Throughout 2020, Fox News and conservatives barked about how people were fleeing regulation-heavy California for more “liberty-loving” states like Texas.  They offered no evidence of this, to paraphrase Bill Maher, “They don’t know it for a fact.  They just know it’s true.”

Well, it’s neither true nor a fact, according to research by the California Policy Lab released Thursday, which shows that most of the migration in California was done intrastate, not to other states, the Associated Press reports.

“While a mass exodus from California clearly didn’t happen in 2020, the pandemic did change some historical patterns, for example, fewer people moved into the state to replace those who left,” author Natalie Holmes said.  “At the county level, however, San Francisco is experiencing a unique and dramatic exodus, which is causing 50% or 100% increases in Bay Area in-migration for some counties in the Sierras.”

The pattern is happening nationally as families seek housing that provides more square footage for quarantining families.  Many urban areas don’t have affordable housing options, so families are seeking properties to rent or buy further out of the metropolitan cities.

According to the study, even in the expensive San Francisco area, people who moved tended to stay with in the state, with only 3 in 10 people moving out of the 11-country Metropolitan Statistical Area, and only 1 in 5 moving out of state, not an unusually high rate.