I Joined the 'Texodus' From California
Why I and countless others are fleeing the Golden State for the Lone Star state.
After 25 years of mild winters in southern California, I just celebrated my first icy Christmas from a new home in north Texas. Within the last few weeks, my family and I finally joined the “Texodus,” the exodus of people abandoning the failed blue state of California and seeking freedom and prosperity in the great red state of Texas.
My wife and I had been window shopping for a new place in the Dallas area for at least a couple of years; we have five kids and long ago outgrew the house we were in, which was located in the San Fernando Valley northwest of Los Angeles, so we needed a much bigger house on a much bigger lot. One day in late October the right property finally presented itself and we jumped on it. We spent the next two months packing up, driving our family across country, and settling in here at a much more affordable house that is twice the size of the place we left, on a lot that is at least four times the size of our former California home. I don't say that to boast about it, only to point out that a property of the same size and features in California would be out of our financial reach. We got vastly bigger bang for our buck in Texas – and that, of course, is one of the prime reasons for the move.
But it wasn’t the only reason. I am originally from the South, having been born in Little Rock, Arkansas, but I have spent my entire adult life – nearly half a century – on the left coast. About half of that time, I lived in San Francisco, a once-beautiful, unique city that is now in catastrophic decline, reeling from a criminal degree of Democrat mismanagement. Then I spent 25 years in southern California and watched it too devolve into a Third World country. I never thought I would move back to the South again, but hey, things change.
In the few weeks I have lived here in Texas, I have been asked a few times why I moved. The answer is, for the same reason literally hundreds of thousands of other people have left California in the last few years: under corrupt, incompetent, agenda-driven Democrat rule, a state that should be paradise has degenerated into the U.S. equivalent of a banana republic, where the wealth of the political elites like Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom shields them from the consequences of their own failed policies. The state is increasingly hostile to the middle class and to small businesses, which are being taxed and regulated out of existence; and everyone else is mired in decaying communities suffering from a lawless chaos, drug trafficking and addiction, unchecked illegal immigration, and homelessness that have all been fostered by pro-crime Democrat policies.
That’s not all. Energy costs are astronomical; California has the highest state gas tax rate in the nation (77.9 cents per gallon). The cheapest gallon of gas I could find in my California neighborhood at the time I left was $4.39; here in Texas it is nearly half that.
Don’t even get me started on the Golden State’s self-righteous animosity toward law-abiding gun owners like myself. Every year the list of firearms banned by the state gets longer, even as pro-crime progressive “prosecutors” like George Gascon and Chesa Boudin put violent felons back on the streets.
And then there is the wokeness. I and many others want to raise our children in a state that isn’t suicidally proud to be on the cutting edge of the ideological insanity that dominates the Democrat Party, such as the gender theory derangement and the corrosive Critical Race Theory being taught as early as pre-kindergarten. Even though my wife and I homeschool our children, we didn’t want to raise them in a community and state in which my family and our fellow Christian homeschoolers constitute an isolated island of sanity and truth. We believe the cultural Marxism is only going to intensify in California until we are at the point where we begin to be persecuted for our non-woke resistance to it – and that day is coming. Yes, to one extent or another, that is a problem no matter where one lives in America; eventually no one will be able to escape confronting it. But for now, Texas is higher ground and a better vantage point from which to do battle.
All of these factors considered, living in California finally became so untenable that, like hundreds of thousands of other Californians, including a growing number of my friends and colleagues who for years had been leaving the state for greener pastures in places as varied as Tennessee, Idaho, Florida, Arizona, and of course, Texas, my wife and I began to explore our options outside California. And as I wrote above, this fall we unexpectedly got lucky and seized the moment.
But we were latecomers to the exodus. The Los Angeles Times reported that people leaving California between April 2020 and July 2022 outnumbered newcomers to the state by more than 700,000. California’s net move-out numbers reached a record 407,000 between July 2021 and July 2022. And in 2022 alone, more than 343,000 people left California — the biggest flight of any state in the U.S.
California has actually been losing its residents to other states for a long time – every year since 2000, in fact. The primary reason is that California is the second most expensive state in the Union (Hawaii tops the list). According to Zillow, the average home price in California now is $747,400, up over $200,000 in just the last five years. Increasingly high costs of living, housing, and transportation, coupled with an increase in crime and drugs, pollution and congestion have caused countless fed-up residents to abandon the state.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that from 2022 to 2023 California’s population declined by about another 75,000, and the Los Angeles Times noted that this population drop was the state’s third straight, while prior to July 1, 2020, California had never seen even one year of population decline since the year 1900.
Businesses have also been on the move out of California. A 2022 report by the Hoover Institution shows 352 businesses leaving California and moving their headquarters to a different state between 2018 and 2022. High rent, high taxes, high cost of living for employees, and bureaucratic b.s. are just a few reasons for that.
Between 2021 and 2022, roughly 818,000 California residents moved out of state, according to recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, and in that time frame, Texas was the most common destination for former Californians. Dallas, the area to which I moved, recently overtook Austin (where a couple of other friends of mine moved) as the top Texas spot for people fleeing California. Housing costs are significantly lower in the Dallas environs (though they have been rising rapidly as Californians like myself seek refuge).
It was wrenchingly difficult for my family and me to leave our wonderful friends and the homeschooling community to which we were so attached. But we were convinced that, especially for our young children’s sake, we needed to leave a sinking ship. An admirable minority of conservative Californian activists, many of whom I know, are still there determined to turn things around and rescue their beloved state from its progressive stranglehold.
But after Newsom recently survived the seventh recall effort launched against him, and after a failed gubernatorial campaign by conservative talk show superstar Larry Elder (who was smeared by the shameless Los Angeles Times as “the black face of white supremacy”), there seemed to me to be no signs that a political turnaround in that state is forthcoming in the near future, the middle future, or maybe ever.
I wish those friends the best but if worse comes to worst, there is still room in Texas. And the house next door to me is for sale.
Mark's crystal clear logical explanation of why he and his wife and 5 beautiful children joined the Texodus movement; shines a light onto to mired mess that Californians face daily. Those of us staying to fight must be optimistic, but perhaps so was Davey Crocket at the Alamo.