The cost of living is higher, but I get a tremendous amount of value for the extra costs and wouldn't move back to Texas for any amount of money at this point. Los Angeles is a very safe city for its size, I live in a comfortable, walkable neighborhood and I just got back from a run through a beautiful, well-maintained city park. My neighborhood is diverse, my representatives care about what is happening, and the city and state government generally try to make things better for the people who live here, even if they don't always succeed. I rarely felt that to be true in my 30+ years in Texas.

Austin is a great city, but the cost of living is high enough now that it is very hard to justify it vs. the dramatically higher quality of life, access to nature and culture, and incredible weather that you get in southern California.

i hope the right people and companies leave and go deal with high humidity and heat waves

Texas is a gerrymandered purple state, not a red state. It's just that the state is the California's bogey-man, because Californians don't actually want to fact the fact that we have major problems with long-term affordability and the ability to build a life for middle-class folks (perhaps less appreciated by the disproportionately high-income folks on this forum). Every single urban area in Texas is now heavily aligned with the Democratic party, and the vast majority of those areas are affordable places to build a life and build wealth.

When I was growing up in Austin, it had the second highest per-capita gay population in America after San Francisco. Texas cities are not some place where minorities have to fear for their safety.

The reason not to move to Texas is that it's a suburban hellscape, and you'll be stuck in traffic for more hours a day than you'd like to admit. I left after pushing for transportation alternatives at Austin City Hall, and the result of that traffic mitigation was an express lane down the highway. Texas is, in large part, following the development pattern of Southern California.

Austin, San Antonio, and El Paso are all lovely towns, full of vibrancy, amazing culture, friendly people, reasonable weather most of the year, wonderful food, and reasonable cost of living. Politics are an issue, but again, that all hangs on a 2%-5% swing in a census year, and the entire state could end up redrawn as 50-50 split. I just want folks on the American coasts to remember that a big part of why Texas is branded as "that really bad place" is exactly because folks on the coast refuse to look in the mirror and fix the problems of affordability, wealth inequality, and clean energy that Texas has addressed. Instead, they've made Texas a bogey man that is "very bad" so that you can't point to things like rapid development of housing and renewables as actually the way to fix affordability.

Texas is draining their portion of the Ogallala, and are putting strain on Texas rivers, but California is literally a desert that moves water to its cities from hundreds of miles away... devastating communities and national parks in the process.