
You're crazy if you don't understand why a large portion of the population doesn't look at the bay area and say "the last people I want are the people who created that situation".
I think it's a lot more nuanced than that but the sentiment is at the very least understandable.
Is this effect stronger with California residents relocating in particular or it will happen with any other residents relocating from different educational/social/political/economic background?
I don't think most people leaving the bay area are headed to some remote cabin in Montana or some sleepy town in the midwest - they're just moving to cheaper (comparatively) cities. Anyone pulling up roots with a bay area salary or a home in CA is going to have a huge cash advantage against anyone in the local market just about wherever they move.
On a personal note, it's been tons of fun competing with the multiple bids, sight unseen, over asking on 600-700k+ century old homes in need of another 100k worth of rehab.
In aggregate, they seem to be. Most vote for dems who want to increase taxes. In a country with a two party system, it's basically the same as bringing their entire policies with them.
They actually do need more people, there's quite a drain of young people in these communities which leads to closed farms and hollowed out Main Streets. But transient npm ninjas aren't quite the ticket.
And who’s full? The main thing the flyover states need is more people.