Home buyers from across the nation are flocking to the MS Coast. Why do they love it?

On the day she decided to leave Utah, Kathy Rodriguez slipped down her icy driveway trying to get her mail.

“That’s it,” she recalled saying. “I am going to move somewhere it doesn’t snow.”

She started searching. Where could she live by the water? Where could she afford a home?

Her answer: Mississippi.

Even as the state worries about its declining population, all along the Coast there are signs of a different story. Rodriguez is part of a growing migration of people from neighboring states and around the country who are leaving families and hometowns to start new lives in South Mississippi.

They are coming from everywhere: Louisiana and Tennessee, but also Washington, Georgia, California and Arizona.

They are veterans and retirees, snowbirds and twenty-somethings. Some are still learning to peel crawfish or adapting to the summer heat. But drawn by the beaches, casinos, low taxes and cheap living, the newcomers are moving to the Coast to stay.

“You can buy a lot more house here than you can in California,” said Philip Demoran, an Ocean Springs-based real estate agent who has seen people move from Colorado and New York. “We’re just desirable for the way of life we have.”

There is no firm count on how many people have arrived on the Coast in recent years, but real estate agents say out-of-staters come often. The coastal counties were some of the few in that state that grew after the last Census, and data shows more than 11,000 people moved to Mississippi from Tennessee in 2022. Over 10,000 came from Louisiana, and thousands more moved from Texas, Florida and Alabama that year.

Construction is booming. Subdivisions are rising. At Southern Paradise Homes in Long Beach and Pass Christian, developer Glynn Illich said nearly every call he gets comes from out of state.

The Gulf Coast Running Club gets new members each year, said Race Director Leonard Vergunst, and some from the North have to cut back on miles because they cannot bear the heat.

At Bacchus on the Beach restaurant in Pass Christian, manager Adam Barnett said lots of customers come from New Orleans or Slidell, and snowbirds from Michigan and other northern states often visit to try oysters for the first time.

The newcomers are even undaunted by hurricanes, they say, because they figure the threat is better than earthquakes or months of freezing snow.

“We’re one of the last affordable places,” said Tammy Sambrano, a broker who works across the Coast. She said some people from out-of-state buy houses in cash.

That is also creating a problem: Some locals can no longer afford to pay.

“They think that they’re going to get what they got 20 years ago,” Sambrano said. “It’s pricing local people here out of the market.”

Moving to the Mississippi Coast

Rodriguez, 74, arrived in Long Beach six years ago on a sunny, 75-degree day. It was a world away from Utah, where it sometimes snowed in June and the powder fell so high she felt like she was driving through a tunnel.

She did not know a soul. She was surprised when people second in line at a light complained of traffic and at how casually they dressed when they went out to eat. But people were nice, she said. When she went to the airport, strangers lifted her bags and put them on the scale.

“Out here, people have property,” she said. “They live on lakes and bayous and sounds. I never even knew what a sound was when I moved here.”

Rodriguez joined a group called Gulf Coast Newcomers and Friends. The club hosts games and luncheons for its members, and Rodriguez said she’s met new people at each meeting, often from Texas.

“People don’t realize how much the Mississippi Gulf Coast has to offer,” said club president Diane Elmore, who moved to Gulfport from East Texas five years ago after her son got a job at Stennis Space Center. “I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d be living my retired years down here.”

Young people are coming too. Anna Sullivan, 23, moved to Ocean Springs from Shreveport, Louisiana, in August. She followed her parents, who moved to the Coast in 2022, and now she works three jobs and takes classes at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College.

She rents a duplex and still needs GPS directions to go anywhere. In January, she went to her first Ocean Springs Mardi Gras, where she saw a man in a purple, green and gold fur costume drinking a Busch Light and throwing ramen noodles.

She laughed about it.

“I just completely started over,” she said. “I’m trying to make a new life for myself.”

‘A big change’

Dave Meisburger wanted to retire in Gautier. He was a California native living in Oregon, and the Coast, he said, “is where I want to be.”

But the house he liked got bought out from under him, he said, and the buyer paid cash.

Mississippi has long had cheap prices to match some of the lowest incomes in the country. That has created a dilemma: wealthy out-of-state buyers can pay cash. Locals cannot.

The influx has forced up home prices, real estate agents say. Rents have also been rising in Mississippi and around the country since at least 2022.

“The prices are still climbing,” Sambrano said. The market is not forcing locals to flee, she said, but she warned Coast natives to buy a home when they can.

“Pretty soon,” she said, “they’re not even going to be able to afford the rent here.”

Meisburger found another house on the same quiet Gautier street. His neighbors are friendly. When he leaves the house, they write down the license plate number if a strange car pulls in his driveway.

Hurricane Zeta hit the Coast three days after he moved.

“I ended up sleeping through it,” he said. “If a hurricane is all I have to put up with, that’s better than California. They’ve got anything and everything out there.”

Others have fled the freezing north. Winter after cold winter broke Kim Schubert’s spirit, and after 25 years in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she and her husband decided the snow was enough.

They flew to New Orleans – a place so foreign Schubert walked into a grocery store and could not understand one word of a heavy Cajun accent an aisle over. They drove east and stopped in every town on the Coast until they hit Pascagoula.

Everything was affordable. “Alright,” Schubert remembered thinking. “We can do this.”

Now the couple lives half the year in Gulfport and spends summers in Michigan.

“It was a big change,” Schubert said, an echo of her old Midwestern accent still in her voice.

But she has not regretted it, she said, not even in hurricane season. “We always wanted to live on the Gulf.”