There’s a version of this story that millions of people will recognize, even if they lived it slightly differently. A dense, expensive city. A pandemic. The sudden, urgent appeal of more space, lower costs, family nearby, a bigger house. The move happened fast, the rationale felt airtight, and the first few months in a new place were full of promise. Then, slowly, the feeling that something didn’t fit – until eventually, it became impossible to ignore.
For Alexis Adegoke and her family, the move from Brooklyn, New York to Dallas, Texas checked all the right boxes on paper. A Brooklyn mom with a family of five, she relocated to Dallas drawn by the classic combination: more space, lower cost of living, and family support waiting on the other side. She moved her family from New York City to Texas, and then, a few years later, with three kids in tow, decided to move back to NYC.
What makes Adegoke’s story worth examining closely isn’t that it ended in a return – plenty of pandemic-era moves have. It’s what the experience taught her family about the difference between more space and a better life, and how clearly that lesson maps onto the data about what actually drives people’s satisfaction after a major interstate relocation.
What the Adegoke Family Found in Texas
At first, the move seemed to make sense. Like many millennials, they had absorbed the familiar script: get married, buy a house, raise kids in the suburbs. Texas offered a concrete version of that script – detached homes with yards, lower housing costs compared to New York, no state income tax, and the cultural gravity of suburban family life.
In Texas, conversations often centered around bigger houses, larger yards, and more space. But for Adegoke and her family, the extra square footage didn’t translate into a better life. That tension – between what a larger home represents and what it actually delivers – became the central discovery of their time in Texas. As Adegoke put it: “I don’t believe square footage creates happiness. Actually, I think it’s the opposite.”
She described how “the more our kids grew, the more we realized how much we were craving what we left behind… the walkability, the rhythm, the movement, the energy.” The ability to step outside and have the city immediately present – the texture of urban life that had felt ordinary in Brooklyn – turned out to be something her family actively needed rather than something they could comfortably leave behind.
Eventually, the family made the decision that surprised some friends and neighbors: they were moving back to New York City. The move required downsizing again, but the process turned out to be unexpectedly freeing. As Adegoke reflected: “We realized how much stuff we had simply because we had the space for it. When we came back to New York, everything we brought had a purpose.”
Their apartment may be smaller, but the lifestyle feels bigger. For them, the experience offered a simple but powerful realization: happiness doesn’t necessarily grow with square footage.
The Broader Migration Picture: A Generation That Moved, Then Reconsidered
The Adegoke family was not moving against the grain when they left New York for Texas – they were moving with one of the largest demographic currents in recent American history. Understanding that current is essential for anyone now making similar decisions.
New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco experienced the largest jumps in out-migration during the early pandemic years. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a significant shift in taxpayer movement, with net out-migration from New York State quadrupling in 2020 compared to the prior year. Based on IRS data, a total of 486,344 New York filers and their dependents moved to other states between 2020 and 2021, partially offset by 224,559 who moved in – a net loss of 261,785 filers and dependents, a slight increase over the previous year’s record outflow.
Net out-migration from New York City to places both in and outside the state spiked, with over two in every 100 city residents moving out in 2020. The scale of the exodus was unlike anything seen in the modern era.
Texas was a direct beneficiary. California and New York saw their domestic net outflows surge during the first year of the pandemic, and those two states were among the top sources of interstate movers to Texas early in the pandemic. The appeal was rational: the median price of homes available for sale in January 2020 was almost $465,000 in New York, compared with only $285,000 in Texas. In addition to lower-cost housing, Texas’ relatively early easing of pandemic restrictions and lack of a state income tax may have been attractive to many families.
According to United Van Lines’ 2024 National Movers Study, for the first time in decades, the primary driver for moving interstate was a desire to be closer to family (28%). The Adegoke family’s motivations – family support, more space, a different kind of life – were textbook pandemic-era relocation drivers.
But the national data also hints at what happened next. America’s pandemic-era relocation boom has officially cooled. Interstate migration fell to its lowest level in a decade in 2024, with just 7.15 million Americans moving across state lines – more than 1 million fewer than at the 2022 peak. The urgency that drove so many moves began to fade – and with it, some of the certainty that had made those decisions feel obvious.
New York City recorded two consecutive years of population growth after its pandemic slump. Updated census estimates showed the city grew by 35,000 people between July 2022 and July 2023, and now stands at 8,478,000 people. The Vintage 2024 Population Estimates showed New York City grew by 87,000 people between July 2023 and July 2024. As suburban housing prices spiked and businesses reopened, migration out of Manhattan slowed and migration into the borough increased.
What Interstate Movers Are Getting Wrong Before They Go
The Adegoke family’s story is instructive not because they made a mistake – relocating for family and space is a legitimate reason to move – but because of what they discovered about the gap between anticipated and lived experience. That gap is where most relocation regret lives.
Anyone currently weighing a state-to-state move would do well to interrogate several areas that are routinely underestimated.
The True Cost Picture Is Rarely What It Seems
The headline numbers – lower housing costs, no state income tax, more square footage per dollar – are real, but they don’t tell the whole story. A big part of the calculation is state income taxes, and people who earn a significant income can save considerably by moving from high-tax states to Texas or Florida, where there is no income tax. But states without an income tax typically make up for it with higher sales or property taxes. Texas has property tax rates ranging from 1.6% to 2%, meaning a $400,000 home would generate $6,400 to $8,000 in property taxes each year.
The full cost of living comparison needs to include healthcare access, transportation costs (car ownership is not optional in most Texas suburbs), and the often invisible cost of rebuilding a life – new doctors, new schools, new social networks. According to North American Van Lines, over 25.87 million individuals relocated in 2024, which is slightly less than 8% of the total population. Interstate moving costs for professional movers are real and significant: the average cost of a long-distance move runs around $5,500. That’s before the first month’s rent, the security deposit, or any emergency fund.
Lifestyle Fit Is Not the Same as Affordability
The Adegoke family’s core discovery is one that housing economists and migration researchers have been documenting for years: people consistently overestimate how adaptable they are to a fundamentally different urban environment. What you give up when you leave a walkable city for a car-dependent suburb is not just convenience – it’s a daily texture of interaction, spontaneity, and access that quietly structures quality of life.
Major metropolitan areas experienced a “donut effect” during the pandemic, in which house values, rents, population, and business growth were inversely correlated with proximity to the central business district. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that three-fifths of households that left city centers in big cities moved to the suburbs of the same city – likely explained by the rise of hybrid work, in which employees still commute to the office a few days a week.
The question that the Adegoke family only answered through experience is: what does daily life actually look like in the destination, and does that life suit the people you are? Strengthening family ties has become the most common reason for interstate moving in 2024 and 2025, with 29.13% of movers relocating to be closer to family in 2025, up from 27.10% in 2023. Proximity to family is a sound reason to move. But it doesn’t follow that every affordable place will feel livable. These are separate questions that deserve separate scrutiny.
Read More: Ireland Will Pay You $90,000 to Move to a Beautiful Island Home
The School and Community Infrastructure Gap
The number of school-age children living in New York City dropped significantly during the pandemic years, with many of those children moving with their families to places where the school system was a significant draw. But what happens to those children’s social lives, their extracurricular access, their sense of stability – especially when a second move becomes necessary – is a variable that families rarely model carefully before committing to a first relocation.
Children often struggle with the concept of moving, especially if it means leaving behind friends, familiar surroundings, and established routines. The age of children significantly influences how they process and react. Younger children may worry about practical matters, while older kids are often concerned about maintaining friendships and adjusting to a new school.
Any family contemplating an interstate move with school-age children should take seriously the evidence that a second move – back to the origin city or somewhere else – carries additional disruption costs, and that those costs are not evenly distributed. Children who experience two relocations in a short window face a compounding adjustment challenge.
Financial Buffers Are Non-Negotiable
Planning an interstate move requires solid financial preparation. Experts recommend saving between $4,000 and $10,000 as a baseline – a figure that covers not just the move itself, but the first month’s rent, security deposit, utility deposits, and an emergency fund.
That number, though, doesn’t account for the more significant cost of an unexpected return move. The Adegoke family’s experience of downsizing twice – first to move to Texas, then to return to New York – illustrates the financial reality of a relocation that doesn’t stick. Every professional move, every temporary storage arrangement, every new security deposit is money that could have been deployed elsewhere.
Why Proximity to Family Is a Double-Edged Variable
The 2024 United Van Lines study found that, for the first time in decades, the primary driver for moving interstate was a desire to be closer to family (28%). The appeal is obvious – especially for parents of young children who were suddenly navigating work, school closures, and childcare without a safety net. But proximity to family solves one problem while potentially creating others. The cultural and lifestyle fit of a destination matters independently of whether relatives live there. Living near supportive family in a place that feels misaligned with who you are is a trade-off, not a solution.
What the Data Actually Adds Up To
The Adegoke family’s journey from Brooklyn to Dallas and back is not a cautionary tale about moving – it’s a precise illustration of what happens when the lifestyle equation gets incomplete inputs. The square footage was real. The family support was real. The lower housing costs were real. What wasn’t fully accounted for was the lived texture of the city they’d left: the walkability, the density of interaction, the way urban infrastructure shapes daily rhythm in ways that only become visible once it’s gone.
According to North American Van Lines 2024 data, the three main reasons people moved were cost of living, proximity to family, and work flexibility. None of those are wrong reasons to move. But none of them, on their own, constitute a complete picture of whether a destination will actually fit.
The national data supports a measured conclusion. The pull factors that once drew households across state lines – cheaper housing, lower taxes, and more space – have weakened. Many of the states that attracted waves of incoming migration in recent years, particularly the Sunbelt states, have seen home prices climb sharply, eroding their affordability advantage. New York City’s population grew by 87,000 between July 2023 and July 2024, reaching 8,478,000, with two consecutive years of growth suggesting that pandemic-era losses were a short-lived shock.
For anyone currently planning an interstate move, the practical imperatives are clear. Spend time in the destination before committing – not a weekend, but enough time to experience daily routines, commutes, school systems, and the social ecosystem. Run a full financial model that includes the cost of leaving, the cost of the first year, and the cost of returning if necessary. Ask not just whether you can afford the new place, but whether the life that place offers is genuinely the life you want.
And be honest with yourself about what you’re leaving behind – not just the costs, but the intangibles. Housing in California and New York runs nearly triple that of Texas or North Carolina, and that spread makes the math on moving look compelling. What doesn’t appear in that calculation is what the Adegoke family ultimately had to discover for themselves: that the life you’re buying with a lower mortgage payment is not always the life you were hoping for.
The Part Nobody Puts in the Moving Budget
The families who navigate interstate moves most successfully tend to be those who treat the first year as a deliberate trial rather than a permanent commitment – keeping their financial exposure limited enough to allow course correction if the experiment doesn’t work. That framing is uncomfortable. It requires admitting, before you’ve even packed a box, that you might be wrong. But it’s the posture that leaves you with options.
What the Adegoke story makes vivid is that the costs of getting it wrong are real and cumulative. Two professional moves, two rounds of setting up a new home, two rounds of children changing schools and rebuilding social lives. The families who avoid that compounding disruption are not necessarily the ones who chose a better destination. They’re often the ones who spent more time questioning whether the destination was right for them specifically – not just affordable, not just spacious, but genuinely suited to who they are and how they want to live.
There’s no formula for that. There are just better and worse questions to ask before you sign a lease somewhere new. Square footage is easy to calculate. What you’ll miss is harder – and it turns out to matter more.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.