Patricia Heaton explains why she left Los Angeles for Nashville, cites homelessness, crime

Actress Patricia Heaton explained why she left Los Angeles in a podcast interview Monday, citing crime, homelessness and high taxes.

Heaton spoke to host Dave Rubin on "The Rubin Report" about filming her movie "Unexpected" in Oklahoma and said she had also worked outside Los Angeles.

"We had filmed it in Oklahoma, and then we were filming something somewhere else, and it was outside of LA. And we just thought that the taxes are high. The crime is high. The homelessness is high, and we're not working in LA as much as we're working outside of LA. So, why don't we leave?" she told Rubin.

"And so we just said, 'Let's go to Nashville because we were familiar with it.' We had friends there and, you know, we really haven't looked back.

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"And when I go back now, I think, 'Does it feel different to me because I'm not working here anymore or has it really changed?' And I think there is a little bit of a sadness about it that I think is real, and it's not just because of my experience," Heaton added.

She said a lot of writers from her previous shows - "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "The Middle" - left and went back to their hometowns.

"We just got an email from a writer saying, 'You got out at the right time,'" Heaton said. She noted that there were now sound stages in LA that were empty. 

"Where we shot 'The Middle,' which is on Warner Ranch, which is around the corner from Warner Brothers. And it used to house like the 'Walton' house and the 'Lethal Weapon' house and the 'Bewitched' house and the 'Friends' Fountain was all there. And that was all razed to the ground, and they built a ton of soundstages. And then the pandemic happened and the strikes all happened, and there's just a bunch of empty soundstages there now," she said.

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After the fires in LA earlier this year, Heaton teamed up with LA Dream Center to help residents in need and criticized local and state officials for their response. She said the city didn't seem prepared for the fires, which began burning Jan. 7 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood.

"I know some of the officials were saying, 'Well, the system was overwhelmed.' Well, in case of a huge fire, of course it's going to be overwhelmed," she told Fox News Digital in January. "You should know that and have been prepared for that. So, I think there's a lot of money spent in LA, and we can't figure out where it's going."

Heaton insisted California residents "can't just rely on the government to take care of things."

"It's people coming together in your community and insisting on getting stuff done. And, sadly, this is a very, very, very harsh lesson," she said.

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Comedian and actor John O'Hurley said during a November interview on Fox News' "The Brian Kilmeade Show" he's "reluctantly" still living in LA but likely not for much longer.

"A lot of the work that I do is voice work. A lot of it I can fly in for. I did five movies this year. I didn't do a single one of them in Los Angeles," he said. 

O'Hurley added that California's shrinking film industry is part of what's driving people away, noting that most of his recent projects have been filmed in other locations like Georgia, Tennessee and New York.

Fox News' Madison Columbo contributed to this report.