MercuryNews.com | 12/10/2006 | Droves say goodbye to Golden State
Fred Pilot sent this along. I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago. I saw nothing but yuppies, homeless people, tourists, and dogs (the residents of San Francisco have an average of 6.3 dogs, if my sampling is accurate). There are no kids in the city, except the ones the tourists bring. It costs a bazillion dollars to rent or buy anything you can live in. And now, forget about San Francisco--it costs a fortune to live even in San Bernardino. So for the first time in memory, people are getting out of California.

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. Unlike the tens of thousands who left Silicon Valley following the tech bust earlier this decade, the new migration is about the quest for something besides a job: a better quality of life at a lower cost of living.