Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog
After a long hiatus, the Texas vs. California update is back!
The update, focusing on news about the two biggest states in the union, and contrasting the the red and blue state models of governance for each, was a regular staple of the blog a few years ago, but as I got busy I fell behind, and the links kept piling up. As a result, this update is extra huge and some of the news here is very old indeed, with some links dating back to 2017. Recently I’ve been updating and triaging so I can finally publish this. I’ve tried to put the newest and most important stories at the top, but there is stil some old news of note further down.
• New Yorkers and Californians
can’t stop moving to Texas:
According to a new U.S. Census Bureau report, of the 15 fastest-growing cities larger than 50,000 people, seven are in Texas including the top three: Frisco, New Braunfels, and Pflugerville. Frisco’s growth rate was 8.2 percent, some 11 times faster than the national rate of 0.7 percent.
Of the cities with the greatest population gain from July 1, 2016 to July 1, 2017, San Antonio, Texas, took the prize, adding some 66 people every day. Texas had the most cities in the top 15 of this category as well with five making the list and three of the top five overall in addition to San Antonio: Dallas, Fort Worth, Frisco, and Austin.
San Antonio now has more than 1.5 million people and ranks as the nation’s seventh-largest city, just behind Philadelphia. Fort Worth, meanwhile, knocked Indianapolis, Ind., out of the top-15 with a population of 874,168. Houston is America’s fourth-largest city and is also the most diverse large city in the nation.
• In fact,
Texas was he number one state for net in-migration in 2020, while California lost the third most residents of any state.
Why high tech companies are leaving California:
In a stunning procession in December, California lost the leadership of three iconic firms — Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle and Tesla — all to Texas, which this year even took the Rose Bowl’s place in hosting the college football playoff. In addition, many California tech firms, including Uber and Lyft, as well as Apple, have been shifting jobs outside the state.
This has been widely described as California’s “tech exodus.†Though it’s still less than a torrent and more a steady, long-term drip, it augurs some very bad trends. In recent years, California has been losing market share of innovative industries compared with 11 states with high concentrations of innovation-oriented firms, according to research by Ken Murphy, a professor at UC Irvine’s business school.
Since 2005, California’s share of the number of firms in the innovation sector (composed of 13 of the nation’s highest-tech, highest R&D advanced industries) has shrunk while competitors like Florida, Oregon, Arizona and Utah have expanded their share slightly.
The pandemic-induced push to move work online could hasten this shift. With 2 out of 3 tech workers willing to leave the Bay Area if they could work remotely, Big Tech could readily spread talent and wealth to other states.
Increasingly, California’s cities must compete with metro areas in Texas, Tennessee and even parts of the Midwest. Housing prices are a particularly critical concern: California has all three of the most unaffordable metro regions for first-time home buyers, according to a recent AEI survey, and six of the top 10. The flow of tech workers during the pandemic has gone to places like Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth and Raleigh, N.C., and away from big coastal cities with higher living costs.
Software-based tech companies can access knowledge workers outside California, and often at lower costs. At the same time, states like Texas and Arizona have been sought to replicate the California formula for tech industry growth — public university expansion, more suburban housing and public investment in downtowns, all meant to appeal to workers and their bosses.
More:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=32811
