Despite a burst housing bubble, as seen here with Manhattan Beach (Los Angeles County) homes for sale, many in California still can’t afford to live here and are opting to leave the state.
[Note: This article was originally posted on December 12th, 2011. The IFNM website was attacked by hackers and many articles are now gone from the archives. As a public service, IFNM is now reposting said articles.]
For a clue to why California is losing its allure as a place to settle down, just ask Jennifer McCluer, who moved out of California in 2007 after she obtained her license in skin care.
Unable to afford Orange County’s sky-high rents, she opted for Portland, Ore. “A big motivator was that I lived with roommate after roommate after roommate,” said McCluer, 30. “Friends said you could probably live on your own up here. The rent was a huge deal for me.”
McCluer would like to move back, but it’s still too expensive. “It’s really difficult,” McCluer said. “I’ve given myself 1 1/2 to two years to save money.”
Recent census figures show the state is losing more Californians like McCluer than it is attracting from other parts of the United States. And the trend toward out-migration is looking less like a blip than a long-term condition.
The proportion of Californians who had moved here from out of state reached a 100-year low of about 20 percent in 2010, and the decade measured by the most recent census was the first in a century in which the majority of Californians were native-born.
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