They got tired of California dreamin'.
Skyrocketing home prices and fierce competition for jobs in the Golden State are prodding poor families to pack up and head to Texas. Our state was the top destination for low-income residents leaving California between 2005 and 2015, according to a recent data analysis by the Sacramento Bee.
In that time period, about 293,000 impoverished people left California for Texas and nearly half that figure moved in from our state, for a net loss of 156,000 people, the Bee reported.
The fact that people are moving in large numbers to Texas is an indicator that the state has economic growth and opportunity, said state demographer Lloyd Potter.
"Of course, the ideal is for Texas to be adding more higher-income, higher-skill kinds of jobs relative to lower-income, low-skill, low-education kinds of jobs," Potter said. "But you need the whole spectrum in a functioning economy."
In past decades, many Californians have resettled next door in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon, said James Gaines, chief economist at the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University.
They still do. The Bee's analysis shows those three states are the largest recipients of California's low-income migration following Texas.
But our state has become a more attractive choice for tens of thousands of poor Californians. Gaines points to jobs and housing.
"Texas is simply -- overall, in any measure -- a much lower cost-of-living state," the economist said.
Housing
Affordable homes are in short supply in both Texas and California, but we do fare better than our friends in the West Coast, according to an analysis of 2015 data by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Texas has 51 affordable and available rental units for every 100 households, making half of the area median income or less. That's four units below the U.S. total. Meanwhile, California has 30 units for every 100 households in that income range.
When it comes to housing availability for the extremely poor, we still do better than California. Texas has 29 affordable and available rentals for every 100 families making 30 percent or less of the area median income. California has 21.
Numbers from real estate company Zillow show the gap in housing costs is clear to anyone shopping for an apartment. Renting a one-bedroom apartment in the Sacramento area -- the fifth largest metro area in California -- costs about the same in Dallas-Fort Worth, the biggest urban center in Texas and one of its costliest housing markets.
But Dallas-Fort Worth's median rent for a one-bedroom unit -- $1,125 in January -- is hundreds of dollars lower than that of nine metropolitan areas in California.
Jobs
The jobs with the biggest net loss of California workers to other states were cashiers, cooks, truck drivers, material movers, retail sales reps and customer service reps, according to the Bee's analysis.
Even San Francisco, the state's best employment market, is getting tens of applicants for cashier and restaurant jobs, the newspaper reported.
Those Californians could find many openings here, according to 2014-24 projections from the Texas Workforce Commission. All the occupations mentioned above are among a list of 25 predicted to add the most jobs over the decade.
Texas weathered the oil slump last year by boosting other industries, such as leisure and hospitality, which grew 3.5 percent from 2015 to 2016. We added a total of 210,200 jobs over the course of the year.
Gaines, the economist, said moving to a place for a lower cost of living is no good if there are no jobs there.
"We also have a vibrant economy that offers employment opportunity to a lot of people up and down the spectrum," he said, "from low income to high income, from low tech to high tech."
California's tech sector is also eyeing Texas with interest, Gaines said. Even in Silicon Valley, many people earn mid-level salaries and can't afford California's soaring cost of living, he said.
Among the fastest growing occupations in Texas are several jobs in health services and web developers, according to the 2014-24 state projections. Web developer jobs are expected to grow by 37 percent over that decade.
