news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090112/ap_on_re_us/fleeing_california
Mike Reilly poses for a portrait while working on converting a camper into a AP - Mike Reilly poses for a portrait while working on converting a camper into a moving trailer outside his ... LOS ANGELES - Mike Reilly spent his lifetime chasing the California dream. With a house purchase near Denver in the works, the 38-year-old engineering contractor plans to move his family 1,200 miles away from his home state's lemon groves, sunshine and beaches. For him, years of rising taxes, dead-end schools, unchecked illegal immigration and clogged traffic have robbed the Golden State of its allure. "If you are a Hollywood actor," Reilly says, "but not for us." Since the days of the Gold Rush, California has represented the Promised Land, an image celebrated in the songs of the Beach Boys and embodied by Silicon Valley's instant millionaires and the young men and women who achieve stardom in Hollywood. But for many California families last year, tomorrow started somewhere else. The number of people leaving California for another state outstripped the number moving in from another state during the year ending on July 1, 2008. California lost a net total of 144,000 people during that period -- more than any other state, according to census estimates. That is about equal to the population of Syracuse, NY The state with the next-highest net loss through migration between states was New York, which lost just over 126,000 residents. California's loss is extremely small in a state of 38 million. And, in fact, the state's population continues to increase overall because of births and immigration, legal and illegal. But it is the fourth consecutive year that more residents decamped from California for other states than arrived here from within the US A losing streak that long hasn't happened in California since the recession of the early 1990s, when departures outstripped arrivals from other states by 362,000 in 1994 alone. In part because of the boom in population in other Western states, California could lose a congressional seat for the first time in its history. Among other things: California's unemployment rate hit 84 percent in November, the third-highest in the nation, and it is expected to get worse. A record 236,000 foreclosures are projected for 2008, more than the prior nine years combined, according to research firm MDA DataQuick. Median housing prices have nose-dived one-third from a 2006 peak, but many homes are still out of reach for middle-class families. Normally recession-proof Hollywood has been hit by layoffs. "You see wages go down and the cost of living go up," Reilly says. His property taxes will be $1,300 in Colorado, down from $4,300 on his three-bedroom house in Nipomo, about 80 miles up the coast from Santa Barbara. California's obituary has been written before -- "California: The Endangered Dream" was the title of a 1991 Time magazine cover story. The Golden State and its huge economy -- by itself, the eighth-largest in the world -- have shown resilience, weathering the aerospace bust, the dot-com crash and an energy crunch in recent years. A state board halted lending for about 2,000 public works projects in California worth more than $16 billion because the state could not afford them. It has become and will continue to become grittier," says New America Foundation senior fellow Gregory Rodriguez. "Now, perhaps, we have to reassess the California of our imagination." Arnold Schwarzenegger is among those who say the state needs to create itself anew, rebuilding roads, schools and transit. "We've lived off the investments our parents made in the '50s and '60s for a long time," says Tim Hodson, director of the Center for California Studies at California State University, Sacramento. "We're somewhat in the position of a Rust Belt state in the 1970s." "The saddest thing I saw was the escalation of home prices to the point our kids, when they got married, could not live in the community where they lived and grew up," Hartz says.
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