This particular blog states exactly what it means: Escape from California. But before I start here's a tiny bit of background info on myself. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area a little less than 12 years ago. Having grown up in the rural South, the atmosphere, weather, culture, and scenic beauty were refreshing and enjoyable. That was until I started looking at buying a house after getting married. Then it became painfully clear that almost any house within a reasonable distance from work was going to cost an absolute arm and a leg.
High house prices in and around the Bay Area, LA, San Diego, and other Cali metros is legendary. Many people who do buy often are in their 40's and even 50's. It takes sometimes well over a decade to save up for a down payment and when the house is finally bought, its common for the mortgage payment to take up 50% or more of the income. During the housing bubble prices were astronomical. Small houses that hadn't seen an update in 50 years in questionable neighborhoods were going for $500,000-$600,000 or more. What most people would call a 'decent' house in a 'decent' neighborhood would often go for $700,000-$800,000. Almost a million dollars for a 3 bedroom house with a small yard. Then the bubble burst. It was the moment many of us who decided to wait and see had been hoping for. But when the dust settled ( and it is still settling as we speak) all that happened was that houses in the ghetto fell in value like a rock while most anything halfway decent fell maybe 10%-%15. In other words that aforementioned $700,000 house might be $650,000.
That's just it. After the damage of the bubble pop, the Bay Area and most anywhere else in California remains to be a prohibitively expensive place. To make matters worse the very choicest of areas like San Francisco are actually starting to go back UP again. Stories about mad bidding wars where home buyers will outbid someone by $100,000 on a tiny 1 million dollar house in the city are starting to crop up again.
Houses are one thing, but taxes are another. I make a fairly decent income. So does my Wife. All told, over 30% of our income goes to taxes. Additionally, everything else is taxed to death. Beer, wine, gas, electricity, and so on are all taxed at enormous rates. Perhaps if the taxes went towards keeping the state's services and infrastructure afloat would I understand. But every single year that I've lived here there has been a budget crisis. This year schools are getting shut down. Freeways are absolutely riddled with pot holes. The reason this is happening is because the state taxation system is totally dysfunctional. I'll go into this at length in another post. So not only are houses expensive, but so too is the general cost of living, and its only getting more expensive all the time as the state desperately seeks ways to squeeze more money out of the populace via hikes in bridge tolls, registration fees, alcohol tax increases, and so on.
Thus with that said I started thinking about moving out of the state around four or five years ago. Just a quick look on any real estate site in just about every other state besides what I refer to as California's "evil twins" on the East Coast- NY, MA, NJ, and so on, $150,000 gets you a pretty nice house, and what's more, you could theoretically live in a cool old neighborhood close to town.
Looking around online I found that just about any site that mentioned relocation, moving out of California, Disgust with high housing prices and the cost of living, and so on were overloaded with reader comments. A little more research showed that close to 700,000 people left the state in 2008 alone. Obviously this is a common idea amongst people like myself. This topic is what this blog is all about. My plan is to be out of this state within a year. The clock starts now...
No comments:
Post a Comment