- A boomer and his wife moved to Kansas after living in California for 50 years.
- He and his wife sold their house for $1.4 million and bought a historic Kansas home for under $400,000.
- He said it’s much easier to make friends in Kansas, and the cost of living is much lower.
Mike H., 73, lived in California for 50 years, but it took a high school reunion in Kansas to get him to move back.
The former architectural planner had a home just north of the Golden Gate Bridge that he bought over 30 years ago, and while he loved the weather and his job, he knew he wanted to return to Kansas, where he attended high school.
In 2020, he and his wife sold their home and moved to a suburb of Kansas City. They bought a historic property for a third of the price of their California home, and they said life has been more peaceful with friendlier people, less traffic, and cheaper prices.
“California changed so much in the time I lived there that we couldn’t get out of there fast enough toward the end,” Mike said. “We hadn’t been really happy there for 10-15 years as it got more congested and deteriorated.”
Many Californians have told BI that they’re moving to states with lower living costs, improved work-life balance, and better climate conditions. About 818,000 people left California between 2021 and 2022, while 475,800 moved in, according to the Census Bureau’s tabulation of ACS data.
While the California to Texas and California to Arizona routes were the most popular, over 5,500 people moved from California to Kansas between 2021 and 2022.
Leaving California after five decades
Mike, whose identity is known to Business Insider but requested partial anonymity for privacy reasons, grew up in Minneapolis but moved with his family to Kansas when he was 15. He lived there for five years and moved to California in 1970. He knew he wanted to live in California after a trip to Disneyland when he was 10.
For much of his time in California, he lived in Mill Valley just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. He recalled seeing celebrities frequently on his commute from his home along Highway 1 to downtown San Francisco. He lived in what he called a “treehouse fixer-upper” from 1988 until he moved in 2020.
At first, he worked as a contractor and then shifted to architecture and planning. Though he enjoyed living in California and had a successful career, he said his area lost its charm over the last decade. He said sometimes traffic was so bad he couldn’t leave his home, as cars would idle in front of his driveway.
He said finding a parking spot at the grocery store around his home was tough. He noticed the infrastructure in his area had started to crumble, and he said the quality of public education declined nearby. As he got older, he also said it was more challenging to make friends, and more situations felt tense. He said even getting acquainted with some of his neighbors was a challenge.
Still, he and his wife didn’t want to move due to Proposition 13, which locked their property tax in when they bought their home. They thought they could move to Phoenix or Reno, though neither pulled them in.
In 2018, he received an invitation to his 50th high school reunion in Kansas, and he realized that the state he only briefly called home growing up was where he needed to move.
“We were driving around, and I thought this place was beautiful and so clean. The streets were so wide, you can park in front of the front door of your destination. We thought this place was real liveable,” Mike said. “We got back to California, and about a week later, we were reminiscing and finally just said, let’s get the heck out of here and let’s go to Kansas.”
It took a year and a half to move to the Kansas City metro, as his wife still had a few months until retirement, and they were still remodeling their California home.
“To be honest, if we hadn’t gone to that reunion in 2018, we’d probably still be living in our same house in California because in order to move, all of a sudden, wherever I moved to would have a new tax base,” Mike said. “I could have sold the house for a lot of money, but my next house was going to cost a lot of money.”
Moving to Kansas: Pros and cons
In 2020, they sold their California home for $1.4 million and moved to Westwood Hills, a city of 400 along the Kansas-Missouri border and about a 15-minute drive from Kansas City. They bought a 1927 home for under $400,000, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
He estimates he’s paying more taxes in Kansas, and when he first moved, he said he was surprised at how similar some prices were, such as at the hardware store. He also said going out to eat is roughly the same between the two states.
Though he acknowledged his comparisons aren’t fully accurate due to pandemic-era inflation, he said groceries, energy, and water costs are much less in Kansas. Even with keeping heat or air conditioning on all year, his utilities are a fraction of what he spent in California. Whereas gas averages $4.74 a gallon in California, gas runs $2.91 a gallon in Kansas.
While he said water was expensive and scarce in California, he said he can now have a nice lawn and host barbecues outside without the stress of running out of water.
He said he and his wife were prepared to face colder winters, though the last few months have been more than tolerable. He and some of his friends expected Kansas to be miles of barren flat land, though he said there is plenty of greenery, rolling hills, and streams in his area.
Mike said meeting new people and making friends in Kansas is a lot easier. As a car enthusiast whose friends moved away from the Bay Area, he joined a group of a dozen locals who meet weekly to discuss and check out cars.
“It’s easier to live here. The streets are wider, the traffic is less aggressive, no one’s laying on the horn or road raging,” Mike said, adding that his community reminded him of Minnesota.
He said he has no intention of moving out of Kansas, noting that his experience so far has been a pleasant surprise.
“I’m not a California basher because California had been very good to me, and it’s a beautiful place,” Mike said. “I miss the palm trees and being near the ocean and seeing the bay every day, but that wasn’t enough to keep us.”
Have you recently moved to a new state or moved out of the US to a different country? Reach out to this reporter at [email protected].
Correction: March 5, 2024 — This post has been updated to clarify Mike’s original location in California.