‘Leaving the Bay Area Is the Best Thing You Can Do Right Now, If You Have a Dream’
9th February 2019
In an essay at Curbed San Francisco, Diana Helmuth explores why so many young people have left California. It’s not normal, she writes, considering a dozen loved ones have moved away in the past two years.
We are witnessing two migrations. One is the continuation of the Californian dream, where young people flock here for gold and glory, ready to hustle and disrupt, hammering to hit the motherlode and laughing at the odds. The other is the migration of young people out of California, which seems to have affected everyone I know, but which I rarely hear examined. These people want to be artists, teachers, blacksmiths, therapists, mechanics, and musicians. They want to have children, open bakeries, own a house. But they can’t. There is no room here for those kinds of dreams anymore.
Here is the original story, which is well worth reading.
The one assertion the author make is, I think, demonstrably wrong:
To the angry locals of Portland, Seattle, Denver, New Orleans, Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, and elsewhere, please hear this defense: The Californians who are coming in and “ruining” your cities are not snobs. They don’t have trust funds. They aren’t entitled. They are the opposite. They have been kicked out of their own backyards for not learning Python fast enough or not having a dad who could introduce them to VC firms or not wanting to live in their family’s in-law unit at age 30 or not being able to afford a $2,000/month studio on a $20/hour paycheck. They aren’t techies; they had the audacity to want something besides tech. They are some of our best, most creative, most hardworking people—and you are getting them. We are losing them.
We are kind to your friends who move here to grow, to start things, to feel safe, to dream. So, please, be kind to my friends and their dreams too.
Sorry, Debbie, but the reason why people hate your Californians moving in is not because ‘they are just like you’ but because they are NOT ‘just like you’. They are leaving California because they are victims of the results of the way Californians think, but they don’t realize that they think that way too, and they are importing that way of thinking to the places to which they are moving. If enough Californicators move into Boise, for example, eventually Boise becomes just like California in all the bad ways that caused them to move in the first place.
We have the poster child for this in Austin, Texas, which is just a little slice of California dropped into the Hill Country. THE ONLY REASON that Austin isn’t the shit-hole that San Francisco has become is because it’s surrounded by Texas, and Texans won’t allow Californicators to ruin their state-wide government the way they’ve ruined the state-wide government on the Left Coast.
February 10th, 2019 at 09:26
I hate these progs moving to Dallas, too.