Toyota’s announcement that it’s moving its U.S. headquarters from Torrance, Calif., to Plano, Texas, is raising interest.

As you can imagine, they’re not happy in Torrance, according to Reuters:

Torrance Mayor Frank Scotto, looking grim, said outside city hall on Monday that he had been blindsided by the move. A few feet away sat Pat Simpson, a Torrance resident for over 60 years, with her head in her hands. “Why do they want to tear this place apart?” Simpson, 72, asked. …

The two biggest employers in Torrance, which has a population of 147,000 according to city figures, are Toyota and Honda. Both have about 4,000 employees. Losing Toyota will mean an annual loss of $1.2 million in tax revenue, Scotto said, but the emotional toll and wider economic impact will be much bigger, he said. …

Whether the city can replace Toyota, and fill the 101-acre business park and headquarters it will leave behind, remains to be seen. Scotto said the city had a short list of companies similar to Toyota that are being courted to replace the Japanese car maker.

But conceding that the battle to keep Toyota was lost before it had even begun – “the train has already left the station,” Scotto said – he also said it takes the state of California, not a small city such as Torrance, to stop large manufacturers from leaving the Golden State.

Frank Portillo, a co-owner of Los Chilaquiles Mexican Grill next to the Toyota headquarters said he did not blame Toyota, although he might lose business himself. “The taxes are lower in Texas. There are fewer regulations. It’s cheaper for a company there. Why wouldn’t they leave California?”

Dale Buss sees it as a business climate issue:

For Japanese auto brands, the logic of keeping their U.S. sales and administrative arms in California is breaking down under the outsized penalties of conducting business in the Golden State and the changing dynamics of the North American automotive industry. So Toyota is leaving, according to Automotive News.

And where is Japan’s biggest automaker relocating its sales and marketing operations in America? Why, North Texas, of course. The move to Plano, Texas, will involve most of the 5,000 managers and employees at Toyota’s current Torrance, Calif., headquarters, the magazine said.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry apparently didn’t even have to make a recruiting trip to southern California to get Toyota to do this, although he has helped lure plenty of companies with that gambit over the last several years.

And yet Texas has scored one of the biggest prizes so far in its very focused, state-on-state battle with the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown to get plum companies now headquartered in California to abandon the bluest state for the reddest one.

Clearly, Perry caressed a trump card in the fact that Toyota has enjoyed a deep relationship with Texas through its $2.2-billion truck-assembly complex near San Antonio.

Plus, the fact is that, as Toyota has become a more U.S.-centric company with important assets all over the country, it makes sense for the Japanese market leader to distribute its operations in a new way. Toyota’s 14 North American manufacturing facilities now build 71 percent of the vehicles the company sells in the United States, up from 55 percent in 2008.

A half-century ago, Toyota and other Japanese brands clustered in southern California when they began their assault on the U.S. market because California offered the single best market opportunity for Asian brands coming to America and because the state’s location closest to Japan made logistics easiest.

For most of the time since then, California’s justified reputation as America’s automotive, societal, cultural, and economic bellwether continued to ratify the Japanese brands’ focus there. Consider how Toyota was able to grow its Prius hybrid line into the segment’s dominant brand by starting with an emphasis in California.

But now Toyota and most of it Japanese rivals are treating North America like their domestic market — meaning that a California lens isn’t always the best one. Maybe a new headquarters in Flyover Country will be. …

Besides, California’s business climate is becoming an even bigger downer. California has become infamous with business executives and owners there not only for high tax rates and complex taxing schemes but also for overzealous regulations and regulators that have managed to stifle the entrepreneurial energy of thousands of companies.

Even Hollywood movie studios have been souring about producing flicks in California, increasingly reckoning that the sweet tax breaks and assistance packages now offered by so many other states offset the legacy advantages and ideal production climate in California.

About the only vast remaining pocket of dynamism in the California economy is Silicon Valley, where the mastery of the global digital economy by companies ranging from Google GOOG +1.31% to Hewlett-Packard HPQ +2.27% has become so complete that they have been able to succeed despite the home-state business landscape.

In the annual Chief Executive magazine “Best States / Worst States” ranking that surveys CEOs for their opinions, Texas has been holding on to the No. 1 spot for a while; California seems permanently relegated to No. 50.

As Automotive News put it, “Despite the deep, creative talent pool in greater Los Angeles, doing business in California has become more expensive for companies and their workers.” Bestplaces.net said that the cost of living for employees is 39 percent higher in Torrance than in Plano, and housing costs are 63 percent lower in Plano.

Virginia Postrel follows up on cost of living:

Employees who relocate are in for a surprise. Contrary to the image promulgated by both critics and boosters, Texas is not an alien planet populated by barbarians with big hair.

With its cheap suburban housing and good public schools, Plano in fact offers a 21st-century version of the middle-class California dream that built towns like Torrance. It’s just been updated, with more immigrants, better restaurants and a lot more marble countertops.

In contrasting Texas and California, politicians and pundits tend to emphasize taxes and business regulation. But for most people on a day-to-day basis, the biggest difference between the two is the cost of housing.

Although Plano is one of the country’s richest cities, with a highly educated population and a median income of $85,333 compared to Torrance’s $70,061, it offers a much wider range of housing options. You can pay nearly $7 million for a five-acre estate in Plano — $3 million more than the most expensive listing in Torrance — but the average home costs less than $200,000, compared to $552,000 in Torrance. A Redfin search for three-bedroom houses costing less than $400,000 turns up 149 in Plano versus four in Torrance; lowering the threshold to $300,000 cuts the Plano supply to 73, while yielding nothing in Torrance.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Plano’s combination of inexpensive real estate and excellent public schools has cultural consequences. It allows for more traditional lifestyles, since many families don’t need a second income to live a comfortable middle-class life. Many mothers choose to stay at home or to work, often part-time, for personal fulfillment and luxuries such as family vacations. For both men and women, a life oriented around work rather than family is less common than in coastal enclaves of similarly highly educated people.

Simultaneously cosmopolitan and traditional, Plano will undoubtedly turn off some Toyota transplants. The conversational assumption that everyone belongs to a religious congregation of some kind — if not Christian, then Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist — will create culture shock. But a lot of people will discover that they can have a lifestyle they thought was a vanished American dream. As long as that’s true, companies are going to keep moving to Texas.

I’ve stated here before that Wisconsin needs to follow Texas‘ policies more than California’s. Texas has economically outperformed the entire country in the Obama economy.

Getting a car company the size of Toyota to move to Wisconsin isn’t going to happen since Chrysler (formerly in Milwaukee and Kenosha) and GM (formerly in Janesville) don’t have assembly plants here anymore. But when businesses with big facilities in one state leave that state for another, there are lessons politicians paying attention should learn.