I don't think I'd mind. Then again, Ohio isn't really a state I have to worry about being attractive to anybody whose never lived here. In my experience, most people who land here do so by accident.
It's the PHP of states. Most people hate it because it's popular to hate, but once you get here, you find that there are some pretty nice things about it.
See, this is what I'm talking about! This I understand. It speaks volumes to me.
So, Ohio == PHP of states. I live in Indiana, your neighbor state. imho, Indiana is the R of states. Its terse, unfathomable to the outsider, very cheap, fast enough & gets the job done.
Fellow Ohioan here - you're letting our secret out! The fact Ohio isn't cool makes it super cheap to live here! I have a home that would be more than $1.5M in the cool states where everyone is griping about homes being priced out of reach. Yeah, duh! I couldn't afford to live in a house like I live in now in those locations!
Ohio is the PHP of states - that's awesome! Not sexy, not cool, just getting the job done with little fuss. That's Ohio!
I don't know. I found my 4 years living in Toledo to be not be very attractive. Ya, they have some nice forests, but it is so flat and economically depressed (but true on the landing there by accident). But for all that, Toledo is a much better place than Vicksburg Mississippi (where I spent the next 4 years of my life).
My experience in the Washington, DC, area is that there are plenty of former Ohioans around, and that generally they speak well of Ohio. I think that a co-worker may end up back there after retirement.
That's why I ruled out Florida as a place to move to: no seasons. I'm looking for milder winters, but not no winter at all. Southern Tennessee looks attractive, specifically Chattanooga.
Other reasons to rule out Florida: fire ants, mosquitoes, mosquito spraying, love bugs, huge roaches, spiders the size of you hands, near constant heat and humidity, consist afternoon rain which makes the heat and humidity so much worse, hurricanes, sink holes.
I grew up in the Philadelphia area, then went to Boston (college), back to Philly (grad school), San Francisco, now Atlanta. I like just a little bit of cold, so Atlanta winter is about right.
But whenever it snows in Atlanta I think "hey, I know how to drive in snow!" and start laughing at how people here don't. But I don't know how to drive in snow, because I didn't learn to drive until not long before I left for college, and I didn't have a car in college or grad school.
Why aren't you ready to go somewhere without fire ants, mosquitoes, mosquito spraying, love bugs, huge roaches, spiders the size of you hands, near constant heat and humidity, consist afternoon rain which makes the heat and humidity so much worse, hurricanes, sink holes, and whatever else I forgot?
Some of you whiny purple staters need to take these gripes up with your own tourism industries, because your reps are using your precious tax dollars on telling people like me in super blue America that I'd make a great fit in your neighborhood.
Ohio is advertising all up and down California asking people to move there. Ohio is specifically targeting the folks who live just north of Berkeley, California, where they make the mold for the stereotype you purple staters love to hate.
Ohio is also advertising that same message in Redhook in Brooklyn, again, where you can find the folks whose pictures are basically meme templates that old Trump voters use on their Facebook groups about antifa and critical race theory.
Maybe you all actually just dislike rich, out of touch, Ivy League elitists who move into neighborhoods and ruin them for locals. If that's the case, going to a coastal college doesn't make a person coastal. Last I checked, the Ivy League recruits from every state in the union, including your purple states, and most Californian cities actively demonize those same people who are ruining California cities too.
Anyway, this weekend, I'll be headed up to NASCAR Spring Smash in Roseville, California, where I will no doubt run into the types of Californians who ACTUALLY move to your states. They have all of your cultural tastes, and they read the same stuff you do, and they share your distaste for the archetypal Californian.
Let me explain how politics works in Ohio - one of the most famous of purple states or "battleground" states. It's a population of 12 million that's nearly evenly split between high-density urban areas and rural sprawl (that explains why Ohio is the 10th most densely-populated state in the U.S.). The folks in the urban areas tend to be extremely liberal and diverse (where I live has been a popular spot for homosexuals for decades and women can walk around topless and have been able to for decades and most are onboard with a progressive agenda). In the rural sprawl areas? Nope. Polar opposite. Ultra-conservative who've taken well to Trump. They call us purple, but we're not: we're red and blue.
Move to an Ohio city and you'll do better if you're an "archetypal" Californian but if you move to the rural areas you'll do better if you're an archetypal Trumper. The biggest thing that unites us all is football, and no, I'm not even joking. Football is the biggest reason we can coexist peacefully and Trump tried to screw that up!
I find that state laws make a big difference in quality of life, so it is not sufficient to be in a city with people whose politics match yours. You also need to be in a state where the political power rests with people whose politics match yours. On the state level, all the analyses I have seen indicate Ohio will be "red" going forward.
Parental/family leave, sick leave, minimum wages (especially salaried), overtime laws, allow employees to sit, marijuana legalization, abortion choice (now that it is not allowed in some places), non compete bans, pay range disclosure laws. I am sure gun laws are a big one for many. If you need Medicaid, then I know some states opted out of assistance programs for that which would hurt your access to healthcare.
> No. 4 New Hampshire’s low cost of living got it a No. 1 for wealth.
Yikes. Sure, we don't have income tax or sales tax but be prepared to pay out the ass on property taxes. Oh, and be ready to pay for heat ten months out of the year.
NH has been a brain-drain state ever since people discovered the land is full of rocks and there are better opportunities elsewhere. The wages are low, the cost of living is high relative to wages, and land/real estate has always been expensive. It's a old state with most of it already being divvied up. For instance, my 3 bed, 1 bath home out in bumfuck has more than doubled in price since I bought just five years ago.
The Texas property tax thing is no joke. If you're not from a high property tax state, coming into Texas can be a bit of a jolt. I do think there are states out there with higher property taxes? Those are the people who might find Texas property "cheap". Texas definitely has a lot of "gotchas" that you need to be ready for.
Sometimes when I want some informed commentary with supporting analytics on which database to use, which JS framework offers the most functionality, which saas offers most bang for the buck etc...I turn to the orange website.
Somehow, that level of informed commentary isn't forthcoming on genuinely useful topics like Leaving CA. Why is that ?
For the same reason that the orange website constantly says that being an expert in one field doesn't necessarily make you one in another. Even if some people think that having a "programmer brain" enables you to have a higher understanding of all things.
> As a result of these land conditions, there are approximately 52 people per square mile (19.9 per square kilometer) and that makes Colorado only the 37th biggest state in terms of population density.
Colorado isn't a small state, but is that "raw" square miles, or square miles accounting for reserved land and natural features that make it uninhabitable?
If you saw Colorado sprawl, you'd say it's nigh impossible to increase the density, but that's an American problem in general.
More problematic is we are all out of water. Water rights and laws here means you might own the land but not the water (nor anything else under the shitty topsoil), if there even is water. Lots of land for sale with no mention of water.
Oh wow I completely forgot about Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Normally I wouldn’t care for Knoxville. It reminds me of a similar sized city I didn’t care for.
People think moving to Washington is #1 are truly inept. If you love overcast weather for 9 months out of the year, if you love knowing that your summers will still have overcast weather and there’s a chance the sun won’t happen that year, and that you will be enduring forest fires and freak weather (115F) more often in the future… sure, go for WA. I know people who grew up in AZ and want nothing more than drizzly rain and overcast weather and to stay indoors 99/100 days because they grew up in 120f weather with a baking sun and decided to become a vampire.
If you’re not them - it’s not great. If you don’t love overcast weather - it’s not great. Again - it selects a certain personality. People who love rain, hate snow, and hate sun.
Source: lived there and now live in SF. Would not recommend Washington. (Or Portland or Oregon in general)
Truth is - if you’re wanting to leave CA because you want real change - probably move to the east coast. It’ll be quite different. Living in the PNW will be the same but more shitty weather. (If you’re a vampire - go for it…)
Show me the ex-Californian who moved to the middle of the country who wasn't surprised, and a bit upset, by the weather a few months later. "Snow" is not Big Bear on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
Am spending more time in N. VA area and the growth is shear insanity. National Landing is attractive for a good reason: ultra fast internet.
"Southern Living" I believe comes down to land, and building your dream house. And that's what people do, they build their own mini fiefdoms. Every neighbor alienated from each other in their private mini country club. With the desolation of cities, it seems inevitable here: the home becomes the sphere of convergence: school, work, church, theatre.
I don't understand how Nevada or Texas are ranked lower than Florida. Nevada was filling up with Cali expats years before the pandemic (Tahoe for those with money and Reno/Vegas for those with less money), and Austin has been a draw for those in tech seeking cheaper digs for years. Miami and the Tampa Bay area usually aren't big draws for Californians, that's more of a Northeast/Midwest movement thing.
I will never understand the recent appeal and hype for Florida, except for old expats from the northeast with plenty of cash in their pocket.
I’m from the south, born and lived all my life in various states in the Southeast, and I can say Florida is too hot for me. Hot summers are one thing, hot 75%of the year is something else.
Housing is cheaper than some states for sure, but almost any bordering states can get you a better value for your money.
Also, for the third largest economy in the US, the job market sucks. I’d say even Atlanta is probably a better option m, or even the Raleigh are if you’re looking for a proper “tech city”. I guess with remote work this is less of an issue, but even then…
There’s politics, but then again, you have the entire southeast as well if that’s what you’re after.
One thing I will say is nice is no state income tax. A handful of other states have this as well though, and TX or WA just seen a better choice depending on what you’re looking for.
Yes, you really need to be able to specify what's important to you. Their "traditional lifestyle" factor is definitely not on my list. Also, there can be great places in what would otherwise be dismal states. New Mexico is next to last on their list, and I understand why (it's one of the poorest states), but I'd move to Santa Fe in a heartbeat.
The "Where Should You Live?" quiz that the New York Times did [1] [2] is a much better design, IMO.
On the other hand, the New York Times quiz can end up giving a list of random suburbs that don't have much of an identity fo their own. I think either counties or metro areas are the right level of granularity here. (You'd have to come up with some way to partition the non-metropolitan places.)
(I live just outside Atlanta. That is more meaningful, for someone relocating here, than saying that I live in Georgia or that I live in the particular town I live in.)
I do wonder if there's any real demand for customizable versions of this - allowing you to choose which variables matter to you - or if it's just something that people play with.
States are especially meaningful here. I chose my state based on the pro worker laws it has (I benefited from being able to get more parental leave), less per taxpayer debt burden which result in lower taxes from things like underfunded pension debt which I do not benefit from, and pro women's right's laws (I have a wife and daughter who benefit from access to abortions and women's healthcare in general).
There is also Medicaid to think about which is also on a state level.
OK, those are all good points. But I think it's misleading to present an analysis that groups everything by state. I think what I want is an analysis that brings in state-level variables like you mentioned but doesn't just spit out a score for each state.
I had a startup idea around this. I'd like to make the home search much more personalized. I don't care about exact square footage, but I do care about parks, civic associations, etc.
Why can't we find a way to get neighborhoods and housing areas to compete for residents and help people find the home that best suits them? Companies like Zillow are just 1990s Real Estate with a UI and better search. That's great, but if you don't know the area I'm not sure how you're really learning anything from Zillow.
I feel like I can get much of that information just by searching maps and inferring qualities of communities by the proximity and quality of amenities nearby. At least I thought it was pretty accurate during my home search.
Yea but why do that search in the first place? What if you could just say "I want a brick house in a walkable neighborhood with coffee shops and parks nearby in the city of Des Moines at this price range"? Or just tick off some parameters? Personally I do the same as you do right now, and I keep thinking how is it that this is the best way to do this?
You should have gone for it! The VLA is in an amazingly beautiful region. I camped near there once and had the darkest skies I'd ever witnessed, and I saw a massive fireball meteor.
Socorro is the nearest proper town to the VLA, with about 9000 residents. It's home to New Mexico Tech. Albuquerque is about an hour's drive from Socorro.
I lived in Albuquerque for five years, and four of those years I lived about a mile away from the Breaking Bad car wash... by the time I left, the RV tours were finally starting to trickle off :) Frankly, I found it a pretty pleasant place to live and I'd pick it over the SF area any day. People joke about "the war zone" down by the fairgrounds, and yeah that's probably the roughest part of town, but it's a small region and it still feels less sketchy that many portions of the bay area (I sure as shit never saw anybody smoking fentanyl out on the sidewalks). Almost any part of town north of I-40 is a decent place to live, and big chunks of the city south of I-40 are quite nice too.
The natural beauty, and the accessibility of said beauty, is incredible. I lived in the middle of town and could be hiking up the Sandia mountains within 10 minutes. In California, if you want to even dream of camping somewhere, you better have 3 different permits applied for months in advance; in New Mexico, you just go, and maybe you have to drop $5 in the kiosk when you get there. Hunting was amazing; wildlife in general was amazing. One night I hiked up the side of a mountain, slung my hammock, and woke to elk bugling all around me.
I liked that one a lot! It lead me to some very interesting places that I had never heard of before. Particularly in Oregon I guess. I currently live in Ohio.
“New Mexico is next to last on their list…”. If this means NM won’t attract the sorts of people who make life decisions based on media like this, it should be more widely circulated. It is this decade’s “Breaking Bad” for NM. If you are the sort of person who makes life decisions based on where TV shows are shot, NM isn’t really for you. Someone might write a comic book about how great Arkansas is, and you’d be forced to move again.
A word to the wise: always poke around in how they measure attributes, how they weight the attributes, and how they combine them in a single score (or sub-score). In the 1970s, there was published a Places Rated Almanac for US cities, by a NYC-based publisher. NYC (in the era of the burning Bronx) was inexplicably rated in the top ten…maybe top five. I looked deeper and saw they took, say, the crime statistics and simply truncated them, uniquely, for NYC. NYC was actually, say, 13 for crime and they said, well that’s too high, we’ll count it as 5. No justification at all. The fix was in.
(1) Taxes.
(2) Cost of housing.
(3) A government that insists on intervening in every aspect of my life.
(4) A culture of people who actively want the government to intervene on every aspect of their lives.
(5) Traffic.
I can afford to live in California. I just don't want to. I spent 8 years in the Bay Area, love to visit, but ultimately I can have more freedom elsewhere.
On an absolute scale no. However my wife's salary tripled when moving back for the same position.
I moved from Knoxville, TN which is experiencing a large housing crunch due to lots of speculative real estate investments. I've moved to a comparable sized city that is not the Bay area.
- Enormous population density. Anywhere even halfway desirable has an outrageous housing market, very high rents, a homeless problem, or all of the above. I will straight up never be able to afford a house in CA. Even with a ~very~ small inheritance, I still wouldn't be able to afford a downpayment on somewhere decent in or near LA.
- Overcrowded nature. This one personally bothered me a lot. Many trails in Southern California are almost always crowded. Beach access is long, difficult, expensive (if you use a parking lot) and exhausting if you live inland.
- Fires. Fires get worse every year, and will continue to get worse. The AQI is constantly above 100 in some areas for most of August/September. For people like me with autoimmune conditions, this is pretty dangerous for health.
- Increased summer temps. 120 degree days are getting more common in many ares of CA.
- Government corruption. High taxes, especially if you're "middle class".
- Earthquake risk.
I moved to Upstate, NY. Yeah, the weather sucks, but not always. Fall is lovely. Early winter is lovely. Spring is lovely when it's not raining. Summer is humid and gross, but it's an absolute joy in my town with all the festivals. The housing market is crazy, but no so crazy that I couldn't afford a home. The town I live in has decent local government, several lakes, and abundant state forests and hiking trails all around.
I miss the LA I grew up in, but it's just not the same any more. I'm trying to convince my mom to retire out here.
> Overcrowded nature. This one personally bothered me a lot. Many trails in Southern California are almost always crowded. Beach access is long, difficult, expensive (if you use a parking lot) and exhausting if you live inland.
This is a huge one for me.
> I moved to Upstate, NY. Yeah, the weather sucks, but not always. Fall is lovely. Early winter is lovely. Spring is lovely when it's not raining. Summer is humid and gross, but it's an absolute joy in my town with all the festivals. The housing market is crazy, but no so crazy that I couldn't afford a home. The town I live in has decent local government, several lakes, and abundant state forests and hiking trails all around.
I went to school in Rochester and I really enjoyed it. Even though it may be described as a dying industrial town, I still found it a better place to live than booming SF.
>Increased summer temps. 120 degree days are getting more common in many ares of CA.
That is not correct. Death Valley, one of the hottest places on the planet, may occasionally reach that temperature, but essentially no one lives there.[1]
Inland areas may get up to 100 degrees F. several times during the summer, but the humidity is low so it is not oppressive like the midwest or the south.
High cost of living, constant fires, high taxes without good government services, homelessness everywhere, highly politicized COVID policies like lockdowns, lopsided political landscape with democrats controlling the entire state with no competition from another party to drive change.
Their problem is that they have to kowtow to the crazy religious element, which makes them as a party completely unpalatable to the modern, secular west coast human.
TFA did not mention anything about "so many people".
Besides,
"Growth is not a goal for most Californians: Asked to look ahead 10 years, 35 percent of respondents believe it would be better if the population decreases significantly and 46 percent want it to stay about the same. Only 19 percent of those surveyed said that the state would be better if its population increases."
"By nearly a 2-to-1 margin, Californians respond that they still believe in the “California Dream” (that it’s a great place to live and raise a family) but belief in that dream depends on demographics, economic status and partisan affiliation. Spanish speakers, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans and younger Californians are more optimistic, while middle-class Californians, white respondents, older residents and Republicans are more pessimistic."
Speaking for myself, the sole reason was cost of living and impracticality of owning a home anywhere within a reasonable drive of an urban center. While I was able to afford renting, I wasn’t getting anywhere with saving and wouldn’t have been able to change that without downsizing to a drafty shoebox of an apartment. That was fine in my 20s but now in my 30s, it felt a bit like I was spinning my wheels.
If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t mind continuing to live in California. There’s a lot to love about it, but it’s just not conducive to my current set of goals unless I manage to land a senior position at Google or something (which comes with its own set of problems).
I left because a mortgage for a single family home in a nice neighborhood was 40% less than the rent I paid to live in northern california, and my neighborhood now is quieter, cleaner, safer, and I don't have to step over human feces in the street anymore because we don't have a homelessness or housing crisis that won't be remedied in my lifetime.
There's pretty nature everywhere in America. And the weather isn't that bad most places.
high taxes, cost for everything is through the roof (even something like a McChicken from McDonalds is 30-40% more expensive here), if you live in the big cities then traffic can be a big problem. But for the majority, i think it is just the absurd cost of everything paired with high taxes.
That's the free space on the "edgy word salad" bingo card. You're going to have to write out a few more of those phrases to actually win the crappy clock-radio.
That’s not what woke culture is. Here’s an example in California: the state has formed a commission to investigate paying reparations to slave descendants. Why? Because of BLM in 2020. Knee jerk Twitter politics running the state.
Edit: some replies saying reparations are nothing new. Yes, reparations have been discussed before. When we say “before”, we mean a long time ago. The current discussions are not the same continuous discussions from before, but new ones that came out of BLM riots of 2020. Show me California’s reparations task force before 2020. Also, this task force according to NPR is the “first in the nation”: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/30/1089629383/california-group-v...
The conversation around reparations dates back to the Civil War, it’s not some new trendy idea. The aim is to fix an injustice done by the US to millions of people. CA should not do this on its own, but with the lack of leadership in Washington you can see why a state might step up to try and fix past inequalities.
You can disagree about how the US should make amends, but it’s very wrong to present this is a recent conversation.
My experience was that the Bay Area was only progressive inside the state buildings. On the streets and out in the world, people seemed to be more "on your own" than the crappy little right-wing town I grew up in.
Honestly, with the Nimbyism and horrible inefficiencies in the public programs, California considering itself progressive is a joke.
For those looking for a gradual change, the Eastern shore of Lake Tahoe is in Nevada (which is predominantly libertarian/ conservative outside of the major cities: Reno & LV), yet it’s minutes from California and shares the same climate and landscape as the California Sierras.
Lots of outdoor activities at the lake and ski mountains.
Plus, no income tax.
And, Reno and Sacramento are within 1-2hrs depending on your location, for a mid-size airport.
Housing is still really expensive, but a couple steps below Silicon Valley.
Call me what you will, but I really dislike Lake Tahoe post-pandemic. It's always been a place primarily of second homes, but it definitely feels richer and snootier now... like Aspen.
It's surprising, at least to me, how un-built-up the Eastern short of Tahoe is. We briefly entertained the fantasy of moving to Tahoe when the pandemic hit. For obvious tax reasons, you would think everyone would be living on the NV side, but when you actually go there, or just putz around on Zillow, almost all of the actual homes and activity is on the (more expensive COL) California side. Why is that?
We still love the area and would entertain the idea of moving there now that remote work is happening in more places, but housing prices went from outrageous pre-pandemic to oh-my-fucking-god post-pandemic so sadly it will probably remain a tourist destination for my family.
> almost all of the actual homes and activity is on the (more expensive COL) California side. Why is that?
The NV side is pretty rugged and what buildable land there is is also shared with resorts / casinos. Otherwise, you pretty much have to go to the North Shore and Incline Village, but that's a tax haven with some real fancy homes driving up prices. From Zephyr Cove to Incline is really steep and large parts are State Parks or Forest Service land, so aren't buildable.
> but housing prices went from outrageous pre-pandemic to oh-my-fucking-god post-pandemic
Yes, everything is about 2x what is was 7 years ago. The most affordable family homes are in Zephyr Cove and up Kingsbury Grade in Stateline. The county also recently passed a restrictive vacation rental law, so many folks will see their short-term rental permits expire (or continue at reduced capacity) throughout this year, which might drive prices down, in addition to rising interest rates.
Also, NV houses are about 10-20% more expensive than the CA houses because of the tax benefits of Nevada.
