People leaving may decrease housing prices but it also increases the cost of public services per capita. It also can lead abandoned areas as in Detroit.
On the other hand modest growth accompanied by significant increases in the housing supply would also cause the COL to stagnate, but they increase the tax base and decrease the per capita cost of public services, especially if the resulting developments are dense and mixed use.
What we don't want is CA to become a place that's inaccessible to middle class, working families, and the population to skew towards people who are too old to want to move. An exodus of working families just as infrastructure and pension liabilities come due is a recipe for economic disaster.
On the other hand modest growth accompanied by significant increases in the housing supply would also cause the COL to stagnate, but they increase the tax base and decrease the per capita cost of public services, especially if the resulting developments are dense and mixed use.
What we don't want is CA to become a place that's inaccessible to middle class, working families, and the population to skew towards people who are too old to want to move. An exodus of working families just as infrastructure and pension liabilities come due is a recipe for economic disaster.