Svelte, sorry to hear about your accident. I hope it wasn’t with that St. George truck in your picture. No injuries I hope.
sdr, thanks for the lengthy response.
And I am not surprised with your data showing a lot of people moving to St. George from the Salt Lake City area. Probably motivated by our better winter weather and, like us, the small city ambience as opposed to big city atmosphere and costs. And, one can add to that their smog, a problem due to their terrain and prevailing winds.
When we meet newcomers, which is quite common in Brio, our new development, our first question is where are you from. The most common answer is usually a big CA coastal city. The second is somewhere in Utah. Seldom is it the Midwest, and never the big cities of the east coast, who are reportedly moving to Florida.
I have often said here that San Diego is the best west coast city if one wants to live near the ocean, which may be why SD gets so many people in your area from the LA and Bay area. When I taught economics long ago at SDSU, on the first day of class I would sometimes ask where the students were they were from. When I mentioned “the San Francisco area”, a third of the hands would shoot up. I suspect they wanted to get away from Mom and Dad, still pay in-state tuition, and party-on in Surf City, USA.
San Diego was quite liveable then, with decent schools, normal RE prices, good government, and Proposition 13 taxes. So we rode the growing RE appreciating rental market until landlording became more attractive than teaching. But age and CA’s deteriorating trends made us look elsewhere. (OK, sdr, the capital gains we enjoyed were a factor too).
What deteriorating trends? An increasingly expensive and dysfunctional government, crazy environmental rules, homelessness, poor schools, high taxes, traffic congestion, a stasi-like one-party government (reparations anyone?), and no likelihood these trends would change.
So moving to St. George which my son and family had also picked seemed like a natural. And given that CA was losing population and St. George growing exponentially, it seemed like a better location for my RE investments, a bet that has paid off.
sdr, you can point to the amenities of your ritzy neighborhood and count the cranes to predict the future of RE trends, but I am a numbers guy, and we all know CA has been losing population at an increasing rate, and cities like Phoenix, Vegas, Austin are gaining those people. Thus my prediction that RE prices will follow. And contrary to what you are seeing in your unique neighborhood, they are high-income, high tax-bracket techies who learned from COVID they can work from home and don’t have to endure the long commutes of previous years. As you know, AZ and UT have low income taxes, and NV and Texas have none.
So the flight from CA continues, and lately even San Diego has recently lost population. As for some high income LA and San Francisco choosing to move to a more attractive CA coastal city like SD, this is no surprise. It is the least dirty shirt in the closet.
