Asks some guy:
How Do You Know When It’s Time To Flee A Deep-Blue Hellhole?
Oh, I dunno. Let me take a stab at it. Here are what I would call good reasons, not in order but as they occur to me. When:
- the state’s legislature and governor’s office is pretty much controlled by the Left (from which, it should be said, all the rest of the catastrophe flows)
- high taxes, and increasingly more-frequent tax increases and new taxes
- permissive attitudes on the part of elected officials (such as district attorneys) towards criminal behavior
- restrictive gun laws pertaining to ownership, possession and use
- a state education system which fails to educate children, but which is intent on sexualizing them
- a stifling bureaucracy that operates seemingly without check or censure as it oppresses the public
- there’s a homeless problem which is apparently encouraged by local regulation and law
- government is in thrall to whatever current fad is popular, e.g. climate change, LGBTOSTFU or drug decriminalization
- cities are falling apart in terms of infrastructure (e.g. public transport and roads/bridges)
- there’s an inability or unwillingness of government to address difficult social problems
- still more that I can’t think of at the moment, but I’m sure that others can.
Ironically, the original article was written by a guy living in Australia, where leaving one state for another is pretty much akin to choosing to die from slow-acting poison or from cancer. In U.S. terms, that’s like someone leaving California to live in Massachusetts.
Unfortunately, by the time that even a third of that list is true, property values will nose-dive and you’ll lose most of your equity, having to start over from scratch on any new house somewhere else. Either that, or you won’t be able to sell and be financially trapped there. I mean, there’s always the potential to simply walk away with nothing, but hard to do if supporting a family with children. They did it in the past, I suppose, but still.
If you’re already asking the question, then it’s probably past time to shit and git.
Houses in my neighborhood in Virginia have gone up ~50% over the past two years of the Biden Terror. Almost all sales during that time time were bid up from asking, sold first day, cash sale, sight unseen, to come-heres from Massachusetts, New York and California.
QED
People say “Oh, you made money on your investment.” Like hell. My property tax assessment went up with no additional benefit to me, and anything I might want to buy, if I sell, is proportionally more expensive. I can only hope the noobs are not bring the Leftist voting poison with them.
Your hope will be dashed on the rocks of a lee-shore.
As DC above said, quite eloquently: Time to Go!
You could move to Colorado where we just took away the limits for how much the local assessor’s office can raise your assessed value of your home. Sure, the value of my property has gone up but there is no way in God’s good green Earth that my 1100 sq ft second floor condo is worth half a million dollars…nearly double my assessed value from last year.
You have to fight them with comps, graphs, anything you can think of and
have the figures written down so that you don’t stumble with a brain fart
during the ‘hearing’ !
A friend once told a board in regards to his ‘new’ assessment –
‘If you can get that price for it, I’ll be out of it THIS WEEK ! They, the board
backed off.
They raise this ‘assessments’ because they KNOW that most ( 90+% !!?? ) will
not or do not know how to fight them and just bend over and …………………………….
Get EVERYONE in you complex to go at the SAME TIME and start contesting
en mass !!!
The last time I was involved in one of these ‘hearings’ I found out that the house
there were using as my comp was also 20% BIGGER than my house. They pull
these numbers out of their asses and the numbers should be ‘put back’
good and HARD !!
Another indicator is when a state like MA has extremely unfriendly gun laws. Then you go look at the results over time and find that the critters in the large cities (Boston, Springfield) are almost never charged with gun offenses even when caught red-handed by the cops. Reason? Almost always the local DA pleads the gun charges away. Let upstanding John Q. Citizen make an honest mistake and they’ll be happy to bend you over without benefit of lube. No plea for you!
How is this not a stupid question? If you live in a hellhole, you should be planning to get out as soon as possible. That’s what hellhole MEANS. If it’s a deep blue one, that just means that total collapse is inevitable. But why would you EVER choose to live in a hellhole for one day longer than you absolutely have to?
For me, when I fled the Dark & Fascist State of New Jersey nearly 20 years ago, it was the death of my illusions.
You see, I’d spent the 5 years or so before that dedicated to the proposition that there was, buried deep in the hearts of my fellow countrymen, an ember of traditional American premise of self ownership and self determination that was consistent with the Founder’s vision. I spent those 5 years deep in political activism, seeking to rekindle that flame…until I had to admit the stark truth: it simply wasn’t there in anything close to the electorally significant numbers that would make a difference. The large majority of the people of that place held in their hearts an alien, incompatible premise, more Rousseau than Locke, and were quite happy with it.
If (big IF!) we accept the democratic premise that the majority gets to have their way with the minority, then there was nothing else for it than to pack up biz, family, dogs and goods to vamoose to safer climes.
Frankly, anchored to family, we did not flee far enough. In the intervening 20 years, I have seen the adversary’s (and make no doubt, these people are your adversaries; they are happy to support by word and deed policies that would see you destitute or imprisoned for simply exercising your righteous prerogatives) lines sweep over the populous Philadelphia suburbs to lock PA into what will, short of a still plausible miracle, prove to be a long, drawn out Leftist death spiral.
A prime indicator for defining a hellhole is that there are no ‘stand your ground’ or ‘castle’ provisions for self-defense, and especially if ‘castle’ does not extend to and cover your business, and your employees.
If your employee could arrest and hold the shoplifter without possibility that there would some made up liability, shoplifters would soon stop ‘lifting. And an armed shoplifter would become a prospect for a Darwin Award.