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Comment by nickv | Hacker News Reader

The "red state" part will eventually bite the "blue cities". Sure, Austin and Houston are blue - but the gun laws in Texas practically encourage gun purchases, you still can't get an Abortion in Austin, the state is still out to get you if you're LGBT, weed = jail, and companies are constrained in what they can say.

Look at Disney and Florida as a good example. Big firms (and the employees that want the personal freedom to love who they want, and make the medical decisions they need to make). This is a very (unsurprisingly) short minded perspective. It matters if the states are blood red.

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Despite these concerns, Texas and Florida are gaining population and firms while California and New York are losing population and firms.

How might this play out over the years ahead? What might this mean for the long term prosperity of these states respectively as capital (human and material) shifts from blue states to red states? Will CA and NY maintain their entitlements and policies as their tax base moves out? Will FL and TX eventually turn blue and this happens all over again?

It's a lot of questions, but trying to leave it open ended and as unbiased as possible.

As a resident of the SF Bay Area, I am constantly reading doom and gloom stories about CA and the Bay Area losing population to FL and TX. The numbers are usually manipulated, taken out of context, or represent temporary blips like COVID.

Counter-balancing those stories are when people move to Texas for the lack of income tax, they discover that TX Makes up for that with higher property tax, and the weather is terrible.

It would be great if there was an exodus of people out of the Bay Area, then the place might become less insanely expensive.

There probably are too many people in SF and spreading out would increase much needed housing supply in that market.

On the topic of property tax, that very well might be true for CA, although NY and TEX property tax seems similar despite the average home in TEX being almost half as much. https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/property-taxes-by-state. Additionally, there may be other cost of living factors that make TEX more or less attractive.

SF needs more housing, and is facing a problem because they went all-in on tech, and most people aren't returning to those expensive SF offices. Those problems are all manageable, but there will be pain in the short term.

The big win by moving out of CA is affordable housing. However, most of the cool alternatives like Austin and Portland have also gentrified (and they hate Californians, at least in Oregon)

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