They don’t miss trying to squeeze their work life, two stuck-at-home kids and Ms. Fluker’s 98-year-old grandmother into a 1,700 square-foot house in Norwalk, Calif. They joined a pandemic-era exodus of Californians to the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area known as the Inland Empire, the biggest movement of people in the most populous state in America.
The Flukers followed some quarter-million others who last year moved east to the 27,000 square-mile swath of Southern California that stretches from the Los Angeles County border to Arizona and Nevada.
The Inland Empire effectively tied the Phoenix region in 2020 for the biggest gain in households from migration nationwide, according to U.S. Postal Service permanent change-of-address data. Phoenix-area migration gains shrank last year from 2019, while the pandemic accelerated the flow of humanity into Riverside and San Bernardino counties by 50%, the postal data show.
The migration is shuffling California’s demographics. Increasingly, the state’s middle class is moving to inland desert and mountain communities. Its coastal cities such as L.A. and San Francisco are housing more of its affluent residents and low-income people who can’t afford to move…. (Excerpts from The Wall Street Journal)
