Maybe they are moving somewhere else in California, but they are clearly getting out of Los Angeles because the costs have been skyrocketing while median wage has been moving nowhere. Hence Los Angeles has seen a massive population decrease.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkot...ties-where-a-paycheck-stretches-the-farthest/
"In contrast, many of the cities toward the bottom of our list — notably the Los Angeles and New York areas — have led the country in domestic outmigration. Between 2000 and 2009, the nation’s cultural capitals lost a total of over 3 million people to other parts of the country. Although migration has slowed in the recession, the pattern has continued since 2010."
"Similarly these high prices seem to have the effect of driving out middle-class workers; places like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco have extraordinary concentrations of both rich and poor workers but fewer in the middle. "
The only detailed analysis of California immigration/outmigration I could find basically seems to confirm that Los Angeles saw a colossal outmigration during the 2000-2010 period, losing an astounding 600k people (1.15 million domestic emigrants, fleeing mostly to the Southwest, offset by 600k foreign immigrants, coming from foreign nations to Los Angeles). Now, California as a whole apparently gained 200,000 people, so it does seem that Los Angeles in particular is getting murdered by outmigration, while the rest of California is doing much better. But particularly of note is not only the vast exodus of Los Angeles residents, but that the exodus is only being replaced by foreign immigrants -- not by domestic immigrants. If you are a US citizen, you have by and large gotten the hell out of Los Angeles.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_71.htm#.U2Az0Ff5Tng
Again, that outmigration (primarily to Southwestern states) has been my impression and is basically a truism for almost everybody here, which of course doesn't mean it's true, but doesn't exactly convey a sense of "it's okay, large corporate employers can leave and nobody is going to suffer for it."
It's great that you and your GF are doing well, but statistically that's a freakish exception. What's interesting is that the middle class used to succeed *without* being particularly competitive. Nowadays, economic competition in California is basically a murderer's row; if you don't have wealth or aren't a killer, you are fucked -- your only real hope is to suck off the public teat. In this, California simply mirrors the broader national trends, it must be admitted, but it is at the higher end of the problem, not the lower. Again, I find it strange that you would suggest that entrenched inequality is not a problem, and that social mobility has not fallen through the floor, when that's pretty much both the default consensus AND what you commonly claim in other contexts.
If you just dwell in relatively elite circles and haven't lived here long-term, you may not have noticed the slow decline of middle class Southern California, a dying world, replaced by intensive stratification. So you probably don't regret it. But it's part-and-parcel of what you generally claim to be against.
