Longtime Irvine resident Helen Tornquist is calling Big D home now after volunteering for a transfer to north Texas.
Her kids moved out. Her marriage is over. And she had planned to retire out of state anyway because California is just too expensive. Last year, she sold her four-bedroom home of 13 years and moved to the Dallas area, where she manages a customer call center.
“I reached out to my boss and said, ‘I am available to go to a new location. Where do you want me to go?’” said Tornquist, 57, a graduate of both UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton. “California is a great place to be, but it’s pretty expensive. And it’s getting pretty crowded.”
Tornquist is one of thousands of Southern California residents who each year is throwing in the towel and moving out of state.
During the first 10 months of 2016, 5,706 residents of Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties took out loans to buy a primary residence out of state, a CoreLogic analysis of mortgage applications shows.
That’s not counting the number of people who paid cash for a home or who, like Tornquist, are renting.
Lower home prices and taxes, less congestion, family ties or a more conservative environment are luring Southern Californians to leave the state, some transplants say.
But housing costs clearly are the chief factor. Southern California’s housing market is one of the most expensive in the nation, with the median house price averaging $473,000 in 2016, double the U.S. average.
And the costs are even higher in Orange and Los Angeles counties, which accounted for most of the region’s out-migration. The CoreLogic study showed one out of every four Los Angeles-Orange County homebuyers moved out of their county.
About 8.3 percent moved to the Inland Empire, while 8.2 percent left the state altogether.
“Generally, what you’re seeing is people in high housing cost areas are moving to lower-cost areas,” said Archana Pradhan, a CoreLogic economist and the study’s author.
More leaving than coming
Irvine real estate broker Dale Cheema noted that these migration patterns occur every time home prices go up.
Typically, a buyer with $550,000 can get a small, two-bedroom, two-bath condo in Irvine, he said. In Riverside County, that same amount buys a four-bedroom house with a three-car garage and twice the square footage.
“You can imagine how enticing that is, to go from a matchbook to a single-family home. Then it’s worth the drive,” he said. “It’s affordability more than anything else.”
CoreLogic’s study is just the latest in a series of reports showing California among the nation’s leaders in out-migration, trailing only New York and Illinois in net out-migration numbers.
About 266,000 more people left California than moved in from other states from 2010 to 2015, U.S. Census data show.
Orange County lost nearly 11,000 residents to other California counties or other states. Los Angeles County lost almost 270,000 but Riverside County offset that loss with a net gain of 66,000 people.
To be fair, that doesn’t include people moving to California and the region from overseas, which more than offsets the loss to other states in California and Orange County. It also doesn’t take into account California’s largest-in-nation population.
When taking population into account, net migration to other states accounted for 0.2 percent of all residents in 2015, 24th highest in the nation.
And CoreLogic’s figures also show that 73 percent of Southern Californians who bought a home last year stayed in their respective counties.
‘They’re from all over’
Still, the out-migration is significant enough that real estate agents in neighboring states are noticing.
Deborah Leffler, an agent with Keller Williams Realty in Boise, Idaho, started seeing a wave of California transplants moving to her area in 2012 or 2013.
“You have them from San Diego. You have them from Northern California. You have them from the L.A. area. You have them from all over,” Leffler said.
Californians can buy a house in Boise for less than it costs to rent in the Golden State, she said. Retirees also can use proceeds from a California sale to buy a home in Boise and still have a nest egg.
Laura Reed and her ex-husband moved to Boise from North Orange County in 2011, drawn by the lower cost of living, conservative politics and less restrictive gun laws.
“We knew for sure we could not retire in California, and didn’t want to,” Reed said in a phone interview. “We were sick of the traffic. Traffic everywhere. And the number of people, the crowding.”
Sean Stafford, a Laguna Beach transplant working as an agent in Bend, Oregon, guessed that as many as 30 percent to 40 percent of out-of-state homebuyers in his area are Californians, drawn by elbow room, clean air and everything from fishing, kayaking to world-class mountain climbing.
“You get more bang for your buck up here, that’s for sure,” Stafford said. “For a million dollars, you can get a big house with some acreage and some views.”
Money and other motives
The 10 departing residents interviewed for this story included a Long Beach police officer who is considering a move to Bend or the Portland area after he retires so his daughter can pay in-state tuition at the University of Oregon. It also included a Costa Mesa retiree who said moving to Las Vegas will save him $16,000 a year. After 10 years, that adds up, he said.
Gary Gailmor, 81, and his wife, Linda, traded their manufactured home in Lake Forest last month for a house in Surprise, Arizona, saving money and moving closer to their daughter and grandchildren.
For Jennifer Leach and her family, however, money isn’t a motive for leaving.
Leach recently put her family’s Ladera Ranch house up for sale and signed a purchase agreement for a house near Denver because of a new California law mandating vaccines for school children.
“I don’t believe in the government telling me what I have to do as a parent, so I’m leaving the state,” Leach said. “I’m literally leaving because of this law.”
Tornquist, the Dallas-area call center manager, has traded the risk of earthquakes for the threat of tornadoes. But she’s happy to be living again in an area where there’s still lots of farmland and open space nearby.
She probably won’t stay in Dallas when she retires. She’s thinking about settling in Colorado or some other town in the West. Just not California.
“If I could get away from the San Andreas fault and go to a place that’s less expensive, that would be better for retirement,” she said.
Contact the writer: 714-796-7734 or JeffCollins@scng.com
