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Don't be scared. As Tara Connolly found, Texas is a welcoming place: "Everyone is just so friendly, and they look you in the eye." And she wouldn't even think of going back to New York City. "The constant stress doesn't seem appealing," she says. "The cost was insane, and it was time to start fresh. This was a good place to try."
--Reported by Hilary Hylton/Austin
Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the author of Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (Dutton, 2013).
The original version of this article misstated the number of Californians who have moved to Texas. More than 4 million people have moved out of California over the last 20 years, according to economist Bernard Weinstein at Southern Methodist University, and about one-third of those migrants moved to Texas.