Texas ranks high on list of spots for relocations

With more than a half-million people a year moving to Texas, the Lone Star State ranks as one of the country’s top destinations for relocations.

The largest numbers of people moving to Texas hail from California, Florida, Louisiana, Illinois, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Georgia and Arizona, according to a new report from the Texas Realtors association.

And around 200,000 of the new Texans came from outside the U.S., the real estate trade group’s 2021 Texas Relocation Report finds.

“Some move here for a lower cost of living than where they’re from, a great quality of life, diverse job opportunities, good weather — there are many reasons people continue coming to Texas,” Marvin Jolly, 2021 chairman of Texas Realtors, said in the report.

California ranks first nationally among states people are leaving, according to 2019 U.S. Census data.

The Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston areas were the biggest gainers for out-of-state moves, according to the Realtors.

With the COVID-19 pandemic changing the U.S. workplace, more companies are pondering a move.

West Monroe, a nationwide business and technology consulting firm, recently surveyed 150 business executives for its latest quarterly report on industry trends.

“One in 4 said they were considering picking up their business locations and moving them somewhere else,” said Adam Gersting, who leads West Monroe’s Dallas office. “A lot of that group are looking at Texas.

“Many behind that are saying they are looking to Texas because of cost of living, cost of talent, taxes, real estate and regulations being more favorable,” Gersting said. “The West Coast employers most often cited Texas as a choice for moves. That’s in keeping with what we’ve seen in the marketplace with companies moving from California to Texas.”

Florida and Tennessee ranked just behind Texas on businesses’ location shopping list.

Gersting said employers are making plans for their workers to return to the office from home as the pandemic subsides.

“Forty seven percent of the folks said their workforce will be on-site either most or part of the time when it is safe to return to work,” he said. “That is a higher figure we have seen in some surveys. Most of the organizations thought that their business would be at least stabilized by the third quarter of this year.”

Gersting said almost half the executives West Monroe surveyed were looking to hire people.

“We see organizations shifting to offense a little bit more and investing in front-end customer experiences driving sales as they see business stabilize,” he said.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The smaller, lighter vehicles that women more often drive, and the types of crashes they get into, may explain why they are much more likely to suffer a serious injury in a collision than men, a new study published Thursday found.

Researchers from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group supported by auto insurers, looked into whether there was some sort of gender bias in the research into vehicle crashes or whether body type had anything to do with the injuries.

They analyzed injuries of men and women in police-reported tow-away front and side crashes from 1998 to 2015. Among the findings were that in front crashes, women were three times as likely to experience a broken bone, concussion or other moderate injury, and twice as likely to suffer a serious one like a collapsed lung or traumatic brain injury.

Men and women crashed in minivans and SUVs in about equal proportions, the researchers found. But around 70 percent of women crashed in cars, compared with about 60 percent of men. And more than 20 percent of men crashed in pickups, compared with less than 5 percent of women.

Men are also more likely to be driving the striking vehicle in twovehicle front-to-rear and front-toside crashes, research shows.

“The numbers indicate that women more often drive smaller, lighter cars and that they’re more likely than men to be driving the struck vehicle in side-impact and front-into-rear crashes,” said Jessica Jermakian, IIHS vice president of vehicle research. “Once you account for that, the difference in the odds of most injuries narrows dramatically.”

Women were also much more likely to suffer leg injuries compared to men, which may require car safety researchers to start building crash test dummies that account more for the physical differences between women and men, the researchers noted.