Study Confirms Business Flight from California Accelerating

The evidence is more than anecdotal. According to a recent study, business flight out of California has accelerated to an unprecedented level. In 2016, the year for which the most recent data is available, 1,800 businesses moved out or “disinvested” from California. This is the highest one-year total in the nine-year history of tracking by […]

Businesses Joined by Non-Profits in Leaving California for Friendlier States

Friends in economic development agencies and in the site selection consulting world have asked why I haven’t posted anything in quite awhile. My answer is simple: I’ve been exceptionally busy. It certainly isn’t because there aren’t things to write about. Another question I’m usually asked is whether businesses are still leaving California. They are, especially […]

Misguided State Policies Lead To More Companies Leaving California

This spring marks the first anniversary of the announcement that Carl’s Jr., a California burger icon for more than six decades, was relocating its headquarters to Nashville. It’s yet another business that has quit California in what was once an almost quiet exodus of companies but now looks more like a stampede. The list of […]

Uber Regulations Mean San Francisco Loses While Phoenix and Pittsburgh Win

Any business person who has dealt with California’s frustrating laws, regulations and bureaucrats was nonetheless surprised to see a story with the headline, “Uber Ships Self-Driving Cars to Arizona After California Ban.” Really? A state ban on Uber? The poster child of the billion-dollar-plus startup, tech-guru, market-disruptor club? Why would Sacramento give Uber, of all people, […]

Two Reporters Walked Into a Bar…

Well, not really. Two reporters moved from California to Texas and last week both of them wrote stories about companies moving to the Lone Star State. In the Dallas Morning News, Jill Cowan wrote a piece about how financial firms are shifting their business operations out of hyper-expensive New York City to “lower cost, more business-friendly […]

The Little Train That Couldn’t: CA’s High Speed Rail

California’s high-speed rail project has fallen into a ditch due to yet another delay. Now would be a good time to put a bullet in this bullet-train scheme before even more billions of taxpayers’ dollars are wasted. The California High-Speed Rail Authority denies there’s a holdup. Maybe it’s just a matter of semantics. What critics are calling […]

California’s Split Personality

Call it a tale of two states. On the one hand, California is briskly creating private-sector jobs, led by a Silicon Valley hiring spree. Sacramento’s budget, deeply in the red just a few years ago, is running a surplus, thanks to big income gains by the state’s wealthy residents. Meanwhile, however, large areas of the […]

Super-Wealthy California City Wants to Charge Family $8M to Close Business

Did several business-hostile politicians leave Sacramento to take over over the City of Palo Alto? Seems that way to me. After all, who else would demand that a family pay $8 million to close its business over issues that the family had nothing to do with? “No one should be forced to carry on a business […]

Has the State’s Business Reputation Improved?

Is California a stellar place for entrepreneurs? What caught my eye in Carla Marinucci’s California Playbook on Politico was an item than California ranked number three of all the states as a positive place for entrepreneurs. One hopes that the entrepreneur spirit is alive and well in California. Certainly, many of the risk takers in […]

Tax Increase Plans Force Business to Look Elsewhere

California is considering imposing the most ruthless set of taxes ever placed on businesses in the state’s history – a tsunami of levies that may trigger the worst raid on private-sector finances ever organized by the state’s politicians. One result will be an increasing number of businesses leaving California for greener domestic or international pastures. […]