'This is Very New and Very Different'

From the Mercury News:

Wayne Brown gave up $40,000 in income to move from the Bay Area to Kansas. And he feels great. It got to be too much last year for the college information-technology officer: the commute to downtown San Francisco that sometimes took two hours, the housing-price spiral and the high-wire borrowing that paid for it. "I would find myself sitting in traffic," Brown recalled, "screaming at people."

When the Kansas job came up in early 2005, Brown and his wife, Teresa, sold two Bay Area homes and happily settled in a suburb of Kansas City. They have never looked back. The Browns are an example of what demographers say appears to be an unprecedented phenomenon -- even in a good economy, more people are leaving California for other states than are arriving from the rest of the country.

Between 2004 and 2005, the migration flow into California from the other 49 states started flowing the other way. Data from the state Department of Finance shows that, for the first time this decade, more people left California in 2005 for another state than the number who moved in. Mary Heim, a finance department demographer, says this particular kind of outflow will continue for the foreseeable future.
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"Some of the people leaving are families with children because school enrollment is declining at a quicker pace than we'd projected,'' she said.
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For 150 years, California has been seen as the Golden State of opportunity and freedom for millions of migrating Americans. Other than recessions in the 1970s and 1990s, and possibly wars, "I don't know if California would ever have been in a position where it was losing people to other states," said Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. "This is very new and very different."
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A flow of migrants to other states is not a worry in and of itself -- if foreign immigration provides a pool of highly educated workers to replace them. A bigger worry is that the state's exorbitant housing prices relative to the rest of the country could act as a brake to economic growth if employers can't find workers. "It's harder to keep people here; it's harder to attract people from abroad; it's harder to attract people domestically,'' said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto. "It's a huge potential barrier."

Nearly half of California's homeowners spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing -- significantly higher than in any other state, 2005 census data shows. "Families just can't make it in the housing market," said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California. "Low-income families are being priced out of rentals, and middle-income families are being priced out of homeownership, and we don't know where they are going."