Thursday, November 17, 2011

Californians moving to Texas in record numbers


The food? Too heavy. The traffic? Not so bad. The weather? Don't get transplanted California residents started. There are a lot of them in Texas these days.

More than 363,000 Californians moved to Texas over the past five years, helping the state grow more than twice as fast as the nation as a whole since 2000, census figures show.

California has sent more new residents to Texas than any other state in recent years. But the pipeline is tightening, part of a national slowdown in migration - from one house to another, from one county to another, and from state to state - that demographers say is a lingering sign of the recession.

California's population is still growing, up 10 percent between 2000 and 2010, thanks to a strong birth rate. But for the past decade, more people have moved out than in.

In 2010 alone, almost 70,000 Californians moved to Texas. Lloyd Potter, director of the Texas State Data Center, said there historically has been movement back and forth between the two states.

Texas' relatively strong economy - with 8.5 percent unemployment compared with 11.9 percent in California - gets most of the credit, he said.

It drew California natives Sandra Zalman and Ted Rubenstein, who moved to Houston from Los Angeles in 2009.

Submitted by Jim Alex

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Texas weather? If you don't like it, just wait 5 minutes and it'll change! Not always for the better, but it'll change.

Anonymous said...

Regular Unleaded is $2.05 a gallon in Texas.

Anonymous said...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/so-long-california-goodbye-texas-taxpayers-decide-some-states-arent-worth-it-11579948200

Anonymous said...

So Long, California? Goodbye, Texas? Taxpayers Decide Some States Aren’t Worth It. After new tax law made it costlier to own a house in many high-price areas, some residents are pulling up stakes
Wall Street Journal ^ | January 25, 2020 | Ben Eisen and Laura Kusisto
Posted on 1/25/2020, 1:25:23 PM by karpov

...

Many people saw their overall taxes go down after the 2017 law was passed. But the law had two main changes making it tougher to live in high-cost, high-tax states, especially compared with lower-taxed options. It essentially curbed how much homeowners can subtract from their federal taxes for paying local property and income taxes, by capping the state and local tax deduction at $10,000. It also lowered the size of mortgages for which new buyers can deduct the interest, to $750,000 from $1 million.

These changes have the biggest impact on a sliver of the population who have high incomes and live in expensive areas. They tend to have white-collar jobs and the ability to pick up and move. Many own their own businesses, work remotely or are nearing retirement.

Critics say the changes have hurt everyone who lives in high-tax states, by taking a bite out of tax revenue. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for example, panned the state and local tax cap last year. “It has redistributed wealth in this nation from Democratic states—we’re also called blue states—to red states,” he said at the time.

The average property tax bill in the U.S. in 2018 was about $3,500, according to Attom Data Solutions, a real-estate data firm. But many residents in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California had been deducting well over $10,000 a year. In Westchester County, N.Y., the average property-tax bill was more than $17,000, the highest in the country.

Among the people who are uprooting, many say they had long considered a change. But they saw the tax law as a reason to finally undertake the potentially difficult task of changing their state residency.

“It was another bucket of straw on the back of the camel,” said John Lee, a wealth-management executive

(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ..