I’ll start with an anecdote. Recently, while walking my dogs in a residential part of West Campus, I came across a partially demolished house lot with several realtor signs in the front yard. Inside the structure, a team of laborers worked to destroy a wall with hammers, shouting instructions to each other in rapid Spanish; outside, a man in a suit and tie stood leaning against a pillar, negotiating a lunch order on his cell phone. I watched them for awhile, not noticing as another dogwalker passed by and his leashes became tangled up with mine. I apologized, but the stranger, politely waving away my worries, merely pointed at one of the realtor signs, saying: “Californians, right?” We both laughed. It was a short, patently unimportant interaction between strangers, yet in the stranger’s two words – “Californians, right?” – there was a whole world of meaning to unpack.

Most Austin Area residents will have at some point heard “Californians” used this way, as a catch-all explanation for Austin’s reckless growth in recent years. Californians, so the rumor goes, are speculating in Austin’s real estate market, driving prices up at the expense of actual local home buyers. Can’t find a job? Silicon Valley firms are invading Central Texas and bringing their (Californian) employees with them. High cost of living? Blame Californians. Rush hour traffic? Blame Californians. Your favorite bar is crowded? That taqueria near your apartment closed? Ask an Austinite to list their woes and, invariably, Californians will crop up at some point as a direct or indirect source of blame.

While I may be exaggerating the severity and extent of Austin’s fixation on Californians, most longtime Austinites will be at least vaguely aware of what I’ll dub the “California Narrative”: a locally-held belief that the migration of Californians to Central Texas is changing the Austin Area, largely for the worse. This is a belief observers in both California and Texas have noted and written about as far back as the 1990s, and, in my experience, it is a frequent topic of casual debates in coffee shops and taco bars across the Austin Area. In this blog post, I’d like to contribute to this running conversation while looking beyond the anecdotal evidence it is usually accompanied by; instead, I will attempt a data-driven approach to the issue, utilizing the Austin Area Sustainability Indicators’ robust collection of primary and secondary data.

Though it comes in many forms, the “California Narrative” basically rests on two key assumptions: (1) that Californians are migrating to the Austin Area in large numbers and (2) that these recently arrived Californians have driven, or are entirely responsible for, drastic changes to Austin’s economy and culture. The validity of the first assumption can be easily assessed using migration figures obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau. According to U.S. Census Population Estimates survey, Austin was the fastest growing major city in America between 2010 and 2017.¹ Analyzing this data, Chris Ramser of the Austin Chamber of Commerce found that 56.2% of Austin’s population growth during this period was due to domestic migration – migration to Austin from other locations within the United States – rather than international migration or natural population increase. ² Recent migrants to Austin (both foreign and domestic) made up 12.9% of the city’s population over the 7-year period, the highest such proportion measured for any of America’s 50 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) during that time. Taking into account that an overwhelming percentage (82%) of Austin’s positive net migration over that period was due to domestic migrants, this data suggests that recent domestic migrants – Californians included – make up a higher proportion of Austin’s population than they do in other cities. In other words, domestic migrants are more noticeable in Austin than they are in other major American cities, statistically speaking.

Unfortunately, the Population Estimates program doesn’t track migrants’ specific places of origin, so there’s no way of knowing how influential Californians are within the larger population of Austin’s domestic migrants. We can, however, approximate this proportion using a different data source, the Metro Area-to-Metro Area Migration Flows estimates conducted by the American Community Survey. According to the most recent available ACS data, a resounding majority of domestic migrants to Austin between 2012 and 2016 hailed from other Texas MSAs (53.2%). 5.63% of domestic migrants over the same period of time came form California MSAs, making California the second-most common source of migrants to Austin ahead of Florida (3.6%) and New York (3.0%). Ranking migrant’s MSAs of origin by number of migrants to Austin, San Francisco-Oakland (1,364) and Los Angeles (2,702) both make the top ten, but are well behind the top three cities San Antonio (9,959), Dallas-Fort Worth (11,449) and Houston (13,987). Texans, not Californians, are the most influential factors behind Austin’s recent population growth.