After calling Glendale home for 50 years, Public Storage is joining a parade of companies leaving Los Angeles for Texas. 

The largest self-storage company worldwide – and the second largest public company in Los Angeles County, with a market cap exceeding $53 billion – announced last month that it will now be based in Frisco, Texas – a suburb of Dallas. The move was a natural progression,

H. Thomas Boyle, Public Storage’s chief financial and investment officer, said during the company’s fourth quarter earnings call in February.

When Public Storage would hire for corporate roles in Glendale or its other corporate office in Dallas, most of the new recruits ended up working out of the Dallas office. Eventually, the company’s corporate occupancy in Dallas grew to be larger than its Glendale office.

“We did see the office increase in size there to the point where today our office in Dallas is our largest corporate presence,” Boyle, who will take over as chief executive in April, said. “It makes sense to relocate the corporate headquarters.”

Public Storage did not respond to a request for comment.

The headquarters change is part of a fairly significant package of changes for Public Storage, with longtime Chief Executive Joe Russell retiring on March 31 and being retained for the next year as a consultant to assist with Boyle’s transition.

“It has been an honor to lead Public Storage through a decade of transformation, accretive growth and shareholder returns,” Russell said in a statement. “Tom has been a valued partner and an exceptional leader in his dual role as CFO and CIO, helping create the foundation that has driven our improved capital allocation, superior operations, and relative shareholder returns in recent years.”

Stream of exits

Public Storage’s exodus adds to the list of major companies that have left L.A. in recent years.

Toyota Motor North America moved its financial services headquarters from Torrance to Plano, Texas, in 2017 to connect its disparate headquarters in California, Kentucky and New York on one campus.

In 2020, real estate firm CBRE Group Inc. moved from downtown Los Angeles to Dallas in a move the company called “largely window dressing, since not many jobs are expected to transfer from Los Angeles to Texas, and Dallas has served as a key corporate office for several years.”

And Space Exploration Technologies Corp. moved from Hawthorne to Starbase, Texas, in 2024 after founder Elon Musk expressed disappointment with transgender rights legislation here.

Not all doom and gloom

Less than 2% of California’s headquarters left the state between 2011 and 2021, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Comparatively, the state saw 17% of its headquarters launch in the same period. While several tech companies have left California for states with lower taxes and fewer regulations, the nonprofit said that effect on the Golden State’s jobs economy appears to be negligible.

“Companies that move headquarters to other states do not appear to shrink non-headquarter employment in the state relative to firms whose headquarters stay in California,” the Public Policy Institute said in a 2025 brief. “Job loss due to relocation appears mostly limited to headquarter jobs.”

Indeed, SpaceX still operates a manufacturing factory in Hawthorne. CBRE said in 2020 that it was moving “an extremely small number of operations-related roles” to Dallas, leaving most of its 5,000 California-based employees in-state. Toyota Financial Services said around 2,300 associates would remain in California after it moved to Plano.

As for Public Storage, the company is not abandoning its Glendale roots entirely.

“We’re going to be moving into new space in the Glendale area as well, with a long-term commitment to be in that market,” Boyle said. “It’s about finding the right talent across the country and building the team going forward.”