According to Chapman University Economics Professor James Doti, who has studied migration trends in California, the trend began in 2011.
“Job formation outside of the state is greater,” he said. “[People are] going to areas where they could get a higher paying job, and that’s happening because businesses are leaving the state—and that’s a negative.”
Among the tech companies that moved out of the state in 2021 are Uber, Airbnb, Oracle, Yelp, and Tesla.
The Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank at Stanford University, also found that in the first half of 2021, more than 70 companies headquartered in California left the state due in large part to the onerous property tax and labor laws. The majority of those companies relocated to Texas, Tennessee, and Arizona.
Additionally, in 2022, Doti and researchers at Chapman University asked a group of CEOs to forecast the future of operating in California in a statewide business survey. Their answers, Doti said, were grim.
“Interestingly enough, it wasn’t as much on the taxation front as it was on the regulatory front,” he said. “[They said], ‘Business regulation is so extreme. It’s very difficult for us to conduct business in a way that can provide the goods and services we produce at an affordable price.’”
California’s income tax rate of 13.3 percent is the highest in the nation. On top of that, the tax rate for businesses is 8.84 percent. The census data also showed the state’s population, which includes migration in and out as well as deaths and births, was down more than half a million people between 2020 and 2021.
On the other hand, the two states that experienced the largest population growth were Texas and Florida, which added around 884,000 and 707,000 people respectively, according to IRS data. In a different study evaluating data between July 2021 and July 2022 by California’s finance department, California lost about 211,000 people, and more than half—just over 113,000—were from Los Angeles County, the state’s largest county.
The median home price as of March in California is $743,200, compared to a national median of $400,706, according to Redfin—an online residential real estate brokerage firm based in Seattle.
“People are leaving paradise, it seems, because they cannot afford to stay,” Newsweek’s Peter Roff opined on May 4.
A Brainchild of ‘California Insider’
Siyamak Khorrami, the producer of the documentary “Leaving California: The Untold Story,” grew up in Iran and has lived in other countries like Mexico and China, but none of them can be compared to California, he said.“When I came to California, it was a true paradise for me,” he said. “Unfortunately, in the past decade, I’ve witnessed a shift in the state’s fortunes. It hit home for me when family members and colleagues started moving out of state. I began to wonder what was causing these changes.”
Khorrami said his guests’ stories and experiences professionally and personally helped him understand how the state operates—and led him to discover “a central theme as to what’s plaguing our state.”
Khorrami said he believes if every Californian was aware of our true state of affairs, “we could stem the tide of this mass exodus.”
“That’s where the power of unbiased, factual information comes in, [which is] what ‘Leaving California: The Untold Story’ presents,” he said.
Californians must help each other stay informed, Khorrami said. Together and informed, “we can help change the course of California before our paradise is lost,” he said.
