The Wrath of Grapes: Californians Head to Oklahoma
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From the NYT:

Affordable Housing Draws Middle Class to Inland Cities By SHAILA DEWAN AUG. 3, 2014



Rising rents and the difficulty of securing a mortgage on the coasts have proved a boon to inland cities that offer the middle class a firmer footing and an easier life. In the eternal competition among urban centers, the shift has produced some new winners.

Oklahoma City, for example, has outpaced most other cities in growth since 2011, becoming the 12th-fastest-growing city last year. It has also won over a coveted demographic, young adults age 25 to 34, going from a net loss of millennials to a net gain.

You can see why places like Oklahoma City let themselves get raped by major league sports team owners in order to call themselves major league. Oklahoma City snagged Seattle’s NBA franchise a few years ago and now has a wonderful basketball player in Kevin Durant. The OKC basketball team is currently cool, so OKC gets featured in this article about a broad trend.
Other affordable cities that have jumped in the growth rankings include several in Texas, including El Paso and San Antonio, as well as Columbus, Ohio, and Little Rock, Ark.


… While the overall number of people who move to a different city or state has fallen in recent years, a significantly greater share of domestic migrants now say they were drawn to a place where housing is more affordable. As a result, the latest winners in the competition among urban centers include locations like San Antonio, Oklahoma City and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.




But during the housing bubble, when even people with modest salaries could get loans to buy staggeringly expensive homes, the cost of housing was less of a concern. Now that getting a mortgage has become harder, the wage stagnation that has hobbled the middle class for years has deeper consequences. “People have no choice,” Mr. Kelman said. “They can’t move across the street; they have to move across the country.”

During the bubble, people coming from the most expensive places viewed even moderately expensive housing in places like Phoenix as a bargain, especially if they expected the value of such housing to rise, says Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist who studies cities.

But, Mr. Glaeser says, there is also a historical trend driven by severe restrictions on building new housing in highly regulated cities like San Francisco, Washington and New York. Whereas high housing prices were once a sign of growth because they indicated strong demand, now they are more a function of limited supply. Midlevel prices (as opposed to rock-bottom values in places like Detroit) have become a better predictor of growth.

Additional next questions seems obvious: Does affordable housing imply affordable family formation? What’s the difference in fertility between couples who move from expensive to affordable places and similar couples who stay? Is the higher white fertility in places with higher incomes to cost of livings more a selection effect of importing family-oriented people or is it more a nurture effect on people who happened to already be there? What are the effects on voting?

George Hawley, a political scientist at the U. of Alabama, has been researching these questions I came up with a decade ago. But mostly, there hasn’t been much interest.

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