40% of California Residents Said They're Considering Leaving the State. Most Say They're Being Priced Out

According to this month’s California Community Poll, over 40% of Californians are considering leaving the Golden State — with over half of those people citing the state’s high cost of living, and housing in particular.

The poll was conducted as a partnership between the public affairs research firm Strategies360, the Los Angeles Times, The Center for Asian Americans United for Self Empowerment, Hispanas Organized for Political Equality, and the Los Angeles Urban League. It covered a wide variety of topics, including residents’ sense of financial well-being, belonging in their community, and trust in its political systems.

The new poll backs up similar sentiments that LAist listeners shared with us in our survey of Angelenos about what issues they feel are most important for Mayor Karen Bass to address. More than half of respondents to our survey suggested they have seriously considered moving away from L.A. in the last year either "often" or "sometimes."

Cost of living might outweigh lifestyle

Dan Schnur, professor of political communication at UC Berkeley, Pepperdine, and USC, helped direct the survey. Speaking on LAist’s public affairs show AirTalk, he said people appreciate many parts of the California lifestyle and culture, but are finding it increasingly unsustainable to make a home there.

Respondents had positive views of the state’s diversity, their sense of safety in California, and the abundance of opportunities to do things they enjoy. In fact, 71% of respondents said they were very or somewhat happy with life overall in California, yet 40% are still considering leaving.

“There's very much of a contradictory push and pull here,” Schnur said. “And right now it keeps most Californians in the state, but increasingly beginning to worry about whether they can afford to stay or not.”

Schnur noted a contrast in how respondents felt about race relations at a local and national level. They felt very positively about diversity and racial relations across their own neighborhoods and even across California — but extremely negatively about those same factors at a national level.

“So if you are an individual who concerns yourself on such matters, whether you're a person of color or not, that becomes a primary disincentive to leave the state, no question about it,” Schnur said.

Over 60% of residents said California is a place where they feel a sense of acceptance and belonging — and among Black residents, that figure jumped to nearly 66%.

If those figures sound a little unexpected, Schnur said, it could be because the poll’s partners, like the Los Angeles Urban League, had a great deal of cultural competence and expertise with their respective communities — so they were able to ask more deeply informed questions that brought out striking responses.

Politics factor in too

Still, there was a clear divide in overall optimism among partisan and racial lines, according to Schnur. Most Californians who are thinking of leaving the state are doing so because of the increasing cost of living — but Republicans and self-identified conservatives are much more likely to consider leaving because of the state’s political priorities.

The COVID-19 pandemic left almost no part of American life untouched, and the poll reflects that too, Schnur said. Before the pandemic, the poll saw much higher levels of satisfaction on economic issues, public safety, education policy, and many other fronts. Those numbers dropped precipitously during the pandemic, Schnur said, and they have not yet recovered.

“So even though for most of us, we think about COVID in the past tense, is still lingers on — not just from a health standpoint, but in terms of our attitudes toward California,” Schnur said. “And that has become one of the driving forces of people considering leaving.”

Listen to the conversation