Sorry to keep writing about Montana, but I was made to think of all this because the line there is the same as it is in Austin and Boise and probably Denver and Columbus–in–Columbus’s–aspirational–billboards: There are too many Californians.
This has always, I’m told, been the Austin line. “Don’t California My Texas,” say the bumper stickers, and “You’re a Midwesterner? You’re fine, then,” say the middle-aged Lyft passengers, and so has it been for at least the four years I’ve been here. There’s a growing narrative, though, that says Austin isn’t as happy as it was even those four years ago, and thankfully, the narrators aren’t attributing this to me. They’re blaming it on the Californians.
The basic premise of this Californian-directed blame is that not only are Californians who leave the state often prosperous housing price-raisers hellbent on putting Instagrammable pseudoscientific “health food” shops on every corner, but they’re an unhappy bunch. They aren’t used to people saying hi on the street, and unlike New Yorkers, they’re unfamiliar and unreceptive with/to the very concept. They do not want Willie Nelson on the radio. The heat offends them. The cold offends them. The sight of a cowboy boot offends them. It is unclear why they are here, or what they thought they were signing up for, and every now and then one writes a “thinkpiece” for a national paper explaining why they moved back to the West Coast after the house they bought sight-unseen turned out to not be located in a metropolitan Eden tailored to their excessively specific desires. That new artfully lit bodega on South Congress might be dumb and annoying, but the real problem is the certain breed of Angeleno expat who responds to the hint of a smile with the facial expression equivalent of a c-word directed in the smiler’s direction.
This exasperation with Californian deserters is not, again, unique to Austin. Austin’s the figurehead, the vanguard, but every growing city in the country is experiencing it and talking about it, from Missoula to McKinney. Yes, the city’s growing, it’s great for the economy, but hot damn, there are a lot of Californians here all a sudden.
We aren’t here to defend California for its choice of demeanor, and we don’t mean to say that all Californians are unhappy. California is an incredible place. You’ve got beaches, you’ve got mountains, you’ve got gorgeous deserts and the rolling hills of wine country. You have more than your fair share of the best American subcultures, and as we’re about to get to, your share is a large one. It’s possible that the reason so many of the Californians now in Austin are unhappy is that if someone has the means to leave California and the desire to leave California, they’re probably fairly unhappy already. If California can’t make you happy, good luck, because what place can?
What we’re here to do instead is to figure out how many Californians there should be among a city’s inflowing population as a whole. California is a giant state. It’s the biggest state, by population. It’s seeing more people move out than other states are seeing, but it’s also just a big freakin’ state. Take a representative sample of Americans and you find a lot of Californians in that sample. So: If a lot of Americans are moving anywhere, a lot of Californians are moving to that place.
Out west—in Boise and Missoula and Tucson—the number of Californians should be overrepresented thanks to geographic proximity. In Austin, though, we’re a decently uniform distance from the country’s other major population centers. So, to get simplistic with it, let’s say the number of non-Texans moving in from each of the other 49 states should be proportional to that state’s population. If that’s the case, given there are 39.2 million people living in California and 302.4 million people living in American states not named Texas, about 13% of incomers to Austin should be Californian, or roughly one in every eight.
Another way to measure this is to look at how many people move across state lines every year and to then look at how many Californians leave California each year. In a pre-pandemic window, the number you get from an unscientific Google search is roughly 7.4 million Americans moving across state lines annually and roughly 650,000 Californians moving out of California. With roughly 450,000 Texans moving out of Texas (and contributing to that 7.4-million number), these numbers would imply about 9% of incoming non-Texan Austinites should be from California, or roughly one in every eleven.
The actual number? It’s unclear for Austin, but ongoing data from Texas A&M puts the number for the state of Texas at between 10% and 16% every year between 2000 and 2020. Every year between 2000 and 2020, an average of about 13% of people moving into Texas from out-of-state were from California, or…exactly what we’d expect from the numbers above.
This doesn’t poke a huge hole in the “people are leaving California” narrative—California has a net outflow in the interstate move department, and it’s easier to move out of states like Connecticut and New Jersey than it is to move out of California in terms of pure mileage, so California should underrepresent in the proportionality of interstate movers—and it doesn’t magically make there be fewer Californians around. But it shows the reason there are so many Californians in all these places that are growing. That reason? There are simply a lot of Californians everywhere. It’s just a really populous state.
