By Ashley Nickel for Daily Mail Australia

23:34 28 Jun 2022, updated 23:47 28 Jun 2022

• Queensland renovator Nat Redgrave bought a “crack den” for less than $60,000
• He wants to remodel the three-bed home in Charters Towers in two months
• A burned spoon and box of syringes were found in the Queensland home
• The median price for a three bedroom home in Charters Towers is over $207,000

A handyman has tackled the ultimate home renovation project to turn an abandoned ‘cave’ into a white picket fence single family home. He took less than three months to complete the ambitious work.

Nat Redgrave bought a home in the Queensland town of Charters Towers, two hours south of Townsville, and on Monday shared video of the interior being approved.

He asked about investment properties in the area on Facebook and received a message from the home’s former owner.

“I hadn’t seen it, I just wanted to take some pictures,” he told Daily Mail Australia.

“After we bought it, I sat down with a carpenter and his first reaction was, ‘No way mate, you have to cancel this contract.'”

“It’s a doable renovation, just a lot of manual work.”

Scroll down for the video.

Queensland renovator Nat Redgrave bought a three-bedroom “crack den” home (above) in Charter Towers for less than $60,000

Video posted Monday showed the home’s overgrown front yard, burned-out electrical box, dingy interior still filled with the previous owner’s belongings, and dingy kitchen and bathroom.

Mr Redgrave said he bought the three-bedroom home for just under $60,000 and hopes to limit renovation costs to $70,000.

He said he first jokingly referred to the house as a “crack den” but has since found some items that suggest people were using drugs in the house.

“I expected to find a lot from outside the home,” he said.

“I didn’t find much, just a box of syringes and a spoon with a bend and a burnt bottom.”

In a viral video on Monday, Mr Redgrave showed off the filthy interior of the house, the burned out electrical box and the overgrown garden (pictured Monday’s fridge). Mr Redgrave shared photos of what the house looked like after a day of cleaning (pictured). The first video on Monday showed the house was still full of the previous owner’s unwanted possessions (pictured a bedroom in the house on Monday). With the help of friends he cleared out a ton of rubbish Nat Redgrave (above) is determined to convert the Charters Towers ‘crack den’ into a picket fenced family home in just over two months

He said the house is a one-off “cat among doves” in an otherwise beautiful area, adding that locals are excited to see how the eyesore will transform in the near future.

He hopes the home will be “safe, tidy, and pretty” in about two months and will go on the market for about $220,000.

“The house looks crazy, but it has good floors and a good roof,” said Mr Redgrave.

“Kitchen is ok and bathroom is pretty good, just needs a good cleaning.”

“We’re going to put up a picket fence at the front, give it a little nice touch and then it’s ready for sale.”

Several items found in the home suggest the people who previously lived there used drugs, including a bent and burned spoon (above) and syringes. Mr Redgrave said he hopes to turn the house (above) into a “safe, tidy and nice” picket-fence family home with $70,000 in just over two months

Videos of the “crack den Reno” have skyrocketed on TikTok and the hard-working Queensland renovator has racked up over 25,000 followers overnight.

He said he plans to share more of the renovation work, as he’s already torn up the house’s old carpets and removed a lot of trash from the house.

A day after the viral video was filmed, Mr Redgrave shared photos of the house with Daily Mail Australia.

The house (pictured a bedroom in the house on Monday) is expected to sell for around $220,000 following Mr Redgrave’s renovations

Charters Towers is a small town of approximately 11,600 people located 84 miles southwest of Townsville.

The average price for a three-bedroom home in the area is $207,500, according to realestate.com.au, with growth of 8.4 percent over the past year.

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Nigel Duara, Cal Matters

California’s best-known prison is being reorganized into a rehabilitation center under a plan the governor announced Friday — a move hailed as revolutionary by some prison reform advocates but derided by prison abolitionists as mere window dressing, rather than the more dramatic changes the you want to.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state will spend $20 million to begin restructuring San Quentin State Prison from a facility housing 3,300 inmates in a high-security San Francisco Bay Area location to a “center for innovation focused on… Education, rehabilitation and breaking the cycle of crime.”

What that will look like in the end remains unclear for the time being. The new facility will be designed by an advisory committee made up of crime victims, ex-prisoners and academics, according to Newsom’s office. The democratically controlled legislature must also approve funding for the rehabilitation plan.

“This is certainly new, bold and ambitious, and I’m pleased to see it as a step in the right direction,” said Sharon Dolovich, director of the UCLA Prison Law and Policy Program.

“Sometimes it slips between cup and lip, so who knows how it will turn out. But the idea is right.”

Newsom’s office has not provided a final cost estimate for the facility’s restructuring. He marked four more state prisons to close since taking office in 2019, a trend made possible by the declining inmate population at California state prisons.

He said the increased emphasis on rehabilitation would better prepare inmates to rejoin their communities.

“We are here to do more and get better, to reconcile and to face the hard realities. We are as stupid as we want to be,” he said in a statement in prison. “Two-thirds of the people who get out of prison every year within three years violate a parole order or commit some other damned crime. Where’s the security in that?”

A Newsom spokesman said he does not expect to lay off prison staff as part of the change.

However, San Quentin is known as the home of California’s Death Row The state has not executed an inmate since 2006. Newsom in 2019 declared a moratorium on executions. In 2022, he announced a plan to disband death row and send convicted inmates to other locations.

The new plan would complete the closure of death row and shut down a prison industry agency camp. The facility would be renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Some of the larger questions about the reorganization will remain unanswered until the prison’s advisory committee makes a decision, including which inmates will be eligible for the rehabilitation center.

The new facility will also offer job training, according to the governor’s office, although the advisory committee must decide which jobs inmates will be trained for. In prisons in other states where job training is a priority, jobs include plumbing and long-distance transportation.

The plan for the new facility is based on prisons in Scandinavian countries, including Norway, which significantly improved its recidivism rate from 60% to 70% in the 1980s to around 20% today as it began to grant more freedom to prisoners and focused its prisons on rehabilitation.

In these prisons, inmates can wear their own clothes, cook their own food, and move relatively freely within the prison walls. This model has taken root in states as different as deep blue Connecticut and deep red North Dakota.

Conditions in San Quentin

As early as 1983, San Quentin was a symbol of California’s inability to safely house its inmates. A federal one Ministry of Justice report from that year pointed to overcrowded conditions, filthy facilities and “serious management problems.”

More than 20 years later, prisoners from San Quentin were among them to file a lawsuit against California’s prison system and claimed that the medical care they received was inadequate. As part of that lawsuit, a judge found that up to 10 deaths in San Quentin were due to preventable causes.

More recently, at least seven prisoners from San Quentin a hunger strike to protest what they described as dire conditions during a massive COVID-19 outbreak and quarantine at the facility in 2021.

Gangs could operate in San Quentin as they did in most California prisons. Even in his highest security unit, the Safe Housing Unit, which keeps particularly dangerous or influential inmates in solitary confinement for up to an hour or two a day, is a former member of a California prison gang CalMatters announced that he was able to lead a crew of Mexican mafia gang members out of the unit.

The prison, California’s oldest, also has a long list of maintenance needs that add up more than $1.6 billion in 2021. A report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office last month showed the state has the capacity to shut down up to nine prisons and eight yards by 2027, as California’s inmate population continues to shrink, and recommended closing those prisons with the greatest maintenance needs.

A model for rehabilitation in California

But San Quentin is also a center of opportunity for inmates, with a award-winning prison newspaper, the inmate-hosted podcast Ear Hustle, and a degree program that allows inmates to earn an associate’s degree in general studies after completing 20 classes.

Turning the few things that work at San Quentin on its head would be one of the downsides to restructuring the prison, said Brian Kaneda, associate director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, which has a list of 10 prisons, the Newsom scheduled to close by 2027.

“One reason San Quentin isn’t on our list for closures is that it has good programming,” Kaneda said. “Well, there’s no such thing as a bad prison to close, we’d love for San Quentin to close, but what’s happening with the programming there?”

The broader plan, Kaneda said, set off “a major alarm bell” for prison abolitionists.

“The last thing California needs is a new incarceration philosophy spearheaded by (the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) who have proven poor stewards of public trust,” Kaneda said.

The Assembly’s Republican caucus did not immediately respond to messages from CalMatters seeking comment.

A bill passed by lawmakers last year would have created a similar pilot program on other prison campuses. News vetoed the bill and blamed his expense.

the author of the bill, Assemblyman Carlos Villapuda, a Stockton Democrat, said he traveled to Norway with CDCR officials this year to better understand how their prisons work. Villapudua’s proposal focused on trucking, an industry in his district that he said needed fresh blood.

The proposal he devised would have allowed people incarcerated to obtain their commercial driver’s license while still in prison.

“Before you are released, you will be tested by the state,” Villapudua said. “This will be the answer to many of our prayers.”

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• Rebecca Möller said it seemed “impossible” to build homes in the Bay Area that people could afford.
• She started a company, Symbihom, that transforms otherwise industrial garages into livable spaces.
• She described how the homes both add much-needed rental housing and help homeowners make money.

This essay is based on a conversation with Rebecca Möller, 64, founder of Symbihom, a company that converts garages in the San Francisco Bay Area into apartments that homeowners can then rent to renters. In this part of California, these units are often referred to as additional residential units, or ADUs, because they are additional dwellings built on the same lot as the primary residence.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I started my company in 2020 after coming across a BBC article about how Berlin and London are trying to solve their housing shortage by converting garages into apartments.

I saw an opportunity to create a replicable, scalable model. So I designed a modular product that would fit in a garage and San Jose pre-approved it.

I got my first investors in May 2021 and then I built my first model. The walls are proprietary modular panels built externally by a prefab factory, with electrical and plumbing already installed. They snap onto a concrete floor and are then strapped on top. I use electricity and water from the house itself.

All elements that go into the unit, except for the walls, are then taken to a warehouse where they are combined into a capsule. Then they are transported to the location of the garage along with the wall panels and installed in the garage. All in all, once approved, it takes no more than four weeks to put the whole thing together.

My units have sold for $150,000 to $220,000. So far I’ve built four units — five more in the pipeline — across San Jose, San Mateo, and Mountain View.

Möller in one of the garages that have been converted into residential buildings. Suszi Lurie McFadden

My previous jobs prepared me to lead a real estate startup

I was born in North Texas. I went to the University of Texas-Arlington to get my bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, but didn’t become a professional engineer. Instead, I started my real estate career in construction at a global cost consulting firm in Fort Worth. There I did an apprenticeship as a mass expert and calculator.

The first contractor I worked with was the largest in Dallas. I assembled 55-story buildings, mixed-use properties and hotels. Years later, I moved to Philadelphia to join the largest contractor in the metro area, working on data centers, operations centers, and hospitals.

I wrote all of the purchase agreements, cost controls and claims on the field at the Wells Fargo Center, home of the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers and the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers. In 1997 I started my own business to oversee the interests of Fortune 500 companies and have worked for large corporations such as IBM and Verizon.

My career in commercial has taught me how to write a contract, hold people accountable and be fair. It’s really important to understand what needs to go into a number estimate. You really need someone at the table who has the knowledge to make a realistic estimate.

I moved to the Bay Area

I came to the Bay Area in 2017 to oversee some high rise residential projects for a commercial developer. Then I was brought in to do a feasibility study at a university that had been given a building by the state. The university planned to set up the project for its teachers and staff. It is a detailed analysis of a project, how much it will cost and how likely it is to be successful.

I realized that the project would cost about $1 million per unit to build, which could not generate a below-market solution for the university. Put simply, the rents didn’t pay for the project. In addition, I realized that the teachers and staff earned less than the region’s median income of $160,000 a year.

The exterior of one of Symbihom’s garage ADUs. Suszi Lurie McFadden

That was my aha moment. I started thinking about what I could do. That’s how it all started.

The living spaces I install are unique to each garage

To start, I go out and visit a homeowner, do an appraisal and take measurements on the garage. I have a really fancy laser scanning the room. Once we’re gone I’ll take an as-is of the inside of the garage to share with all my professionals.

My studio living unit is between 170 square feet and 400 square feet for a one car garage or a small two car garage. My one and two bedroom ADU can range from a 420 square foot unit in a large two car garage to a 1,200 square foot unit in a three car garage.

A representation of one of the two-room apartments that Symbihom is building. Courtesy of Rebecca Möller /Symbihom

All units have a full bathroom with shower, vanity and toilet. You also have a kitchen with a large fridge freezer, extractor hood and hob, quartz worktops, convection oven and sink.

The shower walls are also made of quartz, and there are dimmer switches in every room. The floors are cork and bamboo and the units have solid core barn doors.

There is also an 18-inch dishwasher in the kitchen and a tower washer-dryer in the one- and two-bedroom units.

I love building something beautiful and adding apartments at the same time

The most rewarding part of my business is making a quality product that allows my clients to earn extra income by renting out the unit.

I really started doing this to solve a problem. Sure, my goal is to sell units, but on the side I’m helping solve a problem while making a profit.

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The post I Remodel Garages Into Leases so Householders Can Make Passive Earnings appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Luis went to prison on a life sentence 16 years ago, at age 17. Food came on a tray and leftovers were removed on the same brown plastic rectangle.

So he had never cooked or done dishes before moving to the “Little Scandinavia” unit in the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Chester last year — an experiment modeled after Northern European systems of incarceration, where the goal is less about punishment and more about turning out people who can be good neighbors.

Here, Luis (Pennsylvania prison rules prevent me from using his last name) has use of four stainless steel stoves, two blond-wood islands, pots including a bright blue Dutch oven and a fridge that holds groceries from a nearby supermarket. There are even some not-too-sharp knives.

“It dawned on me that all these years I had become conditioned and dependent,” he told me, standing in that spotless kitchen shared by 54 men. Being able to clean up after himself was an autonomy he didn’t even know he wanted, or needed.

The kitchen in the “Little Scandinavia” unit is spotless and stocked with an array of appliances, cooking utensils and fresh groceries.

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

This week, Gov. Gavin Newsom will announce that California will take its own leap forward, rethinking the purpose of prison by “ending San Quentin as we know it,” he told me Wednesday.

By 2025, California’s first and most infamous penitentiary, where criminals including Charles Manson and Scott Peterson have done time, will become something entirely different: the largest center of rehabilitation, education and training in the California prison system, and maybe the nation. No longer will it be a maximum security facility. Instead, it will be a place for turning out good neighbors, incorporating Scandinavian methods.

The vision for a new San Quentin includes job training for careers that can pay six figures, trades such as plumbers, electricians or truck drivers, and using the complex as a last stop of incarceration before release. Tucked in the proposed budget Newsom released weeks ago is $20 million to jump-start the effort.

The plan for San Quentin is “not just about reform, but about innovation,” a chance to “hold ourselves to a higher level of ambition and look to completely reimagine what prison means,” Newsom said.

The “Little Scandinavia” unit features comfortable, open living spaces meant to encourage conversation and connection.

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

Along with Pennsylvania, the Scandinavian philosophy of incarceration has already been implemented in pilot programs in Oregon and ultra-red North Dakota, as well as in small-scale experiments inside a few other California prisons.

But what’s envisioned for San Quentin is on a different scale. The choice of this prison, tucked on a peninsula in wealthy Marin County and overlooking San Francisco Bay, is a statement by Newsom about justice reform and about California — one with the potential not only to change what it means to serve time, but also to create a pathway to safer communities that our current system has failed to deliver.

Despite consent decrees, prison closures and even the de facto end of the death penalty, California’s approach to crime and punishment remains problematic, as it does across the U.S. Our recidivism rates remain stubbornly high, people of color are disproportionately incarcerated, and both conservatives and liberals make loud arguments as to why.

The goal of the Scandinavian approach to incarceration is less about punishment and more about turning out people who can be good neighbors.

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

Fundamentally, we can’t agree on what prison is for — should its main goal be to punish, or guide? To be a source of ongoing suffering, or opportunity?

Many on the right say prison should serve as a deterrent: Serving time is not supposed to be pleasant, and hard conditions teach hard lessons. On the left, many say restorative justice and other means of diverting people from incarceration should be the priority.

But do such dichotomies miss the point?

The reality is that most people who go into prison come out again, more than 30,000 a year in California, Newsom points out. So public safety depends on people choosing to change, and having opportunities for a sustainable, law-abiding life. Otherwise they will simply go back to what they know, be it selling dope, robbing houses or worse.

“Do you want them coming back with humanity and some normalcy, or do you want them coming back more bitter and more beaten down?” Newsom asks.

The Scandinavian model looks at the loss of liberty and separation from community as the punishment. During that separation, life should be as normal as possible so that people can learn to make better choices without being preoccupied by fear and violence.

Gina Clark, superintendent of the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution in Chester, is still gauging the success of “Little Scandinavia.” Her aim is to turn out inmates who will help rather than hurt their communities.

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

Influencing people to make those better choices, “should be the common goal, no matter what your opinions are, where your beliefs are, what political party you are affiliated with,” Gina Clark, the superintendent of Chester (the Pennsylvania equivalent of a warden) told me.

Clark inherited Little Scandinavia from her predecessor and is waiting for more data before deciding if it works. But incarceration’s purpose, she said, should always look beyond the offender to the community. Will this person help or hurt their community when released? Have we done everything we can to ensure it is the former?

That focus on community safety could make the Scandinavian model the sweet spot of consensus — if people can get past the politics and understand what Chester and now San Quentin are trying to do. And that comes down to understanding the officers who spend their days on the front lines of incarceration.

::

The Scandinavian prison model encourages collegiality on the theory that inmates can learn to make better choices when they are not preoccupied by fear and violence.

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

Pennsylvania corrections officer Matt Tompkins has the word “sink” tattooed below the knuckles of one hand and “swim” on the other.

It’s a nod, he said, to lyrics from an old punk song. But for a while it was also how he felt about his job inside Chester, in the same gritty area outside Philadelphia where he was born. Stress and confrontation were constant and he felt like he was sinking. Just like the men he was watching.

“It wears you down,” he told me. “Little by little, over the years.”

Prison guards have high rates of depression and health issues. Studies have shown they face a risk of suicide 39 times higher than for people in all other professions. Tompkins has lost two colleagues that way in seven years.

But his outlook changed in 2019 when Chester began planning Little Scandinavia. A professor from nearby Drexel University, Jordan Hyatt, conceived of the experiment with a European colleague and helped arrange a trip to Norway, Sweden and Denmark, where Tompkins was able to work with his counterparts.

Experts familiar with the Scandinavian prison model say that when correctional officers and inmates break down the “us vs. them” wall, prisons are better places for everyone involved.

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

It was “mind-blowing,” Tompkins said. A European officer asked him what a good day looked like, and Tompkins’ answer was that American standard of law enforcement: when he went home to his family alive.

“Like I don’t get stabbed, I don’t get beat up, I don’t get hurt,” Tompkins said.

That shocked the Scandinavian officer, who saw a good day as one where he changed an inmate’s life for the better.

“I never once thought, as a correctional officer, I had the ability to change somebody’s life. Never dawned on me whatsoever,” Tompkins said. “And that’s when a lightbulb went off in my head. … You recognize that when you have the ability to help someone, it feels good.”

Though Tompkins once dreamed of jumping to the FBI, he now thinks he could retire from Chester. He is so confident of his safety that on the day I interviewed him, he had left his pepper spray in his office.

Shower facilities in the “Little Scandinavia” unit are clean and offer inmates some privacy.

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

In his unit, the officers aren’t saddled by rules against fraternizing with prisoners. Instead, they are trained as mentors and assigned a handful of men for whom they serve as the main contact for getting help, whether that be a personal issue, educational resources or a friendly ear. Sometimes they sit down on the blue couches and just talk.

“I still deal with a lot of individuals with different personalities, different problems, different complexes, and it can be emotionally draining,” Tompkins said. “But that trade-off is a lot easier when you realize you can make a difference.”

Building those relationships leads to “dynamic security,” Hyatt, the researcher, told me — a peace held not through force but through mutual respect and a willingness to hear what the inmates need and want.

Before you roll your eyes, it’s not just Hyatt and Tompkins who say it works. In more than a dozen interviews I did with experts, officers, inmates and former inmates, there was consensus that when guards and incarcerated people break down the us-against-them wall, prisons are better places for everyone involved.

“We are 100% behind the Norway project when it’s done right,” Glen Stailey told me. He’s the head of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., the union that represents guards.

Inmates in the “Little Scandinavia” unit are able to order fresh groceries and cook their own meals.

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

Sam Lewis, the executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, an advocacy organization working to end mass incarceration, told me much the same thing.

“The prisons that we have in America were not meant to transform people into the best versions of themselves. They were built to house and warehouse people,” said Lewis, who himself served 24 years. But the Scandinavian model is “helping people become the best version of themselves. As we bring people home, if we give them real opportunities to make a decent living, think of how we are breaking the cycle.”

Lewis and Stailey traveled to Norway and Sweden in 2019 and were stunned by the way officers and inmates interacted. They saw the potential despite the differences between the U.S. and Scandinavian countries. Officers “value the relationships they build with people in prison, so they value the people in prison,” Lewis said.

That shift, prioritizing care over control, is the heart of what San Quentin is about to do. But it’s the “when it’s done right” part that both Lewis and Stailey worry about.

The entrance to the “Little Scandinavia” unit greets visitors with colorful murals.

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

California is not Norway — gangs, drugs and mental illness plague our system to a degree unimaginable to our Scandinavian counterparts. All of those problems will need to be accounted for, along with convincing correctional officers that less aggression actually makes them safer. San Quentin will need to train officers and give them the space to use that training, meaning more officers for fewer inmates.

But most of all, success will require a cultural shift inside and outside the walls of San Quentin, a belief that those coming out of prison deserve to be our neighbors.

Luis, originally convicted of first degree murder, was recently resentenced due to a change in laws for juvenile offenders. He may be eligible for parole in five years. He credits Little Scandinavia with giving him a chance of success on the outside by offering him the dignity, calm and opportunity to figure himself out.

He no longer sees the way he grew up as normal, no longer looks at violence and crime as inevitable. Now, he thinks about being closer to the son he had when he was 14. Maybe he’ll make him dinner, saute him some shrimp if he gets the chance.

“As humans, we adjust. So if the environment is bad, eventually you start to drift,” he said of regular prison. “Here, it’s productive. So by the time you get out, you’re a better person.”

And that’s a triple win — for Luis, for the officers who watch him today, and for the neighbors he will one day have.

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Los Angeles and San Francisco saw sizable declines in population during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, new census data show, underscoring how California’s housing crisis and other demographic forces are reshaping two of its largest cities.

In terms of total numbers, Los Angeles County lost about 160,000 residents — more than any other county in the nation, the data show. But LA County has about 10 million people, so the per capita loss was slightly more than 1% compared with 6.7% in San Francisco and 6.9% in New York.

“We are in this new demographic era for California of very slow or maybe even negative growth,” said Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. “And it does have implications for everything in our state — from how we live our lives to which schools are getting closed down to how much capacity we might need for transportation networks, and eventually to housing.”

The data, published Thursday by the US Census Bureau, show California as a whole saw a net loss of nearly 262,000 residents between July 1, 2020, and July 1, 2021, with the lion’s share of the losses coming from Los Angeles County: 159,621 people. The second-largest countywide loss in the nation was New York, which declined by about 111,000 residents.

The findings paint a picture of a state in flux, with factors such as soaring home prices, dwindling birth rates, and more work-from-home options contributing to a population on the move.

“This loss that both California is experiencing and Los Angeles County is experiencing are kind of the perfect storm from a demographic perspective, and all the components that lead to population change are all trending in a downward direction for both the state and Los Angeles,” Johnson said.

Nearly all of the state’s population loss was driven by domestic migration, data show, meaning most people who are leaving are choosing to go — often seeking more affordable housing and job opportunities, or moving with family.

Jena Lords said she and her husband discussed leaving Bakersfield for several years because they were unhappy with the direction the state was going. They decamped to Idaho last year.

“The top reason was 2nd Amendment rights,” said Lords, 39. “There’s also the high cost of living, tax fees, regulations.”

Lords and her husband both had stints in the firearms industry, she said. To them, it felt as though “the governor didn’t want us to be able to defend ourselves.”

The pandemic provided a rare opportunity for the pair to move — Lords had been working remotely as a department coordinator at Cal State Bakersfield and her husband quit his job in November 2020. Last spring, she accepted a position as an administrative assistant at Idaho State University .

She and her husband lived in their recreational vehicle for 10 months before closing escrow on a $140,000 home sitting on half an acre of land in Pocatello, about an hour south of Idaho Falls, two months ago.

“The hardest thing was leaving our friends and family — and the beach, of course,” Lords said. “It’s amazing, the difference in culture. It’s a real small-town feel.”

California overall lost about 367,000 people like the Lords to domestic migration — a number higher than the net loss, which includes gains from births and other sources. Los Angeles lost about 180,000 to domestic migration

The census numbers underscore population losses the state has faced in recent years. The state lost a seat in Congress for the first time in history due to sluggish population growth.

The Bay Area, where skyrocketing housing costs have long been a major problem, was hit particularly hard. San Francisco lost about 54,000 residents and Santa Clara County — home to Silicon Valley — 45,000 people.

But more affordable parts of Southern California, such as Riverside and San Bernardino counties, saw growth during this period, including people coming from other areas. Riverside saw the third-highest population gain in the nation with about 36,000 new residents, following only Maricopa County, Ariz., and Collin County, Texas, according to the data.

California was also among the minority to see a “natural increase” in the population, or more births than deaths during that one-year period, the data show. More than 73% of US counties experienced natural decrease in 2021.

Yet natural increase is also slowing both nationally and within California. The state reported 91,996 more births than deaths from July 2020 to 2021, according to the census data, but that number was about 262,000 in 2015.

And while the state saw a net gain in international migration — about 14,300 people moved to California from abroad — the number is also significantly lower than what it was in recent years. About ten years ago, Los Angeles County received close to 50,000 people through international immigration. This year, the county reported only about 4,000.

“All those factors are operating together now in ways that we’ve never seen before,” said Johnson, the demographer. “We’ve had periods with large domestic out-migration, but not at the same time that we saw this big decline in foreign immigration and a slowdown in natural increase. So when you add all those things together, that adds up to population losses both for the state and for Los Angeles that are very, very unusual demographically.”

Although the COVID-19 pandemic probably played a role in less immigration, the number of international migrants has been steadily declining for several years, said Paul Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA.

“It’s a combination of those things, but certainly it was happening before the pandemic,” Ong said. “In some ways, it’s part of what we see historically in terms of immigrants — that they do settle and cluster in a few areas and cities, but over time they move away. And when they move away, they sponsor new relatives coming in further away from the original core.”

A shrinking population can have a negative effect on the local economy and can mean fewer skilled workers, Ong said.

For some, the decision to leave California grew out of mounting frustration and a desire for change.

“I started seeing the homeless population increasing and nothing being done about it,” said former Southern California resident Alfredo Malatesta, who immigrated to LA from Peru as a child. “It was starting to remind me of where I left many years before.”

He and his wife, Erin, moved from Santa Clarita to Tennessee in 2017, and have taken a shine to rural life outside Nashville.

“You feel like everyone is out to screw you in a way in a city like Los Angeles. And for the amount I pay to live here, the taxes, the infrastructure falling apart … everything is just like constantly like you’re getting screwed,” Malatesta, 43, said.

After sitting down and mapping out the future, the couple decided they wanted some distance from the “fatigue” they felt in LA — and a new adventure with a simpler life.

“I kept telling myself that my wife and I can’t live here happily, and the system is counterproductive and not efficient. It’s harder and harder to run a business when these stresses are pressing down on you,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like Los Angeles has an identity anymore.”

The post Large inhabitants drops in L.A., San Francisco rework state appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

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