Conventional housing wisdom dictates that if you can’t afford Los Angeles or New York City, try Austin or Atlanta. For years, astronomical prices, labyrinthine zoning laws, and dwindling square footage have driven renters and homeowners out of big coastal cities in droves. Their search for more affordable zip codes has frequently landed them in the Sun Belt, a region that stretches across America’s Southeast and Southwest.

But where some people struck housing gold, others are now seeing diminishing returns. In a recent story titled “The Whole Country Is Starting to Look Like California,” my colleague Rogé Karma reported that “over the past decade, the median home price has increased by 134 percent in Phoenix, 133 percent in Miami, 129 percent in Atlanta, and 99 percent in Dallas”—and these rates outpace New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Maybe Sun Belt cities aren’t as different from their coastal counterparts as we once thought. I spoke with Rogé to figure out what that might mean for the rest of the country.

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Stephanie Bai: You point to research suggesting that housing development in Sun Belt cities right now is at a similar point to big coastal cities 20 years ago. How does this trend challenge what experts thought they knew about those regions?

Rogé Karma: The way that experts think about the U.S. housing market is really a tale of two housing markets. The commonly held opinion, and it’s been borne out by the data, is that it is really hard to build housing on the coasts, where anti-growth liberals impose excessive land-use regulations and zoning laws. Then you have the second housing market, which is the Sun Belt. This includes cities such as Miami and Phoenix and Dallas and Austin, which are building a seemingly endless supply of cheap housing under what appear to be looser regulations.

But lately, you’re seeing prices spike in the same areas that used to be a refuge from spiking prices. Over the past 25 years, the rate of housing production in some major Sun Belt cities has fallen by half or more. Our housing market used to work in a very specific way: A problem on the coast was being solved by this pressure-release valve in the Sun Belt. But now that pressure-release valve is getting cut off.

Stephanie: How can the Sun Belt avoid looking like the next California?

Rogé: One thing that became really clear to me was that these places that seem so different are actually suffering from the same affliction. I was surprised to find that the zoning regulations in some Sun Belt cities weren’t actually that much better than those in the coastal cities—that a lot of laws on the books were very similar and very restrictive. The way that Sun Belt cities were able to get around it was just by sprawling, and now that they’re starting to hit the limits of their sprawl, those same laws are a lot more binding.

Stephanie: Another big factor you cite for why development has slowed in the Sun Belt is NIMBYism. You described it as “the seemingly universal human tendency to put down roots and then oppose new development.” That psychology is fascinating to me—why do you think that impulse is so universal?

Rogé: One explanation is pure and simple economics. In America, people’s fortunes are largely bound up in their homes. If you allow a lot of development around you, the value of your home could fall.

A second dynamic, and I’ve been influenced here by a paper by David Broockman and others, is an aesthetic one. Their research found that homeowners in cities are less opposed to new development than renters outside of cities are. Their explanation is that a lot of your position on new development comes down to your aesthetic preferences. I live in a neighborhood in D.C. that has high-rises everywhere. I moved there because I like density, and I like what it brings—diversity, good restaurants—whereas someone who moves to a suburb of Dallas might have moved there because they want more space, because they like white-picket-fence homes. Then all of a sudden, when a high-rise is proposed near them, they’re worried about that aesthetic changing. I think it’s a combination of materialism and aesthetic preference, and then a darker side: a reflexive opposition to newcomers, especially when those newcomers are different from you.

Stephanie: If that mindset is so entrenched, can policy alone help overcome that impulse?

Rogé: Policy isn’t going to change people’s psychology, but here’s what it can do: It can change laws that allow people who have this NIMBYism tendency to have outsize influence. If a state decides that they don’t want to have as much development, that’s one thing. If one or two homeowners get to decide to block development, that’s another thing. We can at least make it so that a small group of people aren’t able to block development that would help hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people.

Stephanie: Speaking of big policy shifts, California recently rolled back a monumental environmental law that had been used to delay housing development in the state. How do you take that news? Will California start to look less like the paragon of the housing crisis in America?

Rogé: The California Environmental Quality Act is well known by housing activists everywhere. And you’re right, it’s a law that was originally created to protect the environment but has been weaponized to block not only dense housing but also solar farms and transit and other things that would actually reduce emissions. I’m very happy to see it reformed—that’s a step in the right direction.

But California’s housing crisis has been metastasizing for decades; I don’t know if one change is going to have a big impact right away. I have much more hope for the Sun Belt states. One reason I focus on them in my story is that a lot of those cities aren’t that far gone. Raleigh, North Carolina, recently responded to the demand for housing with a slate of new reforms that made it much easier to build apartments and dense housing in more places, especially near transit.

Stephanie: Maybe that’s the answer to my earlier question. The Sun Belt states can avoid becoming the next California if they take action on housing and zoning policies now.

Rogé: Exactly. They can look at California and see their future.

Related:

• The whole country is starting to look like California.
• Why people won’t stop moving to the Sun Belt (From 2023)

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