It always stuns me to hear so many people blaming NIMBY movements for housing prices while completely ignoring the effect that good job concentration has on the local housing markets. Housing is insanely expensive on the east and west coast because those are the only areas of the country seeing economic growth. If everyone is required to be in such a small area to even have an opportunity to get a good job, then of course it will be expensive to live there.
That is because we on the west coast have zoned most neighborhoods to single family housing, and that is a direct cause of our housing supply constraint and therefore our high housing cost. It would be trivial to replace a fraction of that housing with enough housing to meet demand if we rezoned.
It is a direct cause, but not the only cause. The fact that virtually all job growth is in these cities is equally if not more to blame. As a Seattle resident who was priced out of a succession of neighborhoods through grad school, I can't help but wonder why we need so much growth. It's not like there's a shortage of employment opportunities.
The NIMBY problem prevents the housing market from adapting to demand, it's entirety of the problem. Job growth and economic growth are not the problems. In places such as Texas with high economic growth housing is not a problem.
It just so happens that NIMBYs have huge economic gains from restricting the market from supplying what people want.
I'm in Houston personally. My employer is always hiring. I'm several times a week contacted by recruiters for jobs in Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Chicago, Kansas City, and Denver. None of those are on the east nor west coast.
I've heard good things about San Antonio, but I don't know the specifics. Texas is just too hot and dry for me to live there, though, so if it suits you good luck
There are plenty of startups in TX but not in the traditional Silicon Valley definition. There are a lot of startups in oil & gas, transportation, banking, retail to name a few.
I'd say it's because our postwar experiment with living far away from each other failed. It was a bad idea and it created spaces that were unpleasant to live in. Those of us who were born in such places, and have a choice in the matter, are getting out.
Certain skills are in high enough demand that people with those skills get to choose where to live. We choose places that don't look and feel like crap. We choose places that lots of other people choose. This makes them expensive. The arc of human history is towards urbanization, and those of us with in-demand skills are its primary agents simply because we have the most choice in the matter of where to live.
Of course it doesn't help that the places we choose believe they are already full.
