Tennessee ranked third in the nation for growth in moves to the state in the year 2021 according to a press release by the moving company U-Haul. The ranking is based on the company’s yearly U-Haul Growth Index which analyzed the net gain of one-way entry to states for the year.
The Tennessee Star previously reported the Volunteer State posted the largest net gain of U-Haul trucks crossing its borders in 2020.
Texas took the number one spot as the leading growth state of 2021, narrowly beating Florida for top honors, according to transactional data compiled for the annual U-Haul Growth Index. Tennessee ranked third, South Carolina fourth and Arizona fifth among the top growth states. Indiana, Colorado, Maine, Idaho and New Mexico rounded out the top 10 growth states of 2021.
“We see a lot of growth coming from the East and West Coast,” said Matt Merrill, U-Haul area district vice president of the Dallas Fort-Worth Metroplex and West Texas. “A lot of people are moving here from California (and) New York. We also see a lot of people coming in from the Chicago markets. I think that’s a lot due to the job growth – a lot of opportunity here. The cost of living here is much lower than those areas. Texas is open for business.”
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, according to the data. California remained the top state for out-migration.
According to the press release, growth states are calculated by the net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks entering a state versus leaving that state in a calendar year. Migration trends data is compiled from well over 2 million one-way U-Haul truck customer transactions that occur annually. However, as the press release notes, while U-Haul migration trends do not correlate directly to population or economic growth, the U-Haul Growth Index is an effective gauge of how well cities are both attracting and maintaining residents.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]
Photo “UHaul Moving Van” by Artaxerxes. CC BY-SA 4.0.
I lived through a similar disaster in Texas when the rust belt cratered and half of Michigan moved south. Nothing was ever the same again. So just get ready for Tennessee to lose its identity. Sad but true.
Can these new comers handle the epidemic of tornados and other climate change which, along with Covid surges, is negatively impacting our state?