Chip Taylor

Voting with your feet

Just like Tiebout said. In the New York Times:

LEE'S SUMMIT, Mo., Nov. 3 - A year ago, Melanie Fischer, a lifelong Californian, was not entirely sure where Missouri was. So when her husband proposed that they consider moving there, she raced to locate the state on a map printed on her children's placemats.

Today, Mrs. Fischer and her family live in this suburb of Kansas City, in a five-bedroom house nearly twice the size of their former home near San Bernardino, with a huge yard and a lake view from the hot tub on their deck. Still, Mrs. Fischer, 28, and her husband, Nathan, 30, had enough money left after their move to pay off the debt on their two cars and buy a 21-foot motorboat.

Many of their new neighbors cannot fathom why the Fischers left sunny California for, of all places, Missouri. "You have to give up things," Mrs. Fischer said, "to get things."

A growing number of people are leaving California after a decade of soaring home prices, according to separate data from the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service and the state's finance department.

Last year, a half million people left California for other parts of the United States, while fewer than 400,000 Americans moved there. The net outflow has risen fivefold, to more than 100,000, since 2001, an analysis by Economy.com, a research company, shows, although immigration from other countries and births have kept the state's population growing.

The number of people leaving Boston, New York and Washington is also rising, and skyrocketing house prices appear to be a major reason, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. From New York, the net migration to Philadelphia more than doubled between 2001 and 2004, with 11,500 more people leaving New York for Philadelphia last year than vice versa. The number of New Yorkers who have moved to Albany, Charlotte, N.C., and Allentown, Pa., among other places, has also increased sharply.

But the change seems most pronounced in California, which has long been a beacon that draws people from all over the country, with its sun-drenched coasts and dynamic economy.

Today, however, the same factors that have made California so alluring have also made it unaffordable for many young families, retirees and recent immigrants to the United States. Some are heading to fast-growing cities like Las Vegas, as they have been for decades. But even less-glamorous destinations, like the Rust Belt and Texas, are on the receiving end of the migration.

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