Californians moving to Houston can save up to $646,000, study finds
money moves
Does it seem that Californians really are everywhere here in Houston? Here's why: A report by online storage finding platform StorageCafe has revealed just how much money the average Californian saves by taking on the title of transplant and relocating to the Lone Star State.
And more people from Los Angeles and Contra Costa counties are choosing Houston over any other area in Texas.
The migration report, which was released this summer by StorageCafe, states about 111,000 people moved to Texas from the Golden State in 2021, while only 33,000 Texans made the opposite move to California that same year.
The reasons why so many are flocking to Texas seem obvious: the lack of income tax, a lower cost of living, and the rise of remote work flexibility. These factors proved to be vastly important for millennials, who made up a majority of the transplants (46 percent).
Californians looking for a permanent Texas home can save hundreds of thousands of dollars by turning to Houston's booming housing market, where median home prices cost about $403,490.
With homes in San Diego ringing up for nearly $870,000, transplants can save $466,278 by buying a house in Houston. The Californians that save the most money on a new house hail from Orange County, where median prices cost over a million dollars. They can save $646,510 by purchasing a Houston home.
Renting an apartment in Houston is another financially advantageous move for California transplants, and will get them a larger space than what they can find in their home state. Rent prices in major California cities like San Diego and Los Angeles easily cost more than $2,600 a month, which is a far cry from Houston's median rent price of $1,336 per month.
Even for that amount of money, renters relocating to Houston from Orange, Los Angeles, and San Diego counties can easily find apartments that are over 500 square feet bigger.
StorageCafe's sister site Yardi Matrix's business intelligence manager Doug Ressler gave his thoughts in the report about the major factors that keep motivating Californians to make that move to Texas.
"Inflation continues to be a major concern, putting a financial strain on many people as they spend more of their income on typical expenses," he said. "As a result, moving to places that are easier on the wallet seems like the obvious solution, with many people crossing city and state lines to find a more suitable place to live."
The trend is not likely to slow down anytime soon, either.
"Over the first two decades of the 21st century, the movement of people leaving California for Texas has been well established," Ressler said. "No other state has sent more migrants to Texas than California during this time. The continual soaring housing prices and cost of living in California and much greater affordability in Texas is likely to sustain the significant flows of Californians toward Texas in the coming decades."
The study's findings were determined using census data between 2017 and 2021 from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) tool. Home pricing information was found using data from real estate platform Point2.
The full study can be found on storagecafe.com.
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This article originally ran on CultureMap.
The Rice team is collaborating with others from MIT, Oak Ridge National Lab, the University of Illinois Chicago and University of Kansas. Photo via Rice.edu
