California exodus is a myth, but that doesn’t stop the haters

Early in the 1990s, Time magazine published a lurid cover — the sun setting into a blood-red sea — fronting a special edition devoted to the decline and fall of the great Golden State. “California,” the sorrowful headline read. “The endangered dream.”

Alas, it was sadly suggested, far too many people wished to live here.

“The problem comes down to California’s rapid population growth, doesn’t it?” then-Gov. Pete Wilson was asked in an interview. “Is there anything you can do to slow the population inflow?”

Today, it is gleefully asserted, too many people are fleeing.

Gloating dispatches report an exodus of millionaires, billionaires and hard-pressed members of the state’s middle and working classes — their U-Hauls piled high like Dust Bowl refugees — supposedly depopulating California, hollowing out its COVID-stricken economy and leaving this once-promised land to sink tragically into the Pacific.

Never mind the reality.

There is no exodus. The nonpartisan California Policy Lab found that most people who moved in 2020 remained within the state, many trading city life for more suburban or rural areas.

The well-to-do weren’t jetting off to spread their lucre elsewhere, parching Sacramento’s coffers. In fact, they were more likely to stay put than those of lesser means.

There was an uptick in movement from the state. In the final quarter of 2020, 139,000 more people departed California than arrived, a droplet of humanity — 0.35% — in a sea of 40 million residents. Though growth has been slowing in recent years, owing in good part to decreased birthrates and less immigration, the state’s population has, since 1900, moved inexorably upward.

The willingness to assume the worst, to write California’s obituary and tromp on its golden poppy-laden grave, is not new.

H.D. Palmer, who has overseen numerous cycles of economic ups and downs as spokesman for the state Department of Finance, likens the frequency of death notices to the rhythm of California’s exceptionally high king tides. “They’re expected, they’re predictable, and they’re dramatic,” said Palmer, who has served in Sacramento under four governors, two Republicans and two Democrats. “They also will eventually ebb and recede.”

It seems necessary to acknowledge here, with italics for emphasis, that California has enormous problems.

The disparity between rich and poor is unconscionable.

The legion of people living on the streets is a disgrace. In many places, the cost of housing has gone from obscene to unspeakable, pricing out all but the rich or those fortunate enough to have purchased a home long ago. Traffic, edging closer to pre-pandemic normal, is increasingly awful.

That said, many still find California preferable to most places.

Half of registered voters surveyed in a 2019 Berkeley IGS poll described the state as “one of the best places to live” and another 25% said California was “nice” if not outstanding.

Just 14% considered the state a “rather poor place” to make a home.

Through good times and bad, Californians have considered their beautiful, bounteous, demanding and sometimes maddening home a place apart, an “island on the land” in the felicitous phrase of the state’s great chronicler, Carey McWilliams.

A few years after Time magazine prophesied the state’s doom, its chief journalistic rival, Newsweek, published an upbeat account of California’s rip-snorting recovery from recession.

“Remember the obituaries? Would the last person to move to Boise please turn off the lights?” the article said with a hint of mockery. But, the piece went on, “a funny thing happened on the way to the graveyard.”

The glowing headline read “Golden Again.”

As if the judgment of a New York magazine made it so.