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The apparent growing appetite for suburban living presents a unique challenge to California. The state policy is aggressively anti-suburban, placing ever-higher hurdles on any development on the periphery. This, over time, is slowing construction in the interior and forcing housing prices unnaturally up, even in these areas.

Some so-called progressives hail these trends, as forcing what they seem to see as less desirable elements — that is, working- and middle-class people — out of the state. They allege that this is balanced out by a surge of highly educated workers coming to California. Essentially, the model is that of a gated community, with a convenient servant base nearby.

By examining state-by-state migration trends, it is easy to see which states are enacting pro-growth policies. After all, Americans have shown that they are willing to “vote with their feet” for better economic opportunities even if it means leaving their home state. The top-ten states in the 2017 rankings have gained more than 3.75 million residents in the past decade. The bottom-ten states, meanwhile, have lost more than 3.78 million residents over the same period. In addition to experiencing a mass exodus of residents, states with oppressively high tax rates such as New York, Illinois, and California have lost vast economic opportunities and vast amounts of wealth. Job growth over the last ten years was nearly three times higher in the top ten states than it was in the bottom ten.

We found that some of the most expensive metros had the largest net outflow—the number of local users searching for a home in a different metro minus the number of users from another metro searching for a home in the subject metro. The San Francisco Bay Area topped the list of places with the largest net outflow, followed by New York and Los Angeles.

Those investments have California officials confident they are setting the groundwork to meet the ambitious ZEV goal. But encouraging consumer adoption is proving a more difficult battle.

“The companies have the vehicles and they are ready to sell them,” CARB Chair Mary Nichols told Utility Dive at the Los Angeles March for Science. “But the public doesn’t yet understand they are a viable alternative because they are still too expensive and there is not enough charging and hydrogen fuel supply.”

Rich States, Poor States examines the latest movements in state economic growth. The data ranks the 2017 economic outlook of states using fifteen equally weighted policy variables, including various tax rates, regulatory burdens and labor policies. The ninth edition examines trends over the last few decades that have helped or hurt states’ economies.

Real estate brokerage site Redfin released its annual “migration report” on Monday and found that those residing in San Francisco Metro are the most likely to leave. The catalyst for moving – high housing costs – should surprise no one.

Analyzing a sample of 1 million Redfin users, the site found that 19.4 percent of potential homebuyers in San Francisco searched outside of the region for houses.

San Francisco also recorded the highest “”net outflow”” – the number of potential homebuyers looking to move to San Francisco Metro subtracted from the number of those who want to leave. The region’s outflow was double that of New York.

The California State Auditor has delivered a damning assessment of the management practices at the single largest university system in the United States. . . In other words, administrators have been hiring more administrators for make-work positions and giving each other raises without sufficient accountability in a self-perpetuating cycle of bureaucratic decay that is sadly endemic to academia at large.

In a just released poll by the Bay Area Council a majority of respondents indicated an expectation that traffic congestion in the Bay Area (the San Jose-San Francisco combined statistical area) is likely to get worse.

It is already bad enough. The Bay Area includes two major urban areas (over 1,000,000 population), with San Francisco ranked second worst in traffic congestion in the United States, closely following Los Angeles.

Moves out of the area remain far below levels seen during last decade’s housing bubble, when out-migration was nearly triple what it was in 2016 — and real estate agents urged clients to “drive until you qualify.”

But after slowing down in the aftermath of the Great Recession, which devastated the housing market, out-migration is picking up as prices climb steadily higher, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

To escape high prices, people — often younger and with lower- or middle-class incomes — are looking toward the Inland Empire and nearby states for additional square footage and a lower mortgage payment.

The million-dollar home prices about 85 miles west, in San Francisco and San Jose, have pushed aspiring homeowners to look inland. Patterson’s population has doubled since the 2000 census. Average monthly rents have climbed from about $900 in 2014 to nearly $1,600 in recent months, according to the apartment database Rent Jungle, compounding the hardships of the foreclosure crisis, the shuttering of several local agricultural businesses and surging substance abuse rates.

The power of the California Democratic Party’s supermajority was mightily tested last Thursday, with the nail-biting passage of a $52 billion transportation package that will add 12 cents to the price of gasoline.

What does that bode for the other big lift coming up in the Legislature, the reauthorization of the state’s landmark climate change legislation, cap and trade? The carbon auction system survived a court challenge Thursday — with the California appeals court affirming the legality of the program — but it’s an open question whether cap and trade can survive a bruising political battle and the likelihood of tacking on more to the price of gas at the pump.

As Hamby’s experience reflects, the frustrations of living in the Bay Area have become so pronounced that confidence in the economy has sunk to its lowest level in four years, according to a survey released Saturday by the Bay Area Council. Housing and traffic concerns have usually topped the list, but they have intensified this year. In 2014, 53 percent of respondents said they felt the economy was doing better than it was in the previous six months. According to the survey, only 31 percent of respondents feel that way today.

The financial losses by Germany’s two energy giants raise fundamental questions about who will pay for the country’s ambitious renewable energy program. To date, German households and small businesses have borne the burden in the form of high electricity prices. Now the shareholders of E.ON and RWE are being asked to step up. If they continue to face losses and cut dividends, they will not be able to attract the capital necessary for Germany’s electricity grid to survive. At that point, Germany’s tax payers will be invited to the payments window to keep companies like E.ON and RWE in business.

An increasing number of Bay Area residents are planning to move out of the area, or at least considering it, primarily because of housing prices, the rising cost of living and traffic, according to a new poll.

The decline in homeownership rates to near 50-year lows is partly to blame for the U.S. economy’s sluggish recovery from the last recession, new data suggest.

If the home-building industry had returned to the long-term average level of construction, it would have added more than $300 billion to the economy last year, or a 1.8% boost to gross domestic product, according to a study expected to be released Monday by the Rosen Consulting Group, a real-estate consultant.