It isn’t just billionaires leaving California.
Anecdotal data suggest there is also an exodus of regular people who load their belongings into rental trucks and lug them to another state.
U-Haul’s survey of the more than 2.5 million one-way trips using its vehicles in the U.S. last year showed that the gap between the number of people leaving and the number arriving was higher in California than in any other state.
While the Golden State also attracts a large number of newcomers, it has had the biggest net outflow for six years in a row.
Generally, the defectors don’t go far. The top five destinations for the diaspora using U-Haul’s trucks, trailers and boxes last year were Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Texas.
California experienced a net outflow of U-Haul users with an in-migration of 49.4%, and those leaving of 50.6%. Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Illinois also rank among the bottom five on the index.
U-Haul didn’t speculate on the reasons California continues to top the ranking.
“We continue to find that life circumstances — marriage, children, a death in the family, college, jobs and other events — dictate the need for most moves,” John Taylor, U-Haul International president, said in a press statement.
U-Haul’s network of 24,000 rental locations across the U.S. provides a near-real-time view of domestic migration dynamics, while official data on population movements often lag.
Official data for the 12 months ended July 1 just came out last month. The California Department of Finance tally — which incorporates deaths, births and international migration, which aren’t part of the U-Haul data — said the state’s population grew just 0.05% in that time period. Even that anemic growth was only thanks to births and international arrivals.
U-Haul said that broadly, the hotly debated issue of blue-to-red state migration, which became more pronounced after the pandemic of 2020, continues to be a discernible trend.
Though U-Haul did not specify the reasons for the exodus, California demographers tracking the trend point to the cost of living and housing affordability as the top reasons for leaving.
“Over the last dozen years or so, on a net basis, the flow out of the state because of housing [affordability] far exceeds other reasons people cite [including] jobs or family,” said Hans Johnson, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.
“This net out migration from California is a more than two-decade-long trend. And again, we’re a big state, so the net out numbers are big,” he said.
U-Haul data showed a pretty even split between arrivals and departures. While the company declined to share absolute numbers, it said that 50.6% of its one-way customers in California were leaving, while 49.4% were arriving.
Eric McGhee, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, who researches the challenges facing California, said there’s growing evidence of political leanings shaping the state’s migration patterns, with those moving out of state more likely to be Republican and those moving in likely to be Democratic.
“Partisanship probably is not the most significant of these considerations, but it may be just the last straw that broke the camel’s back, on top of the other things that are more traditional drivers of migration … cost of living and family and friends and jobs,” McGhee said.
Living in California costs 12.6% more than the national average, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. One of the biggest pain points in the state is housing, which is 57.8% more expensive than what the average American pays.
The U-Haul study across all 50 states found that 7 of the top 10 growth states where people moved to have Republican governors. Nine of the states with the biggest net outflows had Democratic governors.
Texas, Florida and North Carolina were the top three growth states for U-Haul customers, with Dallas, Houston and Austin bagging the top spots for growth in metro regions.
A notable exception in California was San Diego and San Francisco, which were the only California cities in the top 25 metros with a net inflow of one-way U-Haul customers.
