Which Cities Americans Are Moving to – and Escaping From
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/cities-americans-moving-escaping-154840318.html
Mon, Nov 11, 2013
For much of the nation’s history, Americans moved around mostly to find decent work. But these days, people may be more inclined to move in search of low taxes, cheap housing and like-minded citizens they’re comfortable being around. Such shifts in internal migration patterns could transform the U.S. economy and the political establishment in sweeping and unforeseen ways.
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Barone detects another pivotral trend, as he explains in the video above: the movement of Americans to “culturally congenial” places where they feel they fit in. This has a lot to do with a kind of self-segregation that's occuring along a blue-red political fault line. Older, conservative Americans, for instance, are migrating to “well-churched” cities in Texas, where the population has grown 53% since 1990—twice the national rate. “Texas has been a huge growth magnet over the last 20 years,” Barone says, “and not because it has pleasant weather.”
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Liberals, meanwhile, seem to be increasingly inclined to head for their own cultural redoubts. "You'll see liberal professionals go to the San Francisco Bay Area," Barone points out. "They wouldn't leave for the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex if you tripled their salary."
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California, meanwhile, enjoyed a huge influx of people from 1930 until 1990, but has since begun to lose people and businesses fleeing high taxes, regulatory overkill and everyday hassles such as congestion. Many of those people have moved to lower-tax mountain states such as Utah, Colorado and Idaho, while most of the newcomers to California during the last two decades have been Latino immigrants.
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Some of the high-tax, high-cost cities can fight back, of course, by lowering taxes and doing more to create a business-friendly environment that lures employers. They may even develop an advantage as their economies stagnate and wage rates fall, lowering labor costs for companies that might resettle there. Still, many nightmare cities remain saddled with pension costs for former employees and other liabilities that aren’t easy to escape. No wonder people move.
(Much was skipped. Entire article is at the link. Zim.)
Mad Poet Strikes Again.
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