If you’re trying to buy a home in Texas, you can blame California’s politics for driving home prices to unaffordable levels. Adolfo Flores reports in The Wall Street Journal, writing:
Texas has long had a reputation as an affordable place to live, in large part because homeownership stayed within reach for the middle class.
Now the state is being walloped by the same forces that have made homes a lot less affordable in many cities previously known for reasonable prices: pandemic-era migration from California and other more expensive areas.
California to Texas was the most popular interstate relocation route in the country in 2021, according to an analysis by storage-space search site StorageCafe using Census Bureau data. During that year, about 111,000 people—about 300 a day—moved from California to Texas.
Soaring prices have left many longtime residents grumbling about the Californization of Texas.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas recently analyzed data on housing affordability in Texan cities, defined as the percentage of the housing stock affordable to families earning the median income in those places. At the beginning of 2014, nearly two-thirds of homes in San Antonio were affordable for a median-income family. By the end of 2022, fewer than one-third were. Affordability, defined as what a family spending 28% of its gross income on housing could buy, also declined in Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin, before ticking up slightly early this year.
Maintenance technician Randy Templeton moved from Illinois to San Antonio a decade ago because of Texas’ low cost of living. This year, however, when he started looking for an affordable home to buy and fix up for his growing family, he got an unpleasant surprise.
“The prices on those fixer-uppers shot up ridiculously,” he said. “And then even if you do find a home that’s for sale, you’re paying twice what you would have paid even just four years ago.”
Action Line: The destruction of California as a desirable place to live by its radical progressive politicians has changed the reality for homebuyers in Texas as so many Golden Staters search for a better America. If you are looking for a new home in America, start your search with Your Survival Guy’s 2023 Super States. Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
