Steve Jobs would disagree with you and Crawford.

Today's Steve Jobs are relocating out of the state.

Aging population with a shrinking younger population [future workers, innovators] is a population pyramid nightmare -- It doesn't work -- just look to Japan, population pyramid then and now.
1950:
https://images.populationpyramid.net...3Fshare%3Dtrue

What happened 35 years later in Japan? All those young people grew up, got jobs and dominated the developed world in the mid 1980s. Now look at Japan, all those young people in 1950 have retired and not they're not being replaced by an even larger set of young people. Result: Japan has stagnated and declined, same story for China this century.

E] From what JManc has posted he was recently entertaining the idea of relocating to Calif. but ultimately decided not to for a variety of reasons, CoL being one.

JManc? I don't want to put words in The Voice of Reason's Mouth, is this correct?

What does Japan's age pyramid circa 1950 have to do with this amazing "City Discussion" anyway?

Yup, that’s me!

Just to clear things up, my post was indeed a tongue and cheek agreement with badrunner’s wet dream comment. The chart he posted clearly shows a sizable majority of Californians moving to Texas are low income individuals.

Point is, it seems to me there’s some schadenfreude-esque gloating around CA’s domestic “exodus” to other states. Particularly among the right leaning GOP political class, who present a bunch of talking-point reasons for the population loss. But the end results for CA we are watching actually happen are something these very right-leaners would love to see in their own areas. The end results, mind you, not the process: fewer poor minorities, more rich people. And to add to that irony, the poor people leaving CA are headed to places like Texas, which are governed by GOP administrations, and where a lot of the smug schadenfreude over this whole issue comes from in the first place. It’s somehow fitting.

In a discussion about demographics and demographical changes:

I'd like to spell it out for you, but I was under the assumption that most people could do it for themselves?

Feel free to PM me -- I'd be happy to explain.

Is it you think 1950 Japan is so analogous to 2019 California that it can literally predict our future? How magical!

Meanwhile in reality, still-growing California faces the aging of the Baby Boomers like everyone else in the Western world, but there is zero support for the assertion this state must become an outlier like Japan has been for decades.

In fact, this San Jose Mercury News article from earlier this year points out that Californians, in comparison to other parts of the country, are "still are pretty young" and the median age in 2017 of 36 "makes California one of the 10 youngest states in the country. By comparison, Florida’s median age is 42."

If you were sincerely concerned about states aging in coming decades like Japan has been aging in the last few decades, you would focus on 40 other, older states first--but we won't see you posting your deep, principled 'concern' for Florida becoming the next crazy outlier for aging, will we? Nope, because there's no real concern, no principle, and no orchestrated Trumpian campaign to paint Florida in a bad light.

Not sure riding the coattails of California's success is worthy of patting yourself on the back so vigorously. Much of Texas's growth is the direct result of over saturation of companies that were born and bred in California. California is still the innovation capital of the world, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, period. A few glorified back offices in Texas doesn't change that.


We get it - you love Texas. But let's see a Texas startup reach even a tenth of the success as Facebook, Google, Apple before you smugly reach for your back again.

:tup:

...

Well, no. Remember, these are the Good Times, we're at an all-time high right now! :cool: Remember how it was 10 years ago, when California was much younger than it is today? How good were those times? Not too great.

This isn't rocket science, this is math. An increase of the non-working population [retirees] that is reliant on an ever increasing younger population, that is moving away is dependent on those young people to pay for their services, yet that ever increasing younger population is being forced out of the state. This is not a recipe for success and is of great concern.

It's the complete opposite of California's history. This trend, over years will break California, as has been witnessed in other states -- California is not immune.

Nope,, I get annoyed about the California hate and bias from other sun belt states. It's very clear to the California posters.
Usually, it's Texas cause their state pride gets hurt .

But good on Texas for poaching other states talent. They must be struggling to build anything on their own.

Not entirely. I'm a Californian and I'm concerned about the direction of the state.

I want an environment where Californians don't leave the state for others to merely survive and flee California. Yeah, that equals to even higher growth projections -- bring it on -- like the Good Ol' Golden State days. Bring it. There are 2 states that can actually do this in the union and those are -- CA and TX.

Nobody should ever move out of California, because it might lower the state's population growth--and that must never happen, because population growth is always objectively good. Anything that lessens population growth is always objectively bad, a problem to be fixed until nobody ever moves out of California again. For the good of all, nobody gets out alive!

Well, we all know that if Southern CA has a problem, it's too few people and too little congestion. The place has barely grown over the past century. The 405 is a ghost town.

There should be at least 40 million people in LA, with the same road and rail network as today, of course. Otherwise, CA will never match up with the glories of TX.

None of this rambling, has anything to do with anything. Great post!

Wow, 14 pages!

Yeah I don't know what Japan has to do with any of this. There's virtually zero movement of people into and out of Japan. It's like the exact opposite of California.

Charles Schwab just announced that, following the completion of their takeover of Ameritrade, they will move HQ from San Francisco to the DFW suburb of Westlake. Westlake is located 20 miles north of downtown Fort Worth in far northeastern Tarrant County near the Alliance Airport development. Schwab already has over 2,000 employees on a suburban campus there. That seems like a seismic culture shift from a downtown SF headquarters to a suburban office development in Texas. Mercedes Benz Financial Services is also headquartered at the Westlake location.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business...6-14860683.php

Another loss for CA.

Why would so many companies relocate from a place with perfect weather....it certainly isn't the local governance. :P

-----

An airplane full of "talent" can certainly land in DFW just as easily as LAX.

Interesting that home prices in Westlake are the highest in Texas with an average of about $1.7 million. Residential Westlake is home to mega-McMansions mostly in lakefront or country club developments, but there are tons of affordable housing options within a 20 minute commute from the Schwab campus down towards Fort Worth or up in Denton County. I am pretty sure the low housing costs and low overall tax environment dictated this move.

Westlake is also a very small city of 7 square miles with less than 1,000 people, and zoned itself this way to "keep people out". You're right that there are definitely low cost options to the west in North Fort Worth and parts of Keller.

It's a loss if we care about bragging rights, and forumers certainly do, but for people who are actually impacted by this merger, the article indicates the vast majority of San Francisco positions will not be relocated to the Texas suburbs:

Also, before haters get too giddy about San Francisco losing a finance headquarters, let's remember the same merger is doing the same thing to Omaha.

Also from the article:

I do agree that a diversified economy that isn't overly reliant on one sector would be ideal, but a net gain of 71,544 jobs ain't too shabby either.

SF can take the hit. They are gonna be just fine. The real news, as far as I am concerned, is that the DFW area continues to attract large corporate relocations, and this is a big one for the Fort Worth side of the DFW area. Historically most of the relocation action has been in Dallas, Irving, or up towards Plano.

It's strange to me. Dallas is the biggest metro in the South and also growing the fastest in terms of population and job growth, yet I still feel like Atlanta and Houston are more prominent, especially culturally.

That might be because if you seperate Dallas from Forth Worth, the Dallas area would be about 5 million people.

The DFW area doesn't separate that easily. Too much of the economic engine is located mid-cities, and commuting patterns are all over the region. Heck, DFW Airport is technically in Fort Worth along with the American Airlines HQ. I think it is more a case of the DFW area competing for attention with an almost identically sized Houston that is only 200 miles away, and then there is Austin (and San Antonio) just down the road as well. Atlanta kind of stands on its own as the preeminent city of the Deep South.

As austlar1 mentioned, the two cities are too intertwined and there is a lot of people and economic activity in between them that tie the entire metro together. Even if you did peel off Fort Worth, Dallas still would be on the same level as Houston and Atlanta.

that's a good point. we often compartmentalize "the south" into this one big giant monolithic region because that's what the census bureau does for the US with its four big macro-regions, but the south is so freaking big that an alpha city like atlanta has more than enough room to shine all on its own.

up north, shit got split up into the northeast and the midwest, so we think of those places as their own separate realms, and they are to a degree, and thus we don't have a single issue with seeing NYC as the super-alpha of the northeast and chicago as the super-alpha as the midwest.

but it's important to to remember that the distance between atlanta and dallas/houston is ~700 miles, roughly the same distance as NYC to chicago. atlanta has enough space to be its own super-alpha of its hinterland, texas and parts west be damned.

shit gets MUCH trickier in texas itself where houston and DFW are so neck and neck with each other and only 225 miles away from each other.

They aren't relocating. They're just using the Westlake office as the official HQ post-merger. But almost no one is moving. The SF office remains.

And it makes sense for Schwab to grow in TX prairie as opposed to downtown SF. Schwab is a trading platform, like Vanguard (which is, not coincidentally, located in an exurban office park, and not Wall Street). These aren't super high pay/high skill jobs. They don't need to be paying $150 psf in some hyper-inflated tech bubble. I wouldn't waste any time growing a company in downtown SF if it weren't purely tech-focused or provided support for such firms (law/consulting/VC).

SF has the lowest unemployment in the country. They have too many jobs, and not enough people. It would probably be better for the region if Schwab left, but that isn't happening. That whole region needs to cool off a bit, and slowly depressurize, or there's gonna be another epic bust.

Living in Texas, I've always viewed Atlanta as the leading metro in the South and Texas as its own thing even if Texas (especially east Texas) shares many attributes with the rest of the South.

Yeah, to me, TX is big enough to be its own region. Atlanta is the capitol of the South, but I'm not counting TX (or FL).

It also can be viewed this way.

Using your 200 miles scenario, the population is 3-4 million more within that distance of Atlanta compared to Houston and Dallas. And to use your word "compete" and to surmise the usage; it can also be viewed that the "competition" maybe and probably is stiffer within the Atlanta radius because it comes from more Metros (although smaller) and in different states/jurisdictions.

:tup: I so much agree. "The South" is so diverse in so many ways even within much shorter distances.

I was really referring to a competition for national and international attention and recognition. In that regard Atlanta dominates its region. DFW must "compete" with Houston and to a lesser degree with sexy Austin and saucy San Antonio for the spotlight.

Texas is in the South but also exists as its own subregion therein. In terms of prominence, I suppose it depends on how you look at things. Economically I do think DFW is definitely more prominent than Houston and Atlanta, especially considering more recent history. Culturally, I think DFW is viewed as more traditionally Texan than Houston and has a more prominent brand and identity.

Many of the Southern cities aren’t as big as their Northern and Western counterparts by city proper ( except for the Texan cities), but they have metro areas that can compete with all the other metros in the country outside of NYC, LA, and Chicago. Atlanta and Miami are mid-sized cities at best, but their metros are in the top ten. That’s hella crazy and it’s only going to get crazier.

It's Fort Worth that is traditionally 'Texan'. Dallas not so much and it is more well known over Houston due to pop culture references like JR Ewing and the Cowboys. Those images have stuck ever since.

This is probably the only list that matters in the end. The only quibble I have with it is that the entire SF Bay area ought to be considered one GDP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...n_areas_by_GDP

Houston dropped quite a bit in GDP in the past few years. The oil downturn really did make an impact. It shows around town.

That's what they said about McKesson and then McKesson started moving people out of SF.

This acquisition will take 12-36 months.

I 100% guarantee you that jobs will move when the HQ is relocated from SF to DFW.

This is true, but in the example of Texas, Houston has to fight its own state a lot. The other major metros in the state (DFW, AUS, SA) all have government help in the form of multiple military bases and multiple large public universities. In Austin's case, it has the added benefit of the state government. Houston is almost all self-made comparatively speaking. Even now, Governor Greg Abbott is from the DFW area and it feels like his camp has only courted companies for DFW. He's done absolutely nothing for the Houston area.

It depends on the pop culture. JR Ewing is old news now. The Cowboys are still relevant as always. But in today's form of current pop culture, Houston is definitely more in the news than Dallas is. More mainstream musicians and recognizable sports stars come from Houston than Dallas.

Sounds like you're thinking more of a Combined Statistical Area, rather than the list of Metropolitan Statistical Areas you linked. An MSA consists of the commuting region for a single cluster of job centers, while a CSA defines a region of multiple MSAs with interconnected labor pools. San Jose isn't included in the San Francisco centered MSA because Silicon Valley is an economic destination in and of itself, with its own independent commute patterns, but included in the CSA because those same commute patterns overlap with San Francisco's.

i.e. while people in Gilroy are are almost exclusively commuting into San Jose, and people in Marin County are virtually always commuting into San Francisco, someone in Redwood City could be going either way.

But when you get even deeper though, good and services tend to travel much further than individual commuters. This has lead to the more modern concept of the megalopolis or megaregion, which defines an area with a single pool of specialized services. The resulting maps can look a bit weird from a cultural perspective though.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...egaregions.png

Here you can see that although Los Angeles and Los Vegas has wildly differing cultures and no one would ever dream of commuting between them, because there's a high degree of centralization in certain sectors (namely, most of Vegas' finances are being run out of LA) they're both combined into a single megaregion.

I don't think it's worth splitting hairs over in this context. Both Fort Worth and Dallas are part of the same region which, overall, is seen as more traditionally Texan than metro Houston and has more things that give it a greater level of overall prominence. The region does a better job at branding than Houston.

Hmmm...not that I'm extremely familiar with Texas, but this doesn't seem accurate. DFW isn't known for higher education so although it may have some large-ish public universities (UNT?), they aren't notable. Also I can't think of any military installations in DFW. Houston, on the other hand, has UH and the state's only two public HBCUs are in its metro area (TSU, Prairie View). And how can you omit NASA and the port for Houston which are recipients of tons of government funding? Now it's certainly possible that Houston is somewhat being left out of the state's economic development plans, but there's definitely plenty of (state and federal) government money flowing to Houston, probably more than DFW.

Dallas is more like Oklahoma, Houston is more like Louisiana, and El Paso is more like New Mexico. The state is too damn big, so encompasses a variety of regions.

"Traditionally Texan", to me, is somewhere like Amarillo or Lubbock.

Dallas is not like OK apart from they are flat and prone to tornadoes and Houston has relatively little in common with LA other than the climate and we are prone to hurricanes. A lot of people from LA live here and probably the case with Okies in DFW. East Texas and LA are pretty similar.

But that's not accurate. Dallas and Ft. Worth may be part of a common metro area but they have very distinct identities. Dallas shed the 'traditionally Texan' long ago where as Ft. Worth still embraces it. Dallas does have better branding than Houston and that stems from it historically being home to more white collar/ corporate jobs where as Houston was traditionally blue collar. That's clearly no longer the case but images are hard to shake and Houston sucks at promoting itself.

Dallas might have moved beyond actively promoting itself with traditional Texan images and symbols, but as you yourself just said, images are hard to shake and two of the most prominent cultural markers of the Metroplex are the show "Dallas" and the Dallas Cowboys, both of which have strong associations with traditional Texas symbols, are associated with Dallas proper in name, and help give Dallas/DFW more visibility than Houston. Honestly I'm having trouble seeing where the inaccuracy is on my part. We're speaking broadly here about prominence and the things that play into it; getting into the weeds about the actual on-the-ground differences between Dallas and Fort Worth kinda is another discussion altogether.

DFW has UT-Dallas and UT-Arlington and UNT which are all competitive with UH. DFW has SMU and TCU and TWU and UD while Houston just has Rice and TSU. Rice is probably way better than all these put together in academic terms of course.

Texas A&M and Sam Houston State are two giant public universities serving Houston, but which are located in traditional college towns slightly too far away to be considered within the Houston metro. I compare it to how Detroit has only one relatively lower status public school in the city, but Ann Arbor is lurking just over the horizon. Or how Milwaukee has Madison.

From an outside perspective I think culturally they're more like than unlike though. . . Dallas feels a lot more Great Plains and bible belt-ey while Houston feels more gulf coast Louisiana and laid back. . .

. . .

UH aside, there's also UH-Downtown, UH-Clear Lake and UH-Victoria. All apart of the UH system but totally different campuses. There's also HBU. And UTHealth and Baylor College of Medicine...but they are health/medical only

Dallas's popular perception is based on some pretty dated pop culture references. It's like me associating Seattle with grunge and flannel.

DFW isn't known for higher education, but the University of Texas system has two large public universities in the metro area (UTA and UTD) which are both vastly improving, especially UTD. Then you also have UNT. Meanwhile, a metro of similar size in Houston only has the Univ. of Houston. UofH has had the hardest time getting into one of the better college conferences. It couldn't get into the Big 12 because state leaders at the time of its formation deliberately left it out. Texas A&M is I guess nearby at about 2-2.5 hours away.

DFW received a bunch of federal and state funding to construct multiple area lakes, which helped with flooding and protecting groundwater. Houston did not receive that same benefit and because of it has had big problems with subsidence.

For military, DFW has Carswell AFB (Naval Air Station Joint Reserve) in Fort Worth, Armed Forces Reserve Complex and Hensley Field are both in Grand Prairie. Houston's only installation (Ellington Field) closed a while ago. The Austin and San Antonio areas both have multiple large military bases/installations. Having those military bases helped transition some of these cities into new economies (like San Antonio with cyber security).

On top of all that, the governor of Texas seems to be leaving Houston out of current expansion in the state, unless it involves an energy company. Looking back at Texas history, most governors have been from the I-35 Corridor of the state, so maybe it shouldn't be a surprise the 35 Corridor is the area of Texas which has received the most economic help from the government, which has boosted the different economies.

Houston has Rice, which is better than any university in TX.

I don't understand what colleges have to do with the discussion. What does it matter?