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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 (down from nearly $6 just a few months ago); 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.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
Bruce Abraham says
God Bless the Tapson Family and good luck at your new address.
My brother and I are looking for new homes in the southwest.
California has been one disaster after another
The future of California: Detroit!
Lethal says
Sadly, I think the illegal hordes crossing the border into S USA will not only replace those citizens who leave places like California, but soon by sheer numbers force folk to leave Texas too.
Mo de Profit says
All the best in your new home.
As for “California has the highest state gas tax rate in the nation (77.9 cents per gallon)” that would be considered ridiculously low in Europe. In the UK our fuel tax is 83p in the £ current price is £1.60 per LITRE
Sword of The Spirit says
I am from Kansas. I visited Manchester England in 2003 for work and I was shocked at petrol prices then.
Atikva says
And that is supposed to console us? I don’t think Americans who are aware of what’s becoming of the GB, Belgium or France have the least intention of dragging America into the same destructive swamp.
Sword of The Spirit says
So now you’re going to live with all the new DemoCraps that just crossed the border. Good luck and enjoy your sweating. Don’t vote for DemoCraps.
SPURWING PLOVER says
Noone want to sing California Here I Come when so many are leaving
George says
And now native Texans can’t compete with Californians in buying a house.
Justin Swingle says
CA is a colony of Mexico and the largest Mexican welfare state in the world!
The La Raza welfare state is calculated to be in excess of $50 BILLION yearly when state, county and city handouts and crime costs are tabulated.
VIVA LA RAZA SUPREMACY? IT’S HERE AND NOW!
Migrant enclaves already are at the top of the U.S. lists for bad places to – 10 of the 50 worst places in America to live according to this list are in California, and all of them are famous for their illegal populations. MONICA SHOWALTER
Jeff Bargholz says
As much as I like Texas, the freeways in the big cities there are just as crowded and shitty as the ones in all the big cities in CA. LA being the exception, though. That system is a nightmare.
Banastre Tarleton says
The future of the USA is pragmatic partition , something like how the Indian subcontinent was partitioned by the British in 1947 . that involved the mass migration of peoples
This mass movement is already happening in the US in embryonic form as people read the writing on the wall and sell up to move to the relative safety of a red state
DeputyDawg says
My family moved to California from Michigan in 1967. I was 12 years old. Back then California was almost magical, it was called “the golden magnet” I remember golfing with my mother on Christmas eve. Pat Brown was the Governer, soon to be replaced by an actor named Ronald Reagan. At one time, California was solid red. I remember the “Reagan Democrats” that helped Reagan defeat a peanut farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter. The California I once knew is a faded memory.
CL North says
I lived 25 years in California. Met Governor Schwarzenegger in person while serving in the California National Guard. Huge cracks begin to appear in 2011 when Arnold left office after 8 years and Democrat Jerry Brown became governor. He replaced the Republican military leaders with Demonrats. Gavin Newsom was chosen as Lieutenant Governor; a huge mistake. In 2020, I sold my California home and moved back to the Midwest. Ohio has a Republican governor. However, all its major cities are run by Democrats! In 2024, our property taxes are increasing by 20% to pay for the 48 language translators & tutors hired in public schools for children of illegal, economic migrants. America will go bankrupt paying for its new population replacements. We are being controlled and manipulated by the WEF and globalist traitors funded by them. Europe will fall first because Muslim invaders are conquering them by the womb. America is next.
SPURWING PLOVER says
Newsom is bigger Dunderhead then Moonbeam and a bumbling Pea-Brain like Biden like between Tweedledee and Tweedledum Newsom and Biden