CEO Peter Rex has had enough.
Rex writes in the Wall Street Journal that he is moving his $1.5 billion tech-driven investment organization, Rex Teams, from Seattle to Texas.
He has had it up to here—make that up to HERE—with the high taxes, regulations and wokeness of San Francisco and Seattle.
“Both cities [San Francisco and Seattle] with governments dominated by cryptosocialists, are notorious for enacting policies that raise the price of housing, drive out jobs and punish innovative companies in ways that hurt workers,” he writes.
But it appears Rex’s last straw was Seattle’s capitulation to the progressive mob that took over part of the city.
As we have previously pointed out, there has been a years-long trend of independent- and conservative-leaning families and businesses moving from blue to red states, where taxes, regulations and the cost of living are lower. And people are freer to follow their dreams.
Blue states are rushing headlong in the opposite direction.
Take the state responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Rex writes, “The West Coast’s progressive policy makers imposed some of the nation’s most regressive lockdown measures.” By regressive, he means that elected officials “utterly neglected the millions of employees who couldn’t work from home, the families that needed to get out of the house, and the religious believers who wanted nothing more than to worship.”
He’s not the only one looking to move. Zillow CEO Richard Barton recently told CNBC that online shopping traffic for homes for sale is up 50 percent year over year. “What we’re seeing is a lot of dissatisfaction with where people are living right now.” Most of the searches are for single-family homes, outside of the downtown areas.
While most discussions attribute the growing interest in moving out of large cities to the pandemic, recent riots that have taken place in many cities may well be exacerbating that trend.
If you are a shop owner whose business was looted, perhaps at gunpoint, and possibly torched during the riots, do you really want to rebuild in the same location? Some will, but we suspect many won’t.
If you are a small business owner trapped in or in close proximity to Seattle’s CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, though later CHOP), with a go-along mayor who not only didn’t stop the chaos but defended it, do you want to remain?
Rex doesn’t.
It may be too early to get reliable data on the number of businesses and families that are fleeing the blue-city chaos. But even when we do, you can bet the liberals responsible for the migration will deny the cause and effect. “Cryptosocialists,” as Rex calls them, never admit that people are fleeing what we might call the “Woke-ers Paradise.”
July 8, 2020