Californians Are Paying Double the National U-Haul Rate to Escape State for Texas, Florida

U-Haul published its one-way rental data today, and the results are what one would expect: Texas and Florida are the top two destinations for Americans, while California, Illinois, and Massachusetts continue to reside in the bottom five.

But it’s one thing to say trucks are flowing one way and another to show:

It is twice as expensive to rent a 26-foot truck in Anaheim, Calif., and drop it in Keller, Texas (a suburb of Dallas-Fort Worth), than it is to rent the same truck to take westward to the Golden State. Note also: The median household income of Keller ($162,000) is almost double that of households in Anaheim ($88,000). Relatively poor Californians are paying out the nose to flee the state because they’re competing with everyone else for the remaining (metaphorical) life rafts.

Just to make sure the pricing from California to Texas wasn’t gamed to take advantage of wealthy Californians moving to Texas, I priced the same trucks going from Sheboygan, Wis., to Keller. The price was almost exactly the same as the Texas-to-California rental, suggesting that Californians are paying a demand premium that Texans and Wisconsinites (and much of the rest of the country) are not.

As Dan McLaughlin wrote in the early days of 2022:

California, however, bled outbound citizens so badly, it broke U-Haul’s ability to measure — because the company ran out of trucks to rent:

California is 50th and Illinois 49th on the list for the second consecutive year, indicating those states once again witnessed the largest net losses of one-way U-Haul trucks. . . . California remained the top state for out-migration, but its net loss of U-Haul trucks wasn’t as severe as in 2020. That can be partially attributed to the fact that U-Haul simply ran out of inventory to meet customer demand for outbound equipment. [Emphasis added].

Via Craig Bannister at CNS News.

Whatever California’s governor Gavin Newsom and allied progressives say to the contrary, the U-Haul fleet tells us where people see opportunity, as well as where they’re so pinched that they’re willing to throw the dogs, kids, and the Roombas into a box truck to hightail it anywhere but there.