This article caught my eye because we left California due to the cost of real estate. And half the people we have met in Seattle are from California. We've even met people up here who were neighbors of ours down there in 2001.
Personal anecdotes aside, Im curious when/if the high cost of housing will have a negative impact on the economy. Zooming house prices are great if you already own one but how long will you put up with them if you dont?
Off-shoring hasnt slowed at all and I have noticed that Google and Yahoo are building their fancy new operation centers in the middle of nowhere, ie eastern Oregon and Washington, because it's cheap.
Given supply and demand, if people are leaving then the prices ought to start dropping...
Bursting Tech Bubble, Higher Housing Costs Send People Packing
April 20, 2006
An exodus of U.S. workers from the technology-rich San Francisco Bay and Boston areas accelerated early this decade, according to Census Bureau data to be released today.
Meanwhile, high housing costs on both coasts drove more Americans to cheaper cities nearby. One big winner is the inland Riverside, Calif., area. It continued to attract residents from the Southern California coast from 2000 to 2004, experts say. States in the Southwest and Pacific-Northwest continued to attract many disaffected Californians, economists say. But their rate of U.S. migration gains slowed compared with the 1990s, the Census data indicates. Florida continued to attract new residents at a fast clip.
The bursting technology bubble sent people packing from the San Francisco Bay area. The rate of domestic migration out of the area nearly tripled to an average annual net loss of 14.7 people per 1,000 population, compared with a loss of 5.5 people in the 1990s. At the same time, the Boston area, another high-tech hub, lost workers at an average annual rate of 9.5 domestic residents per 1,000 population, nearly double the '90s rate.Some economists say the losses of skilled workers, coupled with high housing costs, could hamper the ability of the tech industry to attract new labor, at least in those areas. "Today, housing in both Boston and the Bay area is unaffordable" relative to other parts of the country, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "If the tech sector takes off, it's going to be much harder to bring in skilled labor for these positions."
More than half of the roughly 973,000 tech workers employed in California in early 2000 had left the industry or the state by 2003, according to the Sphere Institute, a Burlingame, Calif., think tank.
