What Do US Growth Zones Have in Common? They Build Housing
Migration to the South and inland West has many causes, but the availability of new houses and apartments is the most important one.
If you build them, they will come.
Photographer: Mark Felix/Bloomberg
The big population shifts toward the South and inland West over the past few years have been attributed to many factors, from lower taxes and more permissive pandemic policies to better weather and fear of crime.
There’s surely something to all of these explanations, but they only take you so far. The pandemic policy differences have pretty much vanished; violent crime is generally worse in the South than in other parts of the country; the tax advantages to moving across state lines accrue mostly to those with very high incomes, who make up only a small percentage of the movers; and people clearly aren’t being lured from California to Texas by the weather.