Bay Area Exodus: See Top 5 Places Californians Are Relocating To

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Californians have been moving away from the Golden State in droves, and new research from Forbes Home shows where they are being lured away to.

Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau collected in 2019, Forbes found that most people migrated from California to Texas that year. In a study about the same data, Stacker said a lower percentage of Americans changed residence in 2019 than in any other year since 1947.

For years, residents of the Golden State have cited high housing prices, skyrocketing crime rates, rising state taxes and political disagreements as reasons they no longer wished to live in California.

Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a paradigm shift that contributed to higher rates of people working from home, making it easier for people to relocate to pay less in rent prices.

Bay Area native Kenny Phung told the Los Angeles Times it just made more sense for him to move to Portland, Oregon as he continued to work as a project manager at a San Jose-based company.

“Why would I want to live in California when I’m working from home and paying something outrageous for such a small space when I can try things out and be able to save money on rent?” Phung said to the Times.

A Redfin study showed that most people who moved away from California in 2022 were living in San Francisco or Los Angeles before relocating.

A total of 48,718 people moved out of San Francisco in the second quarter of 2022 with some remaining in the state and most others looking to Seattle, Washington for new housing. The trend shows migration out of the city is increasing — up from 2021 which recorded 45,703 people moving out of San Francisco.

In Los Angeles, 40,632 residents relocated in the same time frame, again with some people remaining in the state and a majority of others relocating to Phoenix, Arizona. Los Angeles's trend also shows an increase of people leaving compared to 2021, when 33,712 people decided to leave.

California's population has also been slowly dwindling according to U.S. Census data. A total of 39,237,838 people lived in the state in 2021, an 0.8 percent drop from 2020, which recorded a population of 39,538,223.

Here are the top five states Californians moved to in 2019 according to Forbes:

1. Texas: 82,235 people moved

1. Arizona: 59,713 people moved

1. Nevada: 47,322 people moved

1. Washington: 46,791 people moved

1. Oregon: 37,927 people moved

Read the full report here.