Seems like there is a multi-industry push to move into Texas; came across a video the other day of Matthew McConaughey & Woody Harrelson (and other big name actors) reprising their True Detective role calling for the Texas legislature to increase incentives that bring Hollywood productions over to Texas.
One aspect that intrigues me is it's well positioned to take advantage of solar power. I think solar capacity is growing faster than any state and it's behind only California now?
I live in Chicago and just got finished with a 10F degree week, and I was sitting there feeling bad about how much natural gas my house was burning to stay warm. There are plenty of weeks here, where I have to raise the temperature in the house 60F degrees, whereas the worst in Texas is probably only a difference of a few dozen, tops. On top of which, cooling like that is vastly more efficient than warming. Heat pumps are getting to be useable at these low temperatures, and somewhat more efficient than just burning the fuel, but not nearly as efficient at cooling from, say, 100 to 80.
But the biggest difference is that when climate control needs are the highest here, we have the least sun: in the winter, at night. Whereas in Texas when the climate needs are the highest (in the summer, in the daytime), they have the most sun. There's something sort of pleasing about that to me.
> Texas heat
In other words, as someone who's a solar power optimist, dealing with Chicago cold, I feel like that's not such a drawback.
Of course, somewhere sunny and comfortable like California might be best, but who can afford that.
They don't. They're currently incorporated in Delaware, but HQ is (and will remain, so far) in California.
> The paperwork change would not relocate its corporate headquarters. A Meta spokesperson said that it does not plan on shifting its corporate headquarters out of Menlo Park, California, but declined to comment on reincorporation when contacted by Reuters.
Engineers don’t seem to be taking the bait, and people are very reluctant to move away from basically the most perfect weather in the entire world almost year round.
When industries move away, taxes do as well. When the taxes go down, services and property values go down. Engineers may not want to give up perfect weather, but they still want to be employed, have their properties not depreciate and want good schools.
Industries aren't really moving though. The state a company is incorporated is generally orthogonal to where that company puts their HQ or hires most of their workers.
Eh, people will still move to California to start a business. When it gets threatened enough, it'll cave and play ball with other states to get back into the game. Having an insane upper hand with the climate based desirability will help them to get back on track, in my opinion. Now, I don't live in CA, and wouldn't want to move for some other reasons, but I genuinely don't think there is a better climate than SF, LA, SD metro areas. Maybe Cape Town, but then again, different problems.
Various pundits have been really pushing this "People are leaving California in droves!" narrative, desperately hoping that it one day becomes true. They need it to be true in order to repudiate all the various political Californisms that they disagree with. The reality is that California's population declined less than 1% in one year out of the last 125 and stood approximately steady in one year. It increased the remaining 123 years.
There are a lot of people in Texas and the biggest cities are quite close together. In fact, you can start in Dallas, drive down to Waco, drive down to Austin, drive down to San Antonio, and you've only driven four hours to do so. If ever there was untapped access to a huge workforce, it's in Texas.
Even better, Houston actually has the lowest homelessness rate of any major US city[0] and access to water. People are really sleeping on Houston's future right now.
It's very libertarian. No taxes, few regulations. Some people die here and there from the lack of safety, but that's a sacrifice the government is willing to make.
This is a massive oversimplification. The taxes and regulations are simply handled at a lower level of government. If you've ever lived in a large Texas metro, you would know it's not the wild west it gets portrayed as. Lots of places that give off serious California NIMBY vibes and that are relatively expensive. The difference is that taxation and government services are typically handled via property tax and delivered locally instead of at the state level.
California and Texas have a lot more in common than people who've only lived in one or the other think. Texas just happens to be growing very quickly and is in some ways more geopolitically important at the moment (energy and exports and semiconductors and finance), which (besides less business regulation) is a big reason for the outflow from Cali and other states to Texas.