GOINGS ON

In moving-and-storage parlance, California historically has been a “net inbound” destination: over any given time, more households have been hauled into the state than were shipped out. Local movers were available, anxious even. No longer. Now the wagons are pulling out, words like “exodus” and “stampede” are being thrown around and calls to movers go unreturned or are met with harried refusals.

Ring up Douglas Hill, president of the California Moving and Storage Assn., an industry trade group, and you have to wait until he gets off the phone with NBC’s “Today” show--some East Coast producer wants him to line up outbound customers to talk about why they are fleeing the Golden State. This is the first year Hill can recall moves out exceeding moves in; he puts the ratio at 60/40. The trend reached critical mass in mid-May, he says, when space on outbound moving vans suddenly grew dramatically scarce. Overworked movers were showing up late, and families wound up spending the first two weeks in their new, non-California pads camping out on the floor with sleeping bags.

Conventional wisdom blames the riot/earthquake double whammy, but Hill thinks that’s too pat; for one thing, the trend is statewide. He says a large chunk of the now ex-Californians are retirees, most of them heading to the Northwest or Vegas. The rest, he says, are recession refugees, especially laid-off aerospace workers risking their severance packages on new lives. “I talked to one guy, a physicist--he was going to Montana to be a carpenter,” says Hill, adding, in wonderment: “I even talked to someone who was moving to Tennessee.” All of this might indicate that moving is the greatest new growth industry since bankruptcy law. But Hill says that’s not necessarily so. Languishing cargo takes up warehouse room and drivers must be paid for “deadhead mileage”--coming back into the state empty. The real winners are those moving to the Golden State: Their stuff is arriving well ahead of schedule, thanks.