Leftist California and Illinois are hemorrhaging residents, a report from the U-Haul company says, and they’re moving to Texas and Florida, two conservative states where taxes are low, the cost of living is lower, and the governors have rejected most of the more Draconian China Virus mandates.
Famous for its orange and white trucks decorated with exotic animals and the 50 states, the truck-rental company’s tracking data say most of its one-way customers head for the Lone Star and Sunshine states.
And the exodus from California would have been worse if U-Haul hadn’t run out of trucks. So many people want to flee the benighted Nutocracy the company’s garages were left empty.
Mass Migration
‘Migration to southern states continues to be magnified by the lingering pandemic, and no state netted more U-Haul® customers during the last year than Texas,” U-Haul reported in a news release:
The Lone Star State earned bragging rights as the leading growth state of 2021, narrowly besting Florida for tops honors, according to transactional data compiled for the annual U-Haul Growth Index.
Tennessee and South Carolina are ranked third and fourth and Arizona is fifth.
U-Haul calculates “growth states” by measuring the “net gain net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks entering a state versus leaving that state in a calendar year.”
The data included more than 2 million one-way truck rentals.
Continued U-Haul:
California is 50th and Illinois 49th on the list for the second consecutive year, indicating those states once again witnessed the largest net losses of one-way U-Haul trucks.
Texas reclaims the No. 1 growth state status it held from 2016-18. It ranked second to Florida in 2019 and Tennessee in 2020.
Matt Merrill, the company’s vice president in Dallas-Fort Worth, said people are moving from California and the Chicago area because of the “job growth — a lot of opportunity here. The cost of living here is much lower than those areas. Texas is open for business.”
“California remained the top state for out-migration, but its net loss of U-Haul trucks wasn’t as severe as in 2020. That can be partially attributed to the fact that U-Haul simply ran out of inventory to meet customer demand for outbound equipment,” the company continued.
Long-term Population Decline
U-Haul’s report is unsurprising given population trends from California and Illinois.
“California’s population has continued to decline after falling for the first time on record, new demographic data show — underscoring shifting immigration patterns, declining birth rates and the large number of deaths at the hands of the pandemic,” KTLA5 reported last month.
The state’s population declined 173,000 between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021, or 14,416 people per month. The state lost almost the same number of people the year before, the station reported:
Three main factors contributed to California’s net population loss, demographers found: a continued decline in birthrates; fewer foreign immigrants, which officials attributed to federal policy in recent years; and more than 55,000 pandemic-related deaths.
Officials also attributed the decrease to the loss of 53,000 international students because of pandemic restrictions, as well as declines in domestic in-migration.
Decreased in-migration is a major factor, though, the station revealed in an earlier report:
Every single county has seen fewer people moving in from out of state since the end of March 2020, but declines were especially steep in San Francisco, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.
The study by the nonpartisan California Policy Lab found that the number of people moving to California dropped 38% at the end of September 2021, compared to the end of March 2020.
Meanwhile, the number of residents leaving to other states increased 12%. That’s roughly in-line with pre-pandemic trends, according to the researchers.
The population is declining because families can’t afford to live in the state, The Pacific Research Institute says.
Last year, the median price of a home was $800,000.
Illinois suffers likewise, the Illinois Policy Institute reported, and lost 113,776 residents from July 2020 through July last year.
“This marks the eighth consecutive year of population decline for Illinois, according to Census Bureau estimates,” IPI reported. “The only state that’s population has been in decline longer, West Virginia, currently is suffering its ninth consecutive year of population decline.”
West Virginia is losing population because of its poor economy.
