During the early 1990s, 1.5 million California residents left the state. Faculty member Stuart Gabriel asks 'Why?'

Illustration by Fred Smith

Household moves importantly affect local economic activity and economic development, budgetary flows, provision of public goods and services, retail and commercial development, and the like. For those reasons, public and private analysts seek insight as to the determinants of household moves.

During the first half of the 1990s, California witnessed a striking reversal in domestic migration. IRS data indicates that 1.5 million California residents, on net, left the state during that period for other U.S. destinations. In recent decades, there also has been an ongoing and persistent outflow of population from California cities to outlying and peripheral parts of metropolitan areas. Suburbanization peaked in the late 1980s and then dropped off some in the early 1990s. Out-migration from Los Angeles County to surrounding metropolitan-area counties moved up from about 1/2 percent of L.A. County residents in 1984 to about 1.5 percent in 1990, before dropping back to 1 percent in 1994.

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