It turns out most out-of-state transplants coming to Los Angeles aren’t coming from all that far away. Las Vegas, just six hours away (in good traffic), sends more people our way than any other metropolitan area in the country.
Or at least that’s what an analysis conducted by the moving website Sparefoot, of U.S. Census data between 2009 and 2013, says. According to their work, precisely 6,264 people from Sin City picked up and made the long drive down the 15 Freeway before settling down in Los Angeles County during the five years analyzed, more than any other out-of-state locale.
Along with Las Vegas, the other leading out-of-state sources of transplants who clog up the 405 are Phoenix, New York, Chicago, and Seattle. Though if we’re going to nitpick, the analysis was built on a county-by-county analysis, which separates out the five New York boroughs into their own counties.
When you put all the boroughs together, you arrive with a value of exactly 6,061 New Yorkers who moved here between 2009 and 2013. That’s more than the 4,042 from Phoenix, but still less than Vegas.
To put this all in perspective, all these out-of-state transplants are dwarfed by the number of people moving into L.A. County from other places in California. More than 30,000 people moved from Orange County into Los Angeles during this period, along with 22,327 from San Bernardino County and 13,337 from Riverside County.
In all, a total of 216,018 out-of-county folks moved to L.A. County over the five-years examined. Looks like we’ve still got it.