Huge California influencers like Lauryn Evarts Bosstick (@theskinnyconfidential), Sazan Hendrix (@sazan), Anna Victoria (@annavictoria) and celebrities like James Van Der Beek keep moving to Austin, and I kind of hate it? I put a question mark there because honestly I don’t really know how I feel but I can tell you something feels off about it. Over the last 10 months or so I’ve noticed a large influx of really big influencers and celebrities (of all sizes) packing up and leaving California for Austin. And when I started digging into the why, it seems they all of a sudden thought Austin was the place to be — in the middle of a global pandemic no less. I found similar reasons across the board. Most of them listed “cheap” housing/land prices, this idea that Austin is a thriving utopia not hit by COVID-19 or any other issues, the overall inexpensiveness of Austin, and lack of COVID-19 restrictions. I watched Instagram stories of one large influencer who said she loved how cheap everything in Texas was. I listened to an author share how great it would be for his kids to go to school in person, an option he didn’t have in California. I watched one influencer sit inside a well known hotel in Austin and express that the thing she was most looking forward to in her move was dining indoors. I read a Facebook post by one celebrity who said Texas offered the conservative values he was looking for and less COVID-19 restrictions than California. I listened to a podcast/influencer couple with over 1 million followers on Instagram talk about how many businesses in Austin were thriving because they didn’t have COVID-19 restrictions like the ones in California, and they also mentioned how excited they were to eat indoors. I watched and listened as influencers and other Californians of privilege went on and on about why they chose to move to Austin and I wondered what planet these people lived on. Click to read more at www.chron.com.