When moving companies devote multiple blog posts specifically courting Californians moving to Texas, that’s just another indication that the California migration to Tejas is a bona fide sign of the times.
Take St. Louis-based United Van Lines for example. They’ve tracked inbound and outbound state moves since 1977 with its annual National Movers Study, but earlier this year United Van Lines took a deep dive to understand why — out of the reams of statistics they use to report the top 10 states that people move into and out of — they have seen such a hefty migration from California to Texas.
They’re calling it the relocation sweeping the (west of our) nation. “One of the most interesting trends from the 2019 United Van Lines’ National Movers Study and reports throughout the year is the hefty migration that’s happening between California and Texas,” United says.
Among people who moved out of California in 2019, 7 percent of those moving trucks were headed for Texas. By comparison, the next most popular state that Californians moved to was Arizona with just 2.8 percent.
Speaking of reams of statistics, flip through this interactive tool created by United Van Lines which shows the states where people are moving into and out of. “Outbound” states are shown in yellow and “inbound” states are shown in blue.
Tip: Just select the year to see migration patterns all the way back to 1977. For example, you’ll see a large retreat out of the northeast in 1980 — a trend that dissipates by 1986. The Pacific northwest got hot in the early 90s, around the time Seattle-based Starbucks went public. You get the idea.
But moving studies obviously aren’t the only data to consult. This one just has a cool graphic tool. As David Byrne might ask, how did we get here?
Some reports estimate over the last 10 years, nearly one million people have transplanted from California into Texas. Ten years, really. Some say it all visibly started in 2014, when Toyota announced its plan to relocate from Torrance, California to west Plano.
By July 2017, Toyota officially opened the doors to their new billion-dollar North American headquarters, where the carmaker’s marketing, sales, engineering, and manufacturing arms were all put under one Texas-sized roof. Unofficially, that’s when we started spotting more Toyota Prius’ with California plates around town.
The real estate market really began shifting in 2018 when, according to Texas Realtors, more than 86,000 Californians moved here. The Metroplex attracted the highest number of out-of-state movers with 200,966 new residents and Texas ranked second in the nation for relocation activity with 563,000 people moving here in 2019.
But 2019 brought a global pandemic, and people realized working from home opened up a new world of possibilities. They could live anywhere, and they still overwhelmingly chose Texas. The writing was already on the wall in 2018 and 2019, but the pandemic accelerated migration like crazy.
CBRE, the world’s leading full-service real estate services and investment firm, tracks all the data you could ever wish to know. They reported that in 2020, moves from California to the Dallas-Fort Worth area were up more than 19.1 percent over 2019. That is 16,076 people. The latest statistics show California residents moving to Texas grew to 36 percent.
By May 2020, another California carmaker was eyeing Texas — Tesla and Elon Musk.
In face of COVID-19 restrictions this spring, Musk tweeted that he’s had it with California and will be taking his business from Palo Alto, Calif., to Austin, where he’s building a new factory on 2,000 acres 15 minutes from downtown Austin. His tunnel startup, Boring Company, also set up in Austin.
That started our collective wondering: Is Texas Becoming the New California?
The projection of Californians migrating en masse to Texas for job opportunities and lower taxes in 2020 wasn’t quite as drastic as first believed, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
In 2018, a Texas Realtors Association report showing Californians were migrating to Texas at a more than 2-to-1 rate showed no reason to think it was slowing down. In North Texas, it was expected that the Plano-Frisco-Little Elm area would be the next San Jose, Calif.
But according to new U.S. Census Bureau national data, household movement changed amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Many analysts expected a large interstate migration last year, such as from California to Texas or from New York to Florida, but that doesn’t appear to be the case,” said Joshua Roberson, Texas Real Estate Research Center senior data analyst.
Make no mistake, Californians are headed this way. But instead of being from California and other states, Census data shows more people moved from one county to another within Texas.
Specifically, we gained a city of Allen’s-worth of Californians, or approximately 100,000 people, according to a Texas Relocation Report released by Texas REALTORS® in February 2021.
