Public Storage is the latest company to leave California for Texas

Public Storage is moving to Texas after more than 50 years in California.

The company shared its plans to move its corporate headquarters from Glendale to Frisco, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, ahead of an earnings call this month. The largest self-storage brand in the U.S. has been based in Southern California since its founding in 1972 in El Cajon. The company operates more than 3,500 self-storage facilities across 40 U.S. states and has more than 5,000 employees.

Company leadership framed the move as a logistical decision rather than a full-on California exodus. The move to Texas, part of a wider overhaul of the company, will help it benefit from the “depth of talent and innovation in that market,” according to a statement.

Incoming Chief Executive H. Thomas Boyle, currently the company’s chief financial and investment officer, said during the fourth-quarter earnings call that the company has long operated in both Glendale and Dallas. Corporate job openings often were posted across both offices, but most new roles over the last several years have been filled in the Texas location, Boyle said.

“It’s about finding the right talent across the country and building the team going forward, and we look forward to strong leadership in both offices,” Boyle said.

The news comes shortly after Senate Bill 709 took effect at the start of the year. The bill was designed to place price caps on California’s self-storage industry but was scaled back to a transparency law requiring disclosures of rent hikes in rental agreements. The California Self Storage Assn., of which Public Storage is a funder, heavily lobbied against the bill.

California has been losing more companies than it’s been gaining since 2014, many to Texas. However, experts and economists have told The Times the corporate departures represent adjustments to California’s $4.1-trillion economy, rather than signs of systemic decline.

Last year the hair care company John Paul Mitchell Systems moved from Southern California to Wilmer, Texas, and the green energy company GAF moved from San José to Georgetown, Texas.

In 2024, Chevron announced plans to move its headquarters from San Ramon to Houston after years of butting heads with politicians in Sacramento over climate and energy policies.

That year, Elon Musk moved the headquarters of SpaceX and X to Texas because of a new state law that prohibits mandating that teachers notify families about student gender identity changes. Three years earlier, Tesla moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin, Texas.

In 2019, financial services company Charles Schwab relocated from San Francisco, where it was founded, to Westlake, Texas.

Other billionaires including Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Palantir founder Peter Thiel have begun distancing themselves from California as a labor-backed coalition gathers signatures in the hopes of putting a one-time 5% tax on state billionaires’ total wealth on the November ballot.