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I (truly) wish these people good luck and hope they find the happiness they seek.

I am from near Tulsa and there's absolutely no way in hell you'll ever catch my family moving back to there. It's hot, humid, comes with tornadoes, you have to drive everywhere (and everywhere is set up on the assumption you will drive). Plus, I will never forget the clerk at the licensing office who, after the rules changed to require "proof of legal status" to renew a driving license, gave my wife shit for having "married up to America" when she presented her green card as proof of status. (Never mind that my wife had been a permanent resident for years prior to us meeting.)

Everywhere has its upsides and its flaws, but at least where I live now has the benefit of the vast majority of people and culture here doesn't want to throw my loved ones out on their ear. Perhaps some of the new arrivals moving there will change that culture. I hope so.

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I think your painting with a pretty broad brush. Sitting aside your bad experience at the licensing office (and general negativity on the culture), someone moving from SF may have a higher quality of life, depending on what they value. For example, more space, lower cost of living, lower taxes, ability to travel more, save more, have a larger house, etc. You can trade tornado's for wild-fire's and earthquakes.

I lived in LA for 5 years, and in SF proper for 3. I live in the midwest now and I prefer it, not because of the weather, but for the cost.

> depending on what they value

And therein lies the rub. We had the big house (that we had to clean more often and pay more to heat, cool, and maintain), the huge yard with lots of space (that we had to spend hours every weekend dealing with, along with the cost), the two cars (with their own costs and hassles), and so on.

What we didn't have was the respect of our community, or at least the recognition that families like ours should be full members of society. It's fucking awful to hear your governor on TV crowing about how immigrants are "ruining the state," or that the latest environmental-disaster of a highway project is "true freedom."

No amount of money can ever make up for that. Where we live now, we still get to save, we still are able to travel (well, pandemic notwithstanding), and we need not drive everywhere to do it and we feel accepted--or at least somewhere between begrudgingly tolerated and utterly adored--by the government of our state.

I used to optimize for cost; no longer.

Good for you. You seemed to move to place that sit right with your political positions.

Wanting to be respected by their community is a political position?

or some people always looking for a reason to be offended or feel like someone doesn't like them.

There are plenty of people in a self righteous bubble who think they are enlightened and those in the red states are mouth breathers who spend their day looking to hate people.

Meanwhile you see people in the Bay Area with BLM signs in their yard yet no actual black lives live in their neighborhood.

I was hoping someone would make this comment. White flight to a red state is nothing new. My neighbors in the bay area represent dozens of cultures and no one's going to pay me to give that up.

As a CA native, I feel weird and out of place when in any area with a single overwhelmingly dominant ethnicity. Whether it’s the Midwest or Shanghai, it just feels weird like something is off. I’m just too used to very multicultural areas.

This comment makes no sense to me. All over California are neighborhoods (Chinatown) and entire cities (Rosemead) that segregated themselves because they wanted more familiarity, which makes sense.

Neighborhoods being segregated is much more different than entire geographical regions. People in those neighbourhoods still travel around. Also, Rosemead's most populace race according to wikipedia is only 60% asian. That's a far, far cry from 80-90+% white regions.

(I should also note that the idea they wanted familiarity is just one part of why specific minorities live together. Another is because of the effects of racism actively rejecting any attempt to integrate.)

All good points, I've been through both for a few days each recently and enjoyed myself. I wondered what the line is between a common community Vs forced segregation.

Ehh what a nitpick. Okay I confess I grew up in the Bay Area not Redding or Yreka. Ca is massive so pardon me for referring to the areas most people associate with it, the bay area and La. anyway, yes there are neighborhoods that are monocultures, but they aren’t walled off ghazas where people’s movement is restricted. And even with some areas being clustered, there’s still a lot of dispersion. And that said, again CA is massive like many states, which non Californians probably overlook, and I wouldn’t enjoy living in quite a few areas even in the LA area. Looking at you palos verdes.

As I said below to the other child, all good points and I wasnt trying to nitpick it just didn't make sense to me, perhaps it was just super early.

I love these areas and the cultures I dont have to travel afar to get a taste of.

I just found it odd as being in Rosemead the other day and then seeing that, probably just a crossed wire, my apologies.

I get a disquiet feeling when I'm in old southern towns like Savanah, I didn't know why at first, until I realized it's because their society is still so segregated.

> I get a disquiet feeling when I'm in old southern towns like Savanah

I love Savannah and Augusta. Those cities are a lot of fun. I spent time living in both in my early 20s. The segregation both is and isn't there. It's very strange. I think that the feeling you're describing is due to the ghost of slavery. It was always very hard for me to separate the history of the antebellum south from those two cities specifically.

To be fair, though, the most segregated place I've ever lived was easily East Los Angeles. It doesn't have that same feeling that you describe, of course, which makes it ... different but in a slightly better way.

I eventually identified that the feeling came from a noticeable divide between the people working the service industry and the people consuming the service industry. Added to that, and probably linked as cause/effect, was different places seemed to "switch" who was there based on time of day.

Not about having to drive everywhere, which is a deal breaker for me.

Unfortunately that's basically the case everywhere in the U.S. outside of NYC, SF, and DC.

“The only what I’ll go back is in a bag”- multiple (n=5) straight, white, ex-Texan-now-Bay-Areans. This includes me. I have never met anyone from that demographic who moved to SV from TX who espoused a different view, though they clearly exist based on the move-back fantasies common in HN comments.

That said, I did know several Indians (n=4, subcontinent, not Sioux, all Hindu, not Muslim) who seemed to enjoy Texas more than the gringos. They were all highly educated like the aforementioned cohort but also really into pickup trucks. We lost touch over the years and I’m curious to see how they viewed the cultural shifts under the outgoing administration.

Funny, from Broken Arrow myself, but indeed, have no intention moving back for very similar reasons.

Has Tulsa agreed to look for the mass graves of its citizens killed in the race massacre yet? Seems like that might deter the level of "diversity" the city is looking for.

Tulsa is 15.6% Black

San Francisco is 6.1% Black

Would maybe slow the roll on who is more diverse.

San Francisco. Hands down. I mean c'mon. This is not token diversity - San Francisco, with its many many cultures and immigrants from all over the world constantly intermingling and its many industries is far more diverse than a midwest town. Even if there are more of one type of minority in that town.

Tulsa is more Black than SF. Also, more White than SF.

SF is more diverse (even just racially; ethnicity and national origin just makes that even more clear.) There's more to the world that White and Black.

(Also, in the Bay Area, Oakland is 22.7% Black and about the population of Tulsa, so if you are looking for concentrated Blackness, the Bay Area has Tulsa beat on that as well as diversity.)

There is more to the world than black and white, but post above mine was implying black. Which from SF to San Jose (where the companies actually are) is almost all lower single digit % of pop.

As for Oakland the black pop is steadily declining, and might even be sub 20% when 2020 Census #s are released, in a decade might be mid teens.

> but post above mine was implying black.

No, in the context of the posts upthread of it, while it referenced an anti-black mass slaughter as an indicator of unwelcoming aspects of local culture, it did not imply that it was just talking about blacks.

Part of changing and improve things is to actually move there to dilute the bigotry But I can understand that one wouldn't want to be the one that has to suffer for the good cause, because it takes generations for things to improve.

The great thing about religion is that it attracts fanatics who are willing to do this work. I wish there was a movement to make the world a better place with missionaries going abroad and to remote places to make people more open minded and less individualistic.

> Part of changing and improve things is to actually move there to dilute the bigotry

Yes, bigotry is a nasty stain. Otherwise this thought sounds so tone deaf.

The common perception outside California is that Californians royally fucked it up and are flooding out like water from a ruptured damn, except they are bringing their political baggage with them to damage their new home just like the thing they can’t escape from fast enough.

It’s really odd to me that California is perceived to be such a problem while the area is so economically productive. It’s a very odd type of cognitive dissonance where something is both a model to be copied and a mess at the same time by the same people.

People try and recreate Silicon Valley while arguing non competes must be enforced. As if the ideas must inherently be unrelated.

I also agree it seems like some weird cognitive dissonance to look down on California’s labor and environmental laws, as if many people like to pretend they’re in the owner class. Sure, some are crazy, but overall it’s a trend in the right direction to benefit the vast majority of worker bees, at least the ones who aren’t pretending they’re going to be millionaires.

Aside from not allowing non-competes what is there to copy?

Overtime after 8 hours, allowing sitting if you don’t need to stand, mandatory 30 min breaks after 5 hours, same min wage for all workers regardless of tipping, health insurance mandate, Medi-Cal, to name a few.

I have a relative with an advanced degree in a state without labor laws who has to work 12 and 13 hour shifts with zero breaks standing up.

The best anti-SLAPP law in the country, no state ban on municipal broadband, no blue laws, allows people who get a JD by remote learning to take the bar exam.

> It’s really odd to me that California is perceived to be such a problem while the area is so economically productive. It’s a very odd type of cognitive dissonance where something is both a model to be copied and a mess at the same time by the same people.

it's only odd if you think economic productivity is the sole determination of what makes a desirable place to live. regarding SF in particular, it's phenomenal what has been accomplished there, don't get me wrong. but this has to be weighed against the fact that a "starter home" costs $1mm, the rate of petty crime rivals that of the most dangerous cities in america, etc. it's not cognitive dissonance to acknowledge that, while great things have been accomplished, a lot of stupid mistakes have also been made.

and by the way, I don't think the ban on non-competes is usually what people are thinking of when they describe california as a mess.

> the rate of petty crime rivals that of the most dangerous cities in america

Correction: SF has nation-leading levels of property crime, a leaderboard dominated by west coast cities. The US cities with highest violent crime rates have comparably low property crime. Which makes sense: Property crime is riskier in those places.

Violent crime is often also property crime in fact, but often not counted as such. So the level of violent crime masks some of the property crime.

A negligible amount. Property crime rate far exceeds violent crime rate in every US city.

> I don't think the ban on non-competes is usually what people are thinking of when they describe california as a mess.

Antibusiness/antiemployer government intervention is the most commonly explicitly-cited thing, and pretty much every State law, rule, and regulation that favors employees or restricts employers is included in that basket.

That rate of property crime is a direct result of prosperity. In poor areas there is less stuff worth stealing and people spend more effort protecting it.

The average house in Riverdale Chicago is worth less than the average car in Silicon Vally. People there make less money from armed robbery than someone can shoplift from a Silicon Valley Apple store. So shockingly with different risk/reward payoffs you get more property crime instead of armed robbery.

According to https://www.neighborhoodscout.com

SF property crime: 57.01/1000

SF median home: $1,195,367

SF per-capita income: $64k

NYC property crime: 18.64/1000

NYC median home: $1,126,049

NYC per-capita income: $73k

Palo Alto property crime: 22.88/1000

Palo Alto median home: $2,363,833

Palo Alto per-capita income: $89k

Chicago property crime: 32.48/1000

Chicago median home: $272,043

Chicago per-capita income: $34k

So SF has worse property crime even though it is on-par or poorer than NYC and Palo Alto.

That site is wildly inaccurate it lists 1.2% of homes in San Francisco as under 58k. https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/real-esta...

But, if you’re confusing the point, clearly median income isn’t the only factor. Palo Alto is 2,712.65/sq mi where San Francisco is 18,790.74/sq mi. It’s over the hump where you don’t get poor people begging etc. Similarly, manhattan effectively segregates the rich an poor in a way that San Francisco doesn’t, but wealth very much is a factor when comparing San Francisco to similar areas.

I think you mean disparity

It isn’t that CA is a problem. The issue here is ethnocentricity and a complete absence of empathy.

The only question people are left asking is if a CA transplant believes their different way of doing things is so much better then why did they leave and why don’t they go back.

it's odd to me that larry flynt is perceived to be such a problem when his businesses are so economically productive.

it's not even just political baggage per say, city people and second home owners are coming from a different culture and they rarely if ever try to understand ours before demanding we change it to accommodate them. they want a starbucks, they want a whole foods and a shopping mall, they drive like assholes on a good day and are straight up dangerous once the roads start to get icy. given the choice they'd turn this place into another smoggy strip mall where the foxes don't come out and you can't see the stars anymore; they wouldn't even recognize what they took from us. to them central park is nature and not a big fucking lawn surrounded by noise and dead concrete. i see exactly what all the concentrated wealth and genius managed to do to california and it scares the shit out of me. keep your money, keep your 'culture' and opportunities just please go somewhere else.

What religion is primarily focused on ending bigotry? Genuinely curious.

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