Leaving California

A meditation.

The one thing she doesn’t mention about why people hate Californians when they move into their community; they’re afraid that they’ll bring with them the voting habits that have made the state such a disaster. I remember when we were in Austin a couple years ago, doing wine tasting in Hill Country. The tone of the conversation got distinctly chillier when they learned we were from CA. I tried to assure them that we weren’t the problem.

15 thoughts on “Leaving California”

  1. … isn’t Austin already Texas’s California, and hasn’t it been that way for ages, even without Californians?

    Just … kinda rich for Austin, eh?

  2. Yeah, when I first moved out of California I was reticent to tell people I’d grown up there.

    Then I joined a local political group — sort of a Tea Party precursor — that certain influential locals held in lower regard than the John Birch Society (and I know this because there was a JBS chapter there), and ran (unsuccessfully) for local office with the taxpayer group’s endorsement. Twice.

    No one has doubted me since.

  3. Having a hard time digesting that article.
    But hating rich tourists simply for flooding the place with money is not the reason Eleanor is leaving the Bay.
    So why is Eleanor leaving the Bay?
    But selling bourgeoise yogurt crocks and $100 bottles of wine to people who didn’t see her as part of their shabby-chic fantasy was becoming difficult to bear.
    The new deal … was getting used to hearing “Where are you from? Here? No way!” repeatedly from rich white people

    Eleanor is leaving the Bay because… too many offensive rich white people.

    To the angry locals of Portland, Seattle, Denver, New Orleans, Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, and elsewhere, please hear this defense: The Californians who are coming in and “ruining” your cities are not snobs.
    And we know this because the subject of your article doesn’t hate all rich white people, just the offensive ones.

    The segment about abandoning an “urban East Bay” apartment because of mold is confusing. It’s not clear who successfully sued who. I’ve heard of the absolutely idiotic tenant rights framework Californians have created for themselves, and how it exacerbates the lack of affordable housing. Maybe that might be one (of many) reasons people are less than ambivalent about Californians moving to their cities. But I guess I can see how that would not be something the author would find relevant.

    We are witnessing two migrations. One is the continuation of the Californian dream, where young people flock here for gold and glory, ready to hustle and disrupt, hammering to hit the motherlode and laughing at the odds.
    Those would be these people, right?
    The other is the migration of young people out of California, which seems to have affected everyone I know, but which I rarely hear examined. These people want to be artists, teachers, blacksmiths, therapists, mechanics, and musicians. They want to have children, open bakeries, own a house. But they can’t. There is no room here for those kinds of dreams anymore.
    “There’s no room here”. One might be excused for concluding that California is just too damn small.

    1. The latest from iSteve seems relevant. California can’t raise the Lake Shasta damn by 20 feet because it might cause a small amphibious animal too much stress. Even though the current water levels move more than that every year.

      Yeah, any place that wouldn’t welcome people who possess that level of intellect is a place filled with crazed idiots.

    2. Blacksmiths? Geez. In my electronics engineering class there was a guy who was a Master Blacksmith. He had to go to England to get that certification. He was only one of five Master Blacksmiths in all of North America – and he was giving it up to work in electronics, because the market for chainmail armor is even smaller than you think.

      1. As probably the only person in the world who has made much fully welded maille, I was unaware that any such market existed, at least at the price point of welding each and every link. That’s why it was a hobby.

        I did rediscover what banded maille is, which is still thought to be a myth. It’s just the standard 4-in-1 linking pattern but with rows of really large links held by rows of really small links, which saves both time and materials. The down side is that if expended radially it binds up on itself, essentially creating a joint lock. To prevent that you have to run stretchy leather or bungie through the holes left by the small links, to hold the armor together so it won’t lock up. I would phrase it as “The lather bands keep the links together.” This was interpreted by later folks as iron rings held together with leather bands, which can’t work.

        Since I have no skin in the game, I’m just sitting back wondering how long people will keep saying it’s a myth because they read that in a book written in the 1800’s by people who didn’t even know how swords worked.

  4. I’m not kidding that we had an Interior Decorator from California move into our neighborhood, and so far he’s managed to piss off every neighbor that had the unfortunate chance to bump into him in person or online (we have a community Facebook page). The annoyance is a combination of him trying to sell his services unsolicited, then trash talking about our homes, and then trash talking about the neighborhood. He doesn’t handle rejection well, while simultaneously doing all the right things to get people to reject him.

  5. The article is written in usual “lefty loony” style. Vague references to the real concrete issues and heavy on feeling.

    I left Silly Valley in 2015 after being laid off from a tech company at age 66. No way was I going to find another SW job. I have been living in the same house in Santa Clara County for almost 40, except for 5 years I spent on the East coast. I should have never returned.

    My purpose for returning was to sell the house I had rented and move to Tucson, or Texas or Florida, all of which had family. But I stayed too long as jobs were easy to find. Time stretched along and so when the lay off came I used the 6 months of unemployment money to clean out my house and sell it for 7 times what I had pay for it. I tell people in Texas that I am the last heterosexual Republican to leave the state.

    I now live in San Antonio area and am trying to fit in. I own 3 houses and rent two and with the economy here chugging along very well I am happily retired. I have a new hat and cowboy boots.
    Soon I’ll have some cows.

    But, I find myself in a Federal Congressional District that is gerrymandered all the way from San Antonio to Laredo that is Democratic. Republicans did not even run a candidate in the recent election.

    So say goodby to Red State Texas. Fredericksburg is growing the best wine that Californians can grow.

    1. The Republicans should run a candidate in EVERY SINGLE district. There is a good chance an (R) would have won in NY-14 after Acute Occluded Cortex managed to win in the primary against the phone-it-in Joe Crowley.

      But, the R’s are the stupid party….

      Why dont you run against Henry Cuellar?

      1. NY-14 is about as hard-core (D) as anything you are going to find…not the limousine liberal sort, but black/brown working class mixed with trust fund kiddies. As the old saying goes, the donkey would have won there.

        With that said, in places like TX, I agree with you wholeheartedly, the GOP should definitely being contesting every square inch of territory.

  6. Speaking as someone who was born and raised in SoCal, and then moved to rural Arizona, I fully understand the reluctance to admit being from California; I share it.

    What’s despised in my area are California retirees who are fleeing the high prices, high taxes, and high crime – and are bound and determined to make their new area just as crappy as their old one.

    I do not blame people for despising them. I do myself. In my case it’s because they give all Californians a bad name, plus of course that they want the same horrendous policies here that I fled from.

  7. The non-deductibility of state income tax and other blue-state targeted federal taxes may have been winning an important battle to drain Democrats of money and cause the high wage earners to leave those states. But it may have lost the war if states like NY, IL and CA continue to send 400,000 people (200k from NY) to the other states every year (1% for NY/IL 0.35% CA). If Florida turns permablue, that bodes poorly for Republicans to win the Presidency. Here’s a link to immigration patterns before the new law took effect in 2018. https://www.businessinsider.com/state-domestic-migration-map-2016-to-2017-2018-1

    1. Not to put too fine a point on it, but most of the people moving out of NY and IL and moving to Florida are retirees. So, 1) they are old curmudgeons who honestly detest the politics of the next generation and 2) they will probably be dead soon. Not seeing where this will turn Florida much more blue than it is already.

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