Another reason why the chasm between Texas and California will continue to grow larger- Cali has state and local level rent control, whereas rent control is illegal in Texas
As someone who has lived in both Texas and California, I have to point out that "Both have warm weather" is a wildly misleading statement.
California has NICE weather. For example, you can live in a nice apartment near the sea and leave your windows open in the summer and never use AC. It's pleasant to go outside year round.
Texas has miserably hot weather. Weather that makes you want to stay inside and never leave the house from about April to November. Living near the sea is miserably hot AND humid, too; proximity to the gulf doesn't make things any nicer.
No, a part of California has nice weather. There are commuter suburbs of San Francisco that spend a month or two with highs over 100°, and both Bakersfield and Redding will have weeks of 110°. All of those areas are noticeably more humid in summer than they were 20 years ago.
If you compare the whole state of Texas to the whole state of California, though, it's really obvious that Texas has worse weather. We're comparing weeks of 110° to months of 110°
I like to think about it this way. California went from having 10 reasons why it is very difficult to build housing to 7 reasons why it is very difficult to build housing. That's why the recent construction data out of California is so disappointing.
The real problem with the SF Bay Area is that there is a lack of political will to build up. There needs to be a Miami-like skyline alongside Ocean Beach and BART extension to the ocean. SF is meant to be the NYC of the West, not an uncontrolled Texan like suburban sprawl.
Thank you so much for covering this extremely niche, but extremely important intersectional topic of policy, economics, and politics!
I work for… a very large U.S. city… in zoning and planning and I regret to relay that the general consensus amongst those who’s jobs it is to plan for more housing and help facilitate zoning changes are still extremely NIMBY for reason mentioned: gentrification, evil capitalists making money, the usual topics, etc,. This has changed a bit in recent years but not nearly to the degree it needs to.
And thank you for mentioning the public sectors unions! I’ve had a 180 degree shift in my thoughts about unions since working for the government. I can’t stress how detrimental they have become to large liberal cities and states. They essentially operate as an efficiency cartel, draining time and money from cities and states to enrich their members and the behest of the public tax pays, and it’s criminal the things they get away with.
I think in about 2 decades (if even) when Texas eclipses California in population, democrats may actually hit the panic button regarding housing instead of trying to just lightly tinker around the edges.
Your argument is that the CA housing market is "ruined" even though you acknowledge that the YIMBY movement has been achieving success. It is only a "failure" when you insist on comparing to Texas. Why is this the benchmark?
Housing policy has a long lag time. your analysis ignores this, and also doesnt take into account the importance of transit. TX is building houses by the zillions; but have you ever had to commute in Houston or Austin? (I lived in Houston for 9 years, i have direct experience in this regard).
Transit is an important piece of housing policy. LA is building hundreds of miles of new subways and train lines. The Sepulveda Pass project is going to transform SoCal. And HSR - which i assume you are skeptical of - will enable people to commute to high paying jobs in LA and the Bay while living in affordable central valley homes. These are not projects that will result in short term improvements against the Texas comparison benchmark. But in 20 years lets run the comparison again and see where the migration flows are oriented.
Housing requires generational thinking to solve structural problems. Texas is moving fast on the short term but they are creating new structural problems for the future. CA is moving slow - but still moving - short term and also playing the long game.
YIMBY/Abundance grew out of the political realities that people were leaving blue states for red states, and that this is bad for the people leaving blue states, and it is bad for Democrats goals on a national level.
Democrats and liberals concluded (rightly in my opinion) that the cost of housing was a chief force in this phenomena, at least for places like New York City and California.
I don't consider this sinister or bad, BTW. Just an acknowledgement that for the average American, cost of living is a universal concern they deal with every day, while a lot of what we fight over politically is not. Democrats could build a utopia, with well run single payer healthcare, trans rights, abortion, 0 gun deaths, 100% clean energy, and hip walkable communities everywhere, and no one would live there if they can't afford the rent/mortgage.
Ergo, getting lapped by Texas, which is already has cheaper housing is a policy failure.
I'm pretty willing to take this bet. I'm from Texas and went to grad school at UCLA. The unlivable conditions there drove me back to my home state. My husband is a native Californian and moved back here with me. There's a very good chance we'd have stayed in California forever if it wouldn't have meant being two or three times as poor (and probably never owning a house) if we had. This is also Texas' "20-year gain" in terms of tax revenue and talent with internal migration like this.
We live in Houston today. Traffic was worse in LA ten years ago than Houston is *now.* Obviously some of that is contingent on your specific commute, but from a sheer point to point "how much of my life did I waste in traffic, trying to find parking, paying for expensive gas, etc." LA definitely wins.
Also, my mortgage on my 3-bedroom house in Houston is currently ~1400 a month. Nice neighborhood - not soulless cookie cutter houses. It's old enough that it has fully mature trees, several big parks within walking distance, lots of good restaurants, and I pretty much never see homeless people or hear/see anything about crime. When I was in LA, my studio apartment in Westwood was ~1250 over ten years ago, and I had to pay some extra hundreds per year in parking.
There's also tons of mid-range cities in Texas growing like weeds. Waco is one example. I took a job here this last year and have been staying here with family (helping deal with a sick family member). Extremely affordable, walkable downtown with lots of restaurants, shops, museums, and churches right in the heart of the city. Most Wacoans I work with tell me to stop plugging the city so people will just keep thinking of Branch Dravidians and not move here. (It also has one of the best urban parks I've ever been to, Cameron Park). It's extremely possible to forget about the biggest 3 or 4 cities in Texas and move to one of these smaller cities which are also doing great when compared to other cities of comparable size in California or other states.
People can keep on with the weather and "suburbs are ugly" cope, but you can't shed people for years and years and not feel the pinch. You need taxes to pay for the trains.
Because Houston also has regulations that prevent the building of an actual city. Houston's downtown is dead, a victim of Urban Renewal. Houston doesn't have zoning, but it is far from a free market housing Mecca.
Why does specifically downtown have to thrive as a *fun* place for this to be considered a success? That's an extremely narrow, bizarre metric of what "counts." Given the amount of infill I see in the 610 loop, that entire zone is getting more and more "urban" by the day. It may never look like Manhattan. So what? (For the record, I'm not opposed to it becoming Texas Manhattan. It would in fact be cool). My definition of success is "normal people can afford to live here, be safe, have economic opportunities, have leisure activities a reasonable distance from them, not be driven out of public spaces by social dysfunction, etc." and the city proper and yes the sprawling suburbs are fulfilling that pretty well. This is true for many people. My suburb is basically a self-contained universe with lots of nearby shops, jobs, housing, restaurants, and leisure options, and I have no need to commute into the 610 loop at all. I've got a huge library, a community center with gym, pool, ballfields, and a huge park with several miles worth of trails within walking distance of me. I paid 150k for my house. If I do need to go downtown for jury duty or something I take the Park and Ride, and it's always been clean, safe, quiet, and on time.
The comparison between Texas and California is because of their comparable size in population, geography, demographics, and economy, while politically being complete opposites. California regulates everything to insanity, Texas regulates generally only what is necessary. They offer a good stress test of ideas and policy.
I hope that one day places like LA will have great transit. But politics, unions, and bureaucracy basically hamper the state and cities from effectively and efficiently building any critical infrastructures. 2 decades later and the bullet train still has no end in sight, it takes 10 years to approve and build a BRT line in SF that goes only a few miles, I could go on. And now the state is in a budget crises and can no longer write blank checks to projects that should be coming online much faster and cheaper than they are.
Texas most definitely has an infrastructure problem. But until they realize endless freeways won’t solve their congestion, people will continue to tolerate it for economic reasons. Just look at LA traffic.
No, mass transit will do nothing to create affordable housing. Just look at all the metro areas in the US with affordable housing. None of them have would might be considered a strong mass transit system. And all the metros that do have strong mass transit systems have the most unaffordable housing.
> Transit is an important piece of housing policy.
No, this is a terrible, deeply misguided idea.
The population will grow or shrink. As it grows, it needs more housing. As it grows, it also needs more transit. But you would 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 want to tie housing policy to transit policy. That would make it impossible to address either problem effectively.
If a lot of people suddenly move in to a new area and strain the existing transit system, new transit systems will be worked out. Planning that change in advance means getting much worse outcomes at much higher costs.
If I were to poke at your EHC thesis, it's that it takes too broad a view of what is elite.
Is the median left-winger smarter than the median conservative? Sure. At the 80th percentile? Maybe? But the hordes of median workers and mid-wit $150k per year office drones aren't the people who ultimately matter when it comes to leading policy.
At most, their influence is derivative. You can't be too much smarter than the voters, but you can be quite a bit smarter. It's not an accident that the most anti-gay voters (Black) are the backbone of the party that supports gay rights, or that the blue-collar truck drivers vote for the party that keeps Private Equity humming. Politics is about making sure that a certain basket of policy preferences are advertised the the masses in a way that gets to 51%.
In other words, it really doesn't matter if some number of CA voters are smart. Their elites hate economic growth, and they have a solid grip on the state.
Yes, Vance, the near term future of the (national) GOP, is a big housing slopulist. Worth nothing that the long term future, Fishback, is also on this train, regularly sharing “Florida is full” hukou rhetoric
If Japan, a nation consisting of almost exclusively mountainous islands, can comfortably hold ~120 million people in what is roughly the size of Montana, California has no excuse. It’s not land, it’s land-use.
Yes, and fortunately that applies to most of North America, including much of California. But where zoning and urban containments zones do not allow new housing construction, it does not matter how much flat land there is.
No one denies there is a much lower proportion of miserable poor people in Sweden/Finland/Norway than in America, despite our higher "growth" and "freer markets". If the benefits are mainly more money for newly imported bosses from India, people won't vote for your economic/political project. Hope this helps.
The Nordic countries are some of the most pro-business and free-market in the world, even more so than much of the U.S. (in particular, California). Yes, they have high taxes and a social safety net, but it is very easy to start a business and hire people in those countries, unlike much of the rest of Europe. It's why the tech world of Europe is mostly in those countries.
What about the benefits of greater affordability, which has an outsize benefit for poor people? Basic goods like cars, large houses, and air conditioning are more affordable in America because of its growth. That last one is especially important, having affordable air conditioning is more important in Texas than in Sweden.
Part of it is just we’ve had so many movies with the evil developer trope that doing something developers hates is automatically virtuous for the entire left and a good chunk of the right too
When I commuted into San Francisco, it took me 35 minutes to go 14 miles. If I left by 5:50. If I left home at 6:50, I couldn't count on being at the office by 8:00. Taking Bart wouldn't have been reliably faster.
Even Texas has too many regulations that drive up housing costs. Why does a condo in an American city cost so much more than in, say, Bangkok? Because vertical is cheaper and vertical is made difficult to build damned near everywhere in America. It also hard to build a tiny house. So, I would say, "Texas, bad; California, worse."
Texas’s housing advantage highlights how policy execution often outweighs ideology. Streamlined zoning and reduced barriers to supply seem to matter far more than abstract debates about markets versus corporate power.
> What lesson can we learn from all this? Consider it a blow against Elite Human Capital theory, which says that on average, smarter and more intellectually inclined movements will be more likely to get policy right.
That theory would appear to have come into the world stillborn, considering that under the name Elite Human Capital it is much younger than the history of Marxism.
Another reason why the chasm between Texas and California will continue to grow larger- Cali has state and local level rent control, whereas rent control is illegal in Texas
As someone who has lived in both Texas and California, I have to point out that "Both have warm weather" is a wildly misleading statement.
California has NICE weather. For example, you can live in a nice apartment near the sea and leave your windows open in the summer and never use AC. It's pleasant to go outside year round.
Texas has miserably hot weather. Weather that makes you want to stay inside and never leave the house from about April to November. Living near the sea is miserably hot AND humid, too; proximity to the gulf doesn't make things any nicer.
No, a part of California has nice weather. There are commuter suburbs of San Francisco that spend a month or two with highs over 100°, and both Bakersfield and Redding will have weeks of 110°. All of those areas are noticeably more humid in summer than they were 20 years ago.
If you compare the whole state of Texas to the whole state of California, though, it's really obvious that Texas has worse weather. We're comparing weeks of 110° to months of 110°
I like to think about it this way. California went from having 10 reasons why it is very difficult to build housing to 7 reasons why it is very difficult to build housing. That's why the recent construction data out of California is so disappointing.
The real problem with the SF Bay Area is that there is a lack of political will to build up. There needs to be a Miami-like skyline alongside Ocean Beach and BART extension to the ocean. SF is meant to be the NYC of the West, not an uncontrolled Texan like suburban sprawl.
But even Texas sprawl is due to factors that inhibit going vertical. That would be the best idea almost everywhere.
Thank you so much for covering this extremely niche, but extremely important intersectional topic of policy, economics, and politics!
I work for… a very large U.S. city… in zoning and planning and I regret to relay that the general consensus amongst those who’s jobs it is to plan for more housing and help facilitate zoning changes are still extremely NIMBY for reason mentioned: gentrification, evil capitalists making money, the usual topics, etc,. This has changed a bit in recent years but not nearly to the degree it needs to.
And thank you for mentioning the public sectors unions! I’ve had a 180 degree shift in my thoughts about unions since working for the government. I can’t stress how detrimental they have become to large liberal cities and states. They essentially operate as an efficiency cartel, draining time and money from cities and states to enrich their members and the behest of the public tax pays, and it’s criminal the things they get away with.
I think in about 2 decades (if even) when Texas eclipses California in population, democrats may actually hit the panic button regarding housing instead of trying to just lightly tinker around the edges.
Your argument is that the CA housing market is "ruined" even though you acknowledge that the YIMBY movement has been achieving success. It is only a "failure" when you insist on comparing to Texas. Why is this the benchmark?
Housing policy has a long lag time. your analysis ignores this, and also doesnt take into account the importance of transit. TX is building houses by the zillions; but have you ever had to commute in Houston or Austin? (I lived in Houston for 9 years, i have direct experience in this regard).
Transit is an important piece of housing policy. LA is building hundreds of miles of new subways and train lines. The Sepulveda Pass project is going to transform SoCal. And HSR - which i assume you are skeptical of - will enable people to commute to high paying jobs in LA and the Bay while living in affordable central valley homes. These are not projects that will result in short term improvements against the Texas comparison benchmark. But in 20 years lets run the comparison again and see where the migration flows are oriented.
Housing requires generational thinking to solve structural problems. Texas is moving fast on the short term but they are creating new structural problems for the future. CA is moving slow - but still moving - short term and also playing the long game.
YIMBY/Abundance grew out of the political realities that people were leaving blue states for red states, and that this is bad for the people leaving blue states, and it is bad for Democrats goals on a national level.
Democrats and liberals concluded (rightly in my opinion) that the cost of housing was a chief force in this phenomena, at least for places like New York City and California.
I don't consider this sinister or bad, BTW. Just an acknowledgement that for the average American, cost of living is a universal concern they deal with every day, while a lot of what we fight over politically is not. Democrats could build a utopia, with well run single payer healthcare, trans rights, abortion, 0 gun deaths, 100% clean energy, and hip walkable communities everywhere, and no one would live there if they can't afford the rent/mortgage.
Ergo, getting lapped by Texas, which is already has cheaper housing is a policy failure.
What do you not consider bad? I'm not quite sure.
I'm pretty willing to take this bet. I'm from Texas and went to grad school at UCLA. The unlivable conditions there drove me back to my home state. My husband is a native Californian and moved back here with me. There's a very good chance we'd have stayed in California forever if it wouldn't have meant being two or three times as poor (and probably never owning a house) if we had. This is also Texas' "20-year gain" in terms of tax revenue and talent with internal migration like this.
We live in Houston today. Traffic was worse in LA ten years ago than Houston is *now.* Obviously some of that is contingent on your specific commute, but from a sheer point to point "how much of my life did I waste in traffic, trying to find parking, paying for expensive gas, etc." LA definitely wins.
Also, my mortgage on my 3-bedroom house in Houston is currently ~1400 a month. Nice neighborhood - not soulless cookie cutter houses. It's old enough that it has fully mature trees, several big parks within walking distance, lots of good restaurants, and I pretty much never see homeless people or hear/see anything about crime. When I was in LA, my studio apartment in Westwood was ~1250 over ten years ago, and I had to pay some extra hundreds per year in parking.
There's also tons of mid-range cities in Texas growing like weeds. Waco is one example. I took a job here this last year and have been staying here with family (helping deal with a sick family member). Extremely affordable, walkable downtown with lots of restaurants, shops, museums, and churches right in the heart of the city. Most Wacoans I work with tell me to stop plugging the city so people will just keep thinking of Branch Dravidians and not move here. (It also has one of the best urban parks I've ever been to, Cameron Park). It's extremely possible to forget about the biggest 3 or 4 cities in Texas and move to one of these smaller cities which are also doing great when compared to other cities of comparable size in California or other states.
People can keep on with the weather and "suburbs are ugly" cope, but you can't shed people for years and years and not feel the pinch. You need taxes to pay for the trains.
Because Houston also has regulations that prevent the building of an actual city. Houston's downtown is dead, a victim of Urban Renewal. Houston doesn't have zoning, but it is far from a free market housing Mecca.
Why does specifically downtown have to thrive as a *fun* place for this to be considered a success? That's an extremely narrow, bizarre metric of what "counts." Given the amount of infill I see in the 610 loop, that entire zone is getting more and more "urban" by the day. It may never look like Manhattan. So what? (For the record, I'm not opposed to it becoming Texas Manhattan. It would in fact be cool). My definition of success is "normal people can afford to live here, be safe, have economic opportunities, have leisure activities a reasonable distance from them, not be driven out of public spaces by social dysfunction, etc." and the city proper and yes the sprawling suburbs are fulfilling that pretty well. This is true for many people. My suburb is basically a self-contained universe with lots of nearby shops, jobs, housing, restaurants, and leisure options, and I have no need to commute into the 610 loop at all. I've got a huge library, a community center with gym, pool, ballfields, and a huge park with several miles worth of trails within walking distance of me. I paid 150k for my house. If I do need to go downtown for jury duty or something I take the Park and Ride, and it's always been clean, safe, quiet, and on time.
The comparison between Texas and California is because of their comparable size in population, geography, demographics, and economy, while politically being complete opposites. California regulates everything to insanity, Texas regulates generally only what is necessary. They offer a good stress test of ideas and policy.
I hope that one day places like LA will have great transit. But politics, unions, and bureaucracy basically hamper the state and cities from effectively and efficiently building any critical infrastructures. 2 decades later and the bullet train still has no end in sight, it takes 10 years to approve and build a BRT line in SF that goes only a few miles, I could go on. And now the state is in a budget crises and can no longer write blank checks to projects that should be coming online much faster and cheaper than they are.
Texas most definitely has an infrastructure problem. But until they realize endless freeways won’t solve their congestion, people will continue to tolerate it for economic reasons. Just look at LA traffic.
No, mass transit will do nothing to create affordable housing. Just look at all the metro areas in the US with affordable housing. None of them have would might be considered a strong mass transit system. And all the metros that do have strong mass transit systems have the most unaffordable housing.
> Transit is an important piece of housing policy.
No, this is a terrible, deeply misguided idea.
The population will grow or shrink. As it grows, it needs more housing. As it grows, it also needs more transit. But you would 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 want to tie housing policy to transit policy. That would make it impossible to address either problem effectively.
If a lot of people suddenly move in to a new area and strain the existing transit system, new transit systems will be worked out. Planning that change in advance means getting much worse outcomes at much higher costs.
If I were to poke at your EHC thesis, it's that it takes too broad a view of what is elite.
Is the median left-winger smarter than the median conservative? Sure. At the 80th percentile? Maybe? But the hordes of median workers and mid-wit $150k per year office drones aren't the people who ultimately matter when it comes to leading policy.
At most, their influence is derivative. You can't be too much smarter than the voters, but you can be quite a bit smarter. It's not an accident that the most anti-gay voters (Black) are the backbone of the party that supports gay rights, or that the blue-collar truck drivers vote for the party that keeps Private Equity humming. Politics is about making sure that a certain basket of policy preferences are advertised the the masses in a way that gets to 51%.
In other words, it really doesn't matter if some number of CA voters are smart. Their elites hate economic growth, and they have a solid grip on the state.
Yes, Vance, the near term future of the (national) GOP, is a big housing slopulist. Worth nothing that the long term future, Fishback, is also on this train, regularly sharing “Florida is full” hukou rhetoric
My understanding is that Fishback is at the bottom of the polls. Vance also seems like he's falling behind Rubio as Trump's successor now.
Hot take: it's easier to build housing where there's lots of flat land that's not already built upon.
If Japan, a nation consisting of almost exclusively mountainous islands, can comfortably hold ~120 million people in what is roughly the size of Montana, California has no excuse. It’s not land, it’s land-use.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-is-the-central-valley-so-bad
Yes, and fortunately that applies to most of North America, including much of California. But where zoning and urban containments zones do not allow new housing construction, it does not matter how much flat land there is.
No one denies there is a much lower proportion of miserable poor people in Sweden/Finland/Norway than in America, despite our higher "growth" and "freer markets". If the benefits are mainly more money for newly imported bosses from India, people won't vote for your economic/political project. Hope this helps.
The Nordic countries are some of the most pro-business and free-market in the world, even more so than much of the U.S. (in particular, California). Yes, they have high taxes and a social safety net, but it is very easy to start a business and hire people in those countries, unlike much of the rest of Europe. It's why the tech world of Europe is mostly in those countries.
What about the benefits of greater affordability, which has an outsize benefit for poor people? Basic goods like cars, large houses, and air conditioning are more affordable in America because of its growth. That last one is especially important, having affordable air conditioning is more important in Texas than in Sweden.
Part of it is just we’ve had so many movies with the evil developer trope that doing something developers hates is automatically virtuous for the entire left and a good chunk of the right too
When I commuted into San Francisco, it took me 35 minutes to go 14 miles. If I left by 5:50. If I left home at 6:50, I couldn't count on being at the office by 8:00. Taking Bart wouldn't have been reliably faster.
Even Texas has too many regulations that drive up housing costs. Why does a condo in an American city cost so much more than in, say, Bangkok? Because vertical is cheaper and vertical is made difficult to build damned near everywhere in America. It also hard to build a tiny house. So, I would say, "Texas, bad; California, worse."
Texas’s housing advantage highlights how policy execution often outweighs ideology. Streamlined zoning and reduced barriers to supply seem to matter far more than abstract debates about markets versus corporate power.
> What lesson can we learn from all this? Consider it a blow against Elite Human Capital theory, which says that on average, smarter and more intellectually inclined movements will be more likely to get policy right.
That theory would appear to have come into the world stillborn, considering that under the name Elite Human Capital it is much younger than the history of Marxism.
I am Elite Human Capital and I disagree