Moving In and Moving On

This Thanksgiving weekend, Donna and Brad Guske and their baby, Henry, are entertaining relatives in a three-bedroom split-level rental in Silver Spring rather than in the tiny bungalow they used to call home in Los Angeles.

The Guskes moved east in July after Brad Guske, an accountant, took a rotation offered by his California employer. Donna Guske had taught elementary school before Henry was born in May.

The new digs are almost double the 1,400-square-foot house they still own in Los Angeles, but the rent is the same as what they're charging their California tenants. And there's plenty of room for their two dogs. There's no way, though, that the yard can accommodate Donna's horse, Huckleberry, who was shipped cross-country on an 18-wheeler and is stabled in Howard County. So the Guskes' hope is to move eventually to greener, cheaper pastures farther out.

The family's planned trajectory, from California to the close-in Washington suburbs and then out to some wider-open, less expensive space beyond the metro area, is exactly the flight path others have been following, according to an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data done for The Washington Post by Moody's Economy.com.

"Migration into the D.C. area is being driven by the region's very strong job market," the best employment market in the country, said Mark Zandi, Economy.com founder and chief economist. And the movers tend to be "from other, very high-house-priced areas such as California and New York."

But housing prices here have jumped so much in the past six years, Zandi said, that a large number of people have been heading for the exit signs, primarily to the areas around Baltimore, Hagerstown, Richmond and Winchester.

The same kind of migratory pattern, from high-cost city to lower-cost city and then to even lower-cost suburb, is occurring nationally around the most expensive markets, Zandi said.

"Some of the really juiced-up markets are seeing significant outflows of people," he said at a recent housing forecast conference of the National Association of Home Builders. In coastal California, the population had been relocating for several years to nearby states, but more recently the IRS statistics show net out-migration to what had been farmland in inland California.

"In Florida, people are moving up the coast" from Miami to lower-cost areas, but as Florida prices overall have risen, retirees and second-home buyers have headed to the Gulf Coast, Zandi said.

"People are responding to the escalating prices: They're moving," Zandi said.

Nationally recognized demographer William H. Frey calls the in-and-out movement that Zandi sees in the Washington area and other expensive housing markets "the funnel effect."

"Essentially what we are seeing is metro D.C. benefiting from the even higher housing costs and stagnating economies in other coastal metros (especially New York, Boston and San Francisco), but also becoming the victim of its own rising housing costs, by heating up demand in close-by metros -- Hagerstown, Richmond and Winchester," Frey said in an e-mail.