Given the price of housing, we shouldn’t be surprised that some people are leaving the state. The median price of a house in San Francisco just passed $2 million.
And, yes, during the COVID pandemic, California experienced a net loss of residents to other states and to other countries.
Sonoma and Napa counties lost population, too, declines exacerbated by the devastating fires of 2017. As Staff Writers Natalie Hanson and Martin Espinoza recently reported, more people moved out than moved in — a difference of 12,100 in Sonoma and 6,900 in Napa between 2016 and 2025. Sonoma County’s population declined 3.4% and Napa County, 5.6%.
The cost of living was the principal culprit. But you also can blame the fires, record-low birth rates, higher rates of death and fewer immigrants from other counties.
Houses don’t cost $2 million in San Francisco because no one wants to live there. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds — AFP via Getty Images)
For all the concern, however, it turns out talking about the California exodus is, well, complicated. From the state Department of Finance, we learn that the population in 2025 was the same as it was in 2020 — 39.5 million people. By a large margin, California remains the most populous state. One in nine Americans still live in California, which happens to be home to the fourth-largest economy on earth.
Here’s the Los Angeles Times: “California’s population has essentially been treading water since the pandemic. … For the last three years, the state has grown in population, though the numbers have been quite small.”
Between housing prices and people still living on the streets, people aren’t wrong to be disaffected.
But there’s politics involved, too, as conservative voices like to talk up California’s problems. Listening to them, you would think people are leaving California by the millions.
And so San Francisco, for example, becomes a “hellscape,” a fiction that seems to be believed by people who have never spent time in San Francisco.
Not so long ago, San Francisco politics could be kind of strange — who talks about changing the name of a high school named after Abraham Lincoln? — but if you’ve walked through North Beach or the Marina or Pacific Heights, or along the Embarcadero to Oracle Park and Chase Center, you know how welcoming the city can be.
A bicyclist rides along the Embarcadero near the San Francisco Bay Bridge. (Justin Sullivan — Getty Images)
Would you rather live in Ohio or Mississippi? Houses don’t cost $2 million in San Francisco because no one wants to live there.
But conservatives will beat the drums anyway. California is a terrible place to live, they will say.
They will not be showing views of the Golden Gate Bridge or the Ferry Building or Golden Gate Park or Ocean Beach, lest their audience come to realize that they are being taken for a ride.
This is not to say that San Francisco — or California — is without fault. A couple years ago, downtown San Francisco and downtown Los Angeles weren’t fun places to be. There were too many people camped out on the sidewalks, and drug paraphernalia was strewn here and there.
New York Times opinion writer German Lopez described the drug scene he saw in downtown San Francisco three year ago. “It was,” he wrote, “a startling vision of what had gone wrong with West Coast progressivism.”
But, as Lopez acknowledged, San Francisco, is putting its house in order again — thanks, in part, to a new gung-ho mayor, Daniel Lurie. Lurie arrived with the good fortune of not being another garden variety politician. He is bringing common sense to a city that can afford to do better than allow its downtown streets to be taken over by people who need help.
Walk across Union Square, as we did recently, and you see happy people enjoying their morning. We saw exactly one homeless guy, who was soon shooed away by what we assume was a plain-clothes security guard. (San Francisco calls them “community ambassadors.”)
There is still work to do. Too many businesses, whipsawed by the pandemic and the homeless people on the streets, closed their doors. Some never returned.
But you can see that better days are ahead. San Franciscans elected Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, because he represented a break with the recent past. San Franciscans came to understand that it wasn’t progressive, nor humane, to leave people to suffer on the streets, turning downtown into a place no one wanted to go.
From jobs to housing to politics to proximity to family, people find many reasons to live where they live.
If you want, you can freeze your butt off in Ohio, or cope with the politics of Idaho (where one church pastor doesn’t think women should be allowed to vote).
It turns out, I should mention, that states that attract Californians — Texas, Florida, Tennessee — now have their own affordability problems.
Never mind that former Californians are more likely to land in places with a culture that reminds them of California — Austin or Nashville, for examples. These are liberal towns in conservative states. (More often than not, big cities in red states tend to be blue.)
As for me, I’ll take California, blemishes and all. I like the weather, the energy, the sense of innovation, the beautiful and diverse landscapes where I live and all the ways San Francisco is restoring its reputation as one of the most beautiful and livable cities in the world.
Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com
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