California and Texas are the two most populated states in the country. They have remarkably similar demographics: California is 35% non-Hispanic white and 39% Latino, while Texas is 40% white and 40% Latino. Both have warm weather.
Politically, as we all know, they are almost as far apart as two states can be. Trump won Texas by 14 percentage points, while Harris took her home state by 20. Every statewide elected official in Texas is a Republican, and every statewide official in California is a Democrat.
This has had all kinds of policy implications, but one of the clearest differences is on housing.
In California, the median home price is $809,000, second behind Hawaii. That is over 2.5 times higher than Texas, where it is $308,000. This isn’t because Californians all enjoy larger homes. If you do the math as price per square foot, California housing is still twice as expensive as it is in Texas.
Taking into account income doesn’t change much either. As M. Nolan Gray writes,
If we zoom in on cities, the situation is even bleaker. Take Harris County, home of Houston, and Los Angeles County, home of Los Angeles. In 1970, the ratio of median home value to median household income was 1.4 and 2.2, respectively. In 2020, it was 3.0 and 8.6. While Houston remains a place where normal Americans can show up and claim their slice of the dream, Los Angeles excludes all but the most affluent households.
Housing is the single biggest item in the budgets of US households, making up about 20% of consumption.1 In some states, it costs 2-3x as much as in others.
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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.
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.