How California exported its worst problem to Texas

We walked into the coronavirus pandemic with a national housing crisis already brewing. According to a recent report by Up for Growth, a group advocating for solutions to the national housing shortage, the United States was short 3.79 million homes in 2019, a 130 percent increase over 2012. Researchers estimate that 169 metro areas—from Boston to San Diego—weren’t building nearly enough housing to keep up with demand, up from 100 metro areas in 2012.

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At the start of the pandemic, many eagerly predicted that the “death of the city” would help solve this. A shift to remote work, the story went, would cause a wave of migration out of high-cost cities in the Northeast and on the West Coast—long suffering from self-imposed housing shortages—and into low-cost cities in the South and the Mountain West. This would benefit everyone, easing pressure on housing prices in the former regions while spurring economic growth in the latter.

It didn’t quite work out that way. Yes, places such as Manhattan and San Francisco lost some of their population. And pre-pandemic migration patterns—from California to Texas, for example, and from New York to Florida—ramped up. By one measure, approximately 360,000 people moved out of the Golden State last year, many of them going to states such as Nevada and Arizona in a kind of a modern exodus to the desert.

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