Michael Barone’s column in the Washington Examiner (COVID only accelerated the blue state exodus) hit me in the pet peeves. The main peeve is just generally poor analysis: wanting to fit outcomes into very specific partisan narratives without sound arguments. The secondary peeve is the weird obsession a lot of conservatives have about California (and often large urban areas in general).
The basis of the column is factual.
Domestic out-migration — the number of U.S. residents leaving the state minus those entering — in 2020-22 was 3.3% of the 2020 population in New York state and 2.2% in Illinois and California. These are staggering numbers, far higher than any other state. The losses are undoubtedly concentrated in central cities, as suggested by the District of Columbia, where pre-COVID population was growing but in 2020-22 was down 3.8%.
Whether these numbers are, in fact, staggering, is a judgment call, but they certainly are noteworthy. And, I think that without any doubt whatsoever, the pandemic has something to do with these figures. At a bare minimum the increase in remote work options means people can live, at least in theory, wherever they want.
I certainly think Barone is correct when he notes the housing costs are also part of the explanation for these shifts. But he conflates a number of issues and then over-generalizes:
Not coincidentally, these states have some of the nation’s highest state and local tax rates and high housing costs due to restrictive regulations. That has spurred out-migration for more than a decade. The post-COVID woes — lockdowns and masking mandates, the post-George Floyd upward zoom in violent crime, and the spread of homeless encampments — have sparked a larger exodus that seems unlikely to be fully reversed.
We have quite a parade here. First I am struck by the fact that lockdowns and masking mandates were pandemic woes, not post-pandemic woes. And a lot of places had both lockdowns and masking mandates, not just California, New York, and Illinois. And while I know there is some at least anecdotal evidence that people moved to less restrictive states, I would like to see more than just speculation at what large numbers mean.
The assertion of a “post-George Floyd upward zoom in violent crime” is all kinds of problematic. And while homelessness is an important issue, I would need more evidence of its effects than is given here. Indeed, both issues feel more like cable news chatter than actual explanatory variables.
Indeed, it seems pretty straightforward the existing trends linked especially to housing costs have simply been augmented by the chances for remote work options.
And as I have noted before, if the issue was just people looking for lower taxes and cheaper housing then why haven’t Alabama and similarly situated states seen a massive in-migration? Clearly, this is more complicated than presented.
There is also an assumption being made (the whole casing this as people leaving blue states bit and linking it to COVID policies) that this represents political migration, but it is almost certainly the case that the folks on the move are a mix ideologically speaking. Indeed, given the partisan breakdown of California, the odds are higher than not that the migration out of the state means the states being migrated into are getting more new potential Democrats than Republicans. (Although probabilities also dictate that a lot of them are non-voters).
As such, the complexities of reality make this all less of some cautionary tale about blue state policy failures than Barone and others might prefer.
That brings me to the California part of my pet peeve. For going on four decades I have heard caterwauling from conservative circles that California is going to do itself in. Now, don’t get me wrong, California is crazy expensive. In fact, when I was looking for faculty jobs back in the mid-to-late 1990s, I mostly avoided positions in the state because I knew that the cost of living would outpace potential salaries. And, quite frankly, it is too crowded for my tastes (I finished high school and did my undergraduate schooling in the state, so I had direct experience, all of which was reinforced when visiting family over the decades).
But let’s focus on the “too crowded” aspect because when conservatives talk about mass exoduses of the state I always think about Yogi Bera’s observation that “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” I mean, call me when traffic flows freely on the 405, I don’t have to wait at least 45 minutes to get a table for dinner, and the line at CostCo isn’t ten people deep.
But I have been hearing how places like Texas were going to drain CA for decades. I saw some of this in action when I was in Austin in graduate school in the 1990s. Austin’s tech boom was in a nascent phase when I arrived to start my Ph.D. in 1990 and was in full swing, but not yet at its peak when I left the area in 1998. And yet, Austin’s tech boom (and the growth of other tech hubs like the Research Triangle in North Carolina) didn’t mean California’s downfall, so clearly this issue is more complicated than just who has cheaper taxes and housing (not to mention that growth in Austin has been a huge surge in housing costs and while Texas doesn’t have income taxes, its property taxes are nothing to sneeze at).
I would further note that things like infrastructure, including schools, airports, and other amenities affect where companies can and will locate. And, weirdly enough, higher tax locations often have better infrastructure. And general amenities require a certain population level. And so, a lot of this migration out of blue states is into blue population centers of even the red states in question.
So, again, kind of complicated. Certainly more complicated than Barone’s conclusion:
What the census numbers show is that COVID lockdowns, piled atop high taxes and restrictive housing regulations, got several million people on the move in the 27 months from April 2020 to July 2022.
Those who moved are likely to be better off, but the self-damage inflicted on the places they left will be hard, in some respects impossible, to repair.
I mean, the census numbers just show the movements, they decidedly don’t show the reasons for those movements. And while I am certainly willing to accept that this might, finally, be the predicted collapse of liberal states, this seems rather unlikely. While there has been some significant movement of people in the last couple of years, we are still talking about a small percentage of the overall population. More likely than not this is a broader effect of the pandemic than it is anything else. Indeed, it seems quite likely that it will be years before we fully understand the pandemic’s effects on the broader society.
Still, it seems likely that California, which is attractive in multiple ways, will continue to be the largest state by population for the foreseeable future and continue to be a massive segment of the national economy. And place like NYC and Chicago will remain important and attractive as well.
And, no doubt, stories about how their policies are leading them to the brink of destruction will also continue unabated.
A nice side-note illustration to all of this (and which fits my own personal connection to Austin’s experiences) is a piece from Texas Monthly from almost exactly two years ago: No, Austin Won’t Become Silicon Valley 2.0.
A 1990s upswelling of Dellionaires in Austin gave way to a burst dot-com bubble in the 2000s, with the concrete hulk of the Intel Shell reminding downtown visitors what dreams had failed to come. Meanwhile, mega-firms such as Google, Facebook, and Apple roared out of Silicon Valley to define a new, twenty-first century age of billionaire industrial barons starting in the second Bush administration. Austin was stuck in the relative bush leagues, with Dell hitting a rough patch.
Austin’s current place on the tech-world map has lately been defined by its many secondary campuses for major tech companies—most significantly Apple, IBM, and Samsung—employing tens of thousands of people in the region. This trend has heated up in recent years, with more and more investment from outside firms, until one such secondary campus, Oracle’s, was rechristened last month as a Fortune 500 corporate headquarters.
In regards to the pandemic and remote work:
There’s no question that the Oracle move is huge for Austin. Still, it’s worth keeping in perspective what it means, both for the company and for its new home city. Oracle’s revenues are on the decline. With no state income tax, salaries go notably further in Texas, creating an opportunity to cut payroll without cutting employees’ take-home pay. The move is especially easy to make now, as a work-from-home “new normal” means there’s no need for Oracle to force all its deeper-rooted California employees to make the move. Indeed, Oracle announced its relocation alongside a shift to a “more flexible employee work location policy.” The company seems to want to have its Texas cake and eat it in California too.
And in regards to what decades of growth in Austin’s tech sector has been compared to Silicon Valley’s:
Oracle isn’t choosing Austin because the city is poised to overtake the Bay Area as the capital of the U.S. tech industry anytime soon. In 2019, according to the Computing Technology Industry Association, the San Jose and San Francisco metro areas combined for over $333 billion in gross tech regional product in 2019. Austin managed just over $33 billion. That’s an order-of-magnitude difference.
So, yeah, all a bit more complicated than mean blue states making businesses leave places like California.
The whole piece is worth a read if this topic is of interest (it is also a reminder of what a quality publication Texas Monthly is–every time I have cause to read their stuff I am reminded of its quality and am mildly surprised that such long-form magazine journalism continues this deep into the 2000s).
Also of possible interest via the NYT in May: For Second Straight Year, California Sees a Population Decline.
