Why blue states keep losing people; What if NIMBYs told the truth?

David Brooks is one of the few opinion columnists I read on a regular basis and his latest piece touches on a subject that should be near and dear to everyone’s heart. That is why people are moving from blue states to red and purple states. It’s not entirely that simple (some purple and red states are also losing people), but there is plenty of validity to it. For many decades now, people have been migrating from the northeast and midwest to the sunbelt states. The most obvious reason is winter weather. Most people may not like scorching heat, but will prefer it over freezing winters. Count me among them.

The trend of people moving from colder places is not one that is likely to stop any time soon. While warmer weather can explain the exodus of people from most parts of the northeast and midwest, it doesn’t explain why people are leaving California. There is no state in the country with better weather. In my next life, I’ll be living in San Diego.

The problem in California is that almost nobody can afford to live there because housing is extremely expensive. The same is true in New York City and to a lesser extent in the DC and Boston areas. Despite those places having cold winters, there is still high demand for housing just as there is in California.

Housing costs don’t explain why people are leaving most parts of the country that are losing people. In most parts of the northeast and midwest, housing is very cheap. Rural areas in almost every state are losing people even though housing there is much cheaper than it is in most cities and suburbs. In the case of California and New York City, housing costs explain nearly all of why people are leaving. Finding an affordable place to live there is extremely difficult. Even elected officials are having trouble finding it.

Brooks mentions in his piece that sunbelt states have lower housing costs as one of the reasons for their growth, but only dedicates a paragraph to it. In his defense, he has a limited amount of space so I’ll cut him some slack. I’m not picking on him here, but it drives me insane how much ink is spilled talking about why people move to red and purple states because of low taxes compared to lower housing costs.

How can we be sure lower taxes are not a big reason for people moving to red and purple states? It’s very simple. If that was the sole or main criteria we would see tons of people moving to places like New Hampshire, Wyoming and South Dakota. Those states don’t have an income tax.

The reason people aren’t flocking there is because those states are missing some things that make places like Texas attractive. Texas, like every sunbelt state, has warmer weather in the winter. Texas also has multiple big metropolitan areas. Other sunbelt states have them, too. For those living in an urban or suburban setting in a very expensive state, they have the option of moving to a state in the sunbelt where they can still live in that kind of setting with much lower housing costs.

New Hampshire, Wyoming and South Dakota have no big metropolitan areas. They also are freezing cold in the winter. To the extent places with cold winters have been growing, they have been places in the mountain west with lots of outdoor amenities.

It is true that sunbelt states like Georgia and Arizona have lower income taxes than California and New York. Texas, Tennessee and Florida have no income tax. For someone making high six figures or more, that can be a huge difference in money saved. Most people don’t make nearly that much. Despite having an income tax, the amount of taxes most people pay in California versus Texas is actually lower. What is massively higher in California? You guessed it, housing.

Housing is why people move from California and New York to the sunbelt. Housing is what makes or breaks the growth of an area. I hesitate to say any one thing is everything, but housing comes very close. The reality is if you can’t afford to own or rent a place somewhere, nothing else is going to matter. The tax rate is irrelevant. Texas and Florida could adopt California’s tax code right now and people would still keep moving there. Conversely, California could eliminate every single tax they have and housing would still be unaffordable for most everyone.

Blue states aren’t so tolerant and inclusive

As someone who lives in Texas, I hear all the time from Republicans about how people move here because of low regulations. They are right, just not about the regulations they like to talk about. The low regulations that people move to Texas for have everything to do with housing and almost nothing to do with environmental or labor laws.

I have almost nothing nice to say about Greg Abbott’s tenure as governor. I can’t fault him, though, for crowing about people moving here. For all the things I think are done wrong here, housing laws are done right. Because property owners are given more leeway in what they can use their land for, NIMBYism is much weaker here than it is in many blue states. Houston in particular makes it very easy to build as there is no formal zoning code. Other cities in Texas have zoning codes, but they still make it easy to build.

If anyone reading this lives in a blue state and is wondering how anyone could possibly want to move here, that is why. Those in blue states can bash Texas all they want, but the fact is housing is easy to build here and so it is affordable. Blue states like California and New York make building housing illegal. Combine that with a large number of people who want to live there and you get sky high housing costs.

When you have a place where people want to live, many of them will try to move there. That will inevitably lead to an initial increase in housing costs because new housing stock can’t be built overnight. When that happens, there are two ways to respond. The first is what most cities in Texas have done and that is to make it fairly easy to build housing so supply can accommodate demand. That is what keeps housing costs from surging despite a large number of people moving in. The second way to respond is what most cities in California have done and that is to outlaw new housing. The demand is still there, but because new supply is illegal, housing prices shoot through the roof and living there becomes unaffordable.

Texas’ legislature has enacted many terrible laws in my lifetime. Many of our elected officials combine theocracy with social Darwinism. Texas is one of the few remaining states that hasn’t expanded Medicaid, leaving more than one million people uninsured. The safety net here is bare bones by design. It’s a disgrace and that kind of model wouldn’t be sustainable without the federal safety net.

All that said, I would still say that Texas is a more tolerant and inclusive place than many blue states. Why? Because housing is affordable here. Blue staters can talk all they want about how tolerant and inclusive they are, but it is just that. When you make housing illegal to build, you’re telling people they aren’t welcome. You’re saying that you would rather not have to endure even the slightest drop of inconvenience than walk the walk.

If places like New York and California really were tolerant and inclusive, they would be cutting back on zoning laws like there’s no tomorrow and doing everything they can to get housing built ASAP. If you think Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are awful, then allow more housing to be built so fewer people have to live in their states. If you won’t do that, then shut the hell up.

As I wrote about last year, California has enacted some very good laws that, if enforced, will make a huge difference in increasing the housing supply there. The key question is whether they will be enforced. It is going to be a Herculean task just to make sure the “tolerant and inclusive” NIMBYs there don’t get in the way. It will have to be an all-hands-on-deck effort to be successful.

California used to be a place that embraced change and dynamism. It can be that way again, but it’s going to be a major fight to get there. It would be nice if Gavin Newsom would devote his time to making that happen rather than talking about how mean Ron DeSantis is. In the off chance that anyone reading this has his ear, please let him know that he’s not going to be president in 2028 or ever. He can either be remembered as the governor who got California back on its feet again or the governor who blew that opportunity because he preferred to be a troll.

In other blue states with high housing costs, there have been efforts to pare back zoning laws. Unfortunately, in New York, the effort looks to have been watered down to the point of being a joke. While I am unsparingly critical of left-wing NIMBYs, they are not the only ones. In New York, the most intense opposition to reducing zoning laws has come from Republicans. NIMBYism is not unique to either side of the aisle.

In Colorado, Jared Polis has an ambitious proposal that would go a long way towards helping to alleviate their increasing housing costs. There, too, much of the opposition has come from Republicans. Some Democrats, including the mayor of Denver, have come out against it as well. As in New York, opponents have claimed that they want to address housing affordability, but “not like that.” What is their plan? They don’t have one and never will.

What honesty from NIMBYs would look like

What I like about housing is it really forces people to put up or shut up. Whether it’s those on the left talking about being tolerant and inclusive or those on the right talking about getting government out of the way, it’s very easy to tell what someone truly cares about based on their stance on housing. There have been plenty on the left and right who have proven that they really do care about what they preach, but there are others who have proven themselves to be all talk.  

The following is what I think it would look like if NIMBYs were honest about what they really believe. We’ll start with Democratic/left-wing NIMBYs. Their confession would go something like this: “We want housing to be built, just not where we live. We don’t want our lives to be inconvenienced in any way. Our number one priority is keeping things exactly as they are.

We think housing affordability is a crisis, nobody should be profiting from it and corporations are evil. True, we profit from a lack of housing, work for corporations and use their goods and services. We shop at Whole Foods while tweeting and ordering from Amazon. Right now, some of us are driving in their fancy cars on their way to Starbucks and Costco. But hating corporations and profits is different when we do it.

We believe black lives matter, no human being is illegal and refugees are welcome, just as long as none of it’s here. We’re tolerant and inclusive, just as long as you don’t try to build anything near where we live. We know that banning new housing makes costs go through the roof and we’re not okay with that. It’s just an unfortunate side effect of fighting for what we care about the most.

We know that expensive housing makes living here unaffordable for virtually everyone. Our city/state has been bleeding people and our economy has stopped growing. We don’t like that, but it’s a price worth paying. Like we said, what we care about the most is keeping things exactly as they are no matter what.

We believe housing is a human right, just as long as it’s not built near where we live. If that means there’s rampant homelessness here, we don’t like that, but we live in gated communities with private security so we’ll be fine. Inequality is a huge problem that we want to solve, but we’d rather keep all the prosperity to ourselves when push comes to shove. That’s why we advocate for rent control because it makes us feel like we actually did something good and we can pat ourselves on the back about it.

We know that housing being unaffordable has many ripple effects beyond just housing. Public service providers of all kinds are struggling to keep employees because they can’t afford to live here. As progressives, we believe in an active role for government and public services are essential. But we believe avoiding any inconvenience to our daily lives is more important.”

Moving on to Republican/right-wing NIMBYs. “As conservatives, we believe the government should get out of the way. Regulations are making life harder for businesses and individuals alike. We believe it’s best to let the market handle things. But we make an exception for ourselves. Like our fellow NIMBYs on the left, we believe in keeping things exactly as they are, just for different reasons.

We don’t want other people moving into our neighborhoods. The suburbs belong to us and we get to decide who can live there. We believe it’s the role of government to make sure we get to do that.

As fair weather believers in rugged individualism and small government, we believe people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That’s what we did by getting the government to ban new housing from being built so our property values will be much higher. We worked hard to get the government to stack things in our favor and we won’t let our opportunistic belief in free market economics get in the way of that. The fact that most of us are retired and rely on the federal government for pensions and health insurance doesn’t matter. We earned everything we get from the government, but anyone else who gets anything from the government is a parasite.

True, we were upper-middle class professionals when we worked and benefited from occupational licensing laws and other government-imposed barriers that kept away competition. Many of us worked in industries that are heavily subsidized and/or depend on the government for business. That’s fine. When the government does things that benefit us, we deserve it. When the government does things that benefit others, they don’t deserve it. When the government helps us that’s self-reliance, but when the government helps anyone else that’s welfare.

Free markets are great just as long as we stay ahead of everyone else. When we’re prospering and things are going well, we love the free market. When we’re subject to competition of any sort, especially if that means more people moving into our neighborhoods, we demand the government do something about it.

We know that our city/state is no longer growing. People used to move here in droves, just like we did. Opportunity was everywhere. Now that we’re here, we’re keeping it all for ourselves. Our own kids now have to live with us because they can’t afford to rent or own a place even though they’re making way more money than we did when we first moved in. We hate that, but we hate the idea of more people moving in way more so it’s a price worth paying.

We’d love for housing to be affordable. We know that there are people who are barely scraping by because of how expensive housing is. We’d like to help out with that in a way that doesn’t involve building more housing. Since that isn’t possible, we’re content to have people needlessly struggle and have to live somewhere else so we can enjoy the prosperity that we’re selfishly hoarding.”