Good article from the wsj:
Statistically speaking, Idaho is one of America’s greatest economic success stories. The state has low unemployment and high income growth. It has expanded education spending while managing to shore up budget reserves. Brad Little, the state’s Republican governor, has attributed this run of prosperity to the mix of low taxes and minimal regulation that conservatives call “the business climate.”
But there is another factor at play: Californians, fleeing high home prices, are moving to Idaho in droves. For the past several years, Idaho has been one of the fastest-growing states, with the largest share of new residents coming from California. This fact can be illustrated with census data, moving vans — or resentment.
Home prices rose 20 percent in 2020, according to Zillow, and in Boise, “Go Back to California” graffiti has been sprayed along the highways. The last election cycle was a referendum on growth and housing, and included a fringe mayoral candidate who campaigned on a promise to keep Californians out. The dichotomy between growth and its discontents has fused the city’s politics and collective consciousness with a question that city leaders around the country were asking even before the pandemic and remote work trends accelerated relocation: Is it possible to import California’s growth without also importing its housing problems?
“I can’t point to a city that has done it right,” said Lauren McLean, Boise’s Democratic mayor.
That’s because as bad as California’s affordable housing problem is, it isn’t really a California problem. It is a national one. From rising homelessness to anti-development sentiment to frustration among middle-class workers who’ve been locked out of the housing market, the same set of housing issues has bubbled up in cities across the country. They’ve already visited Boise, Nashville, Denver and Austin, Texas, and many other high-growth cities. And they will become even more widespread as remote workers move around.
Link to Full ArticleHousing costs are relative, of course, so anyone leaving Los Angeles or San Francisco will find almost any other city to have a bountiful selection of homes that seem unbelievably large and cheap. But for those tethered to the local economy, the influx of wealthier outsiders pushes housing costs further out of reach.
“over the past four decades the U.S. economy has bifurcated into high-paying jobs in fields like tech and finance and low-paying jobs in retail and personal services.”
As usual, nothing is as simple as the media likes to portray. There’s a huge swath of good-paying jobs between those two extremes that are going unfilled because society has stigmatized manual labor and become obsessed over college degrees. A PBS NewsHour report on the problem getting worse, not better:
https://youtu.be/O_iHdmMOHZ0
TL;DR a plumber can make $200K/yr snaking drains, and in some places it can be more expensive to call a plumber than visit your doctor.
Unfilled trades jobs is a major contributor to the housing shortage. I keep waiting for the homebuilding industry to wake up and realize, “Hey, maybe if we use modern factory methods and stop doing things as though we were still in the 19th century, we could build homes with much fewer labor hours.” But not yet…
Four decades of “urban planning” and any number of schemes to push density and transit and vertical living running contrary to the explict stated and revealed preferences of the population has created a shortage of homes people want.
Printed houses will do for housing what production lines did for automobiles.
Not sure about ‘printed houses’, but I do think that 12.5′ x 40′ factory assembled modules shipped and joined on site is the future. I saw this on ‘This old house’ on PBS a few years ago.
This migration is all natural and good. We cannot build our way out of this in California.
Quite simply it’s too crowded. I think the outflow of people has as much to do with that as it does with cost. What other states are experiencing now is what California has dealt with for 75 years.
It’s worth noting that only 50% of California’s almost 40 million population was born here.