2020 the battle of the septuagenarians - Trump vs Biden, Part 2

Overheal wrote: »

Looking at the population of both, I don't see anywhere in the last 20 years where there is any decline in population, there is only population growth. So what are you talking about?

It seems that SF has become a stop-off point for immigrants which contributes to this.

Net population of Americans has dropped, as more domestic Americans are leaving the Bay Area than entering. It seems that the population figure is artificially inflated by stop-overs.

https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/bay-area-exodus-fleeing-moving-cost-census-13778557.php

The net domestic immigration number (-2,976) tell another story. The negative sign signifies that more American nationals left San Francisco County than moved there over the past eight years.

This trend followed in most Bay Area counties (Sonoma County being the exception, largely due to the 2018 wildfires that devastated much of the area). Santa Clara and San Mateo counties grew by 46,048 and 16,727 people respectively, but they had negative net migration totals for domestic residents, at -99,374 and -20,966.

The discrepancy between international and domestic migration in the Bay Area can likely be explained by what economists call "gateway cities." These cities, often planted along the coast, serve as entry points for foreigners moving to the U.S. The immigrants will register in the gateway city, but often move to other parts of California or the country within months, according to Phuong Nguyen, a research specialist at the California Department of Finance.

It's worth observing given recent events that though the SF Bay Area is still a beacon of hope for folks looking to make it rich in the tech industry (and forced into pretty damned cramped and expensive quarters in the meantime), for being the hub of the world's technology it's telling that they can't figure out how to keep the lights on. Press conference on Aug 17th, Governor Newsom said that the power crunch was related to the fact that the sun goes down in the evening so solar doesn't work, and it hasn't been windy. Not sure how folks didn't see this coming. Or, more to the point, that they did see it coming, and CA did nothing about it. CA is absolutely terrible at infrastructure maintenance. The solution to a drought is "take shorter showers". The solution to a failing dam is to ignore it until the drought is over. and it partially fails. The solution to a power cut is to "not use power in the evenings". The solution to wildfires is to wait until the place catches fire naturally, then spend stupid amounts of money trying to put them out.

California is a house of cards. I do miss the weather and the scenery, I don't miss the mismanagement and quality of life.

No that's not why people are leaving. They're leaving because they can't afford to live there.

We could afford to live there. Had a nice little house out in Dublin, complete with pool in a quiet cul-de-sac. We were fed up with the way we were living, mainly related to the state's infrastructure. If you were taking BART from Dublin to San Francisco every morning as my wife did, or driving to Oakland as I did, you'd get pretty damned tired of it pretty quickly. Before the wife moved in with me, she had an apartment in downtown SF, walking distance to her office in the Financial District. Of course, she did have to walk around the junkies at the entrance to her apartment building. That's before the amount of money that we were paying for the privilege. It just made a lot of sense for us to move, and I don't regret it one iota. We are now much less stressed.