This is from an article from the Albany Times Union about how some people from Texas have moved to the area:
https://www.timesunion.com/news/arti...%20the%20knick
"In March 2022, Autumn Thorman sold her Texas home to a family from California. She signed the last of the paperwork, got in her Toyota Camry, and started the drive to Albany, N.Y.
Thorman, 46, who lived in Galveston County on the Gulf Coast, got a glimpse of upstate while on a leaf-peeping tour in the Northeast. She later discovered her job had a campus in Bethlehem.
“I told myself, ‘I have got to get to the north before the next general election,’” she said. “‘And I’ve got to get out of Texas before the next hurricane, before the next Ike or Harvey.’”
Thorman’s story is the opposite of what most data is telling us: New York, particularly its metro areas, is losing residents; Texas and Florida are gaining them.
“It does make sense that people would relocate to the Capital District from areas like Texas,” said Mark Castiglione, executive director of the Capital District Regional Planning Commission.
The Capital Region saw an overall population increase of 2.5-percent from 2016 to 2021, though CDRPC has not looked specifically at in-migration from areas like Texas. U.S. Census data estimates hundreds moved from Texas to Capital Region counties between 2017 and 2021. Castiglione said affordable housing, relatively high median household income and emerging tech sectors in the Albany area could be drivers.
“I’m more interested in why people wouldn’t want to be here,” said Chris Dancy, 55, a technology consultant and author who moved from Houston to Fonda in 2022. “And I just wonder if they have ever actually left, because you would want to be here if you left every once in a while.”
Climate and politics
Climate was a major factor for all of the ex-Texans interviewed by the Times Union.
“The summers are very hot and very long, and getting longer and hotter,” said Cyndee Daly, 42, who moved with her husband and two children from outside of Dallas to Guilderland in 2017.
Dancy, who’d moved to Texas in 2018 to be with their husband, a Spanish teacher and Texas native, was prompted to move after someone was shot and killed in their neighborhood. But areas least impacted by climate change were a major factor in picking a new home.
“This area, from the line we’re at now going north into the Adirondacks, is one of the safest places you can be,” they said.
For most of the Texans interviewed, there was another factor.
“The politics,” said Erica Wiggins, 34, who moved from the Dallas area to Loudonville with her mother Kristin Mora in 2021.
“The politics,” agreed Mora, 51.
Daly said she’d tried to find like-minded moms and other groups in Texas, but saw politics grow more and more extreme over time.
“After the 2016 election there was more of an urgency,” she said, adding she knew it was likely Roe v. Wade would be overturned. (The Supreme Court did so in 2022, allowing one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country to take effect in Texas.)
Erin Sheffield, 22, who moved to Albany after attending Syracuse University, grew up in Canyon, a town outside of Amarillo in one of the most Republican districts in the state. Sheffield constantly found herself defending her politics, her sexuality and religion. The summer after her senior year of high school a former classmate shared a photo she’d posted at a Pride event and said her soul needed saving.
“When people were coming to my defense … they were saying, ‘Just because she’s bisexual doesn’t mean she’s not Christian,’” Sheffield said.
The problem with that statement: She’s an atheist.
“I just increasingly felt like I did not fit in Texas,” Sheffield said. “I just felt like I had to justify myself as a person.”
Missing home
When Sheffield experienced her first snow in Syracuse, she put on two pairs of pants, two coats, a hat and a hood. She’d spent good money on snow boots and was warned to bring sunglasses to avoid snow blindness.
Stepping out into the 30-degree weather, with the city streets freshly plowed, she realized she might have been a little over-prepared. But it wasn’t the biggest adjustment. Sheffield, who attended Syracuse University on a Pell Grant, faced the loss of work-study jobs and had to pay for lodging out of pocket when students were required to quarantine.
“It’s a little hard to separate me being in upstate New York and me being at a rich private school in upstate New York,” she said. “Being in a city, it also meant that people just didn’t really understand what it’s like to grow up in a rural area.”
Sheffield also has to contend with living hundreds of miles away from friends and family. She recently flew out for her uncle’s funeral but couldn’t say goodbye to him. Now she’s monitoring from afar whether wildfires burning the Texas Panhandle will reach Canyon.
“I constantly have to have some money in my back pocket to fly home,” she said. “And I’m going to have to grapple with the fact there are some things I’m going to miss.”
It’s also the little things. The first Thanksgiving Wiggins went back to Texas to visit, she returned with a car full of items from Texas grocery stores. On the subreddit CapitalRegionExTexans, a Reddit forum created two years ago, many discuss the choices for Tex-Mex or barbecue upstate.
“Good Tex-Mex is hard to find,” Dancy said. “But we also miss dumb things, like Panda Express.” (The region’s only Panda Express closed in 2018 in Latham.)
Some have found suitable substitutes. Others have embraced local Italian eateries, baked goods and cider donuts (and there’s nothing comparable elsewhere to a Stewart’s Shop, Dancy noted).
For many, the lighter traffic, four seasons and milder summers balance it out. Thorman said she found herself embedded in the community, starting podcasts and highlighting free things to do in the area on social media.
“Here I kind of matter, try to matter,” Thorman said. “And I love that about Albany too, it’s so freaking local.”
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