In a ranking of U.S. cities based on moving trends from 2021 to 2022, moving and storage company PODS gave Dallas Fort-Worth the silver medal for growth. Houston, San Antonio, and Austin also made the list, albeit ten spots behind Dallas.
At number one was Sarasota, Florida, a coastal city south of Tampa with a population of only 56,000.
The report also detailed the most moved-out-of places, with Los Angeles and San Francisco taking the No. 1 and No. 2 spots, respectively.
What is prompting people to move out of California and into Texas at such a rate? For starters, the price of homes in California is significantly higher than in Texas. In San Francisco, the median selling price for homes is over $1.5 million. According to Zillow, despite seeing a 22% increase over the past year, median Dallas home prices remain at approximately $311,000.
California has also seen competition for jobs as more and more hubs of innovation spring up locally. Texas has a fast-growing economy in sectors such as tech and is beginning to rival places such as Silicon Valley. In 2021, Elon Musk announced he would be moving Tesla’s headquarters out of California and into Austin, Texas. Austin has proved to be a center of innovation, with sources ranking it as the 11th best city in the nation to start a business.
PODS gives another possible reason for the mass exodus from Californian cities in the report.
“Employers deciding to adopt working remote policies permanently may be one catalyst for the high number of moves out of these cities,” reads the report.
With significant numbers of the population no longer being tied to a metro-style job, they can be free to choose their living space based on other factors.
With tolerant weather in many areas and no state income tax in Texas, it is easy to imagine the appeal to an outsider. It is unclear how moving trends will continue in the following years. Still, recent numbers have proven that the considerable increase in movers to Texas is not exclusively a pandemic product. You may want to get used to welcoming in some new neighbors.
