Kotkin, urban futures fellow at Chapman University, author of “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class,” told NTD that a major factor driving residents and business owners out of the state is that the gap between the middle and upper class is currently higher in California than virtually any other place in the country.
According to an Urban Reform Institute report published in October 2020 and co-authored by Kotkin, over the last two decades, California has seen a net loss of about 2.4 million people—or seven percent of its 2000 population.
The figure excludes the most recent exodus linked to pandemic. California also has the highest poverty rate in the United States.
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Kotkin highlighted the state’s energy policy, “which makes California very expensive for anything that uses energy.”
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“We’re basically trying to get rid of natural gas. We’re systematically destroying our own once very large oil industry. And so manufacturers certainly have to go elsewhere,” he stated.
California’s climate policy and rising property prices are also contributing to the number of people leaving the state, Kotkin elaborated.
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“In our climate policy, we have made the mistaken idea that the way to deal with climate is to force people to live in small apartments in urban areas,” he explained. “Whereas the vast majority, even before COVID-19, wanted to live in a single family house more in the suburbs.”
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“We’ve created the highest property prices in the country—one of the lowest home ownership rates.
“If you’re a young family in California, unless you make a lot of money, or you robbed the bank, or have rich parents, you’re going to probably have to either accept the fact that you’re going to live in an apartment, that you’re probably never going to own anything, probably not going to have kids—or you go somewhere else.
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“If you can’t own a home, you’re always going to be at the mercy of your landlord, you won’t have anything to rely on. That’s where we’re losing so many people, which I think does not bode well,” he continued, adding,“I’m frankly more worried not about the people leaving, but the people who aren’t coming.”
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Based on a study he is working on currently, Kotkin said foreign-born people who had been swelling in huge numbers in California in the last two to three decades—immigrants attracted by opportunity—are now going elsewhere.
“Los Angeles is actually seeing a bit of a drop in its foreign-born population—they’re going to Dallas, they’re going to Nashville, they’re going to Fayetteville, Arkansas. When you look at the great rise of California in the latter part of the 20th century, a lot of it was driven by both domestic migration and foreign immigration. Both of those have dropped.”
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