What the red spots indicate is that those areas have housing markets that are very hostile to would be home buyers.
… So, many of them leave, and look to buy a home in a blue area, where home buyers have more leverage in price negotiations, as well as generally lower price per sq ft.
Red does not indicate number of houses bought/sold, in absolute terms, nor in terms of total housing inventory, nor area population.
Californians objectively are leaving California, with huge amounts of money, to states with lower prices homes and goods and services, and functionally doing an interstate version of gentrifying small and medium sized towns and cities outside of California, driving up costs, making everything worse for locals.
This is happening, and they’re not wrong to complain about that.
They are abysmal at figuring out ways to actually solve or mitigate this problem, but they’re not wrong to correctly identify at least one actual cause, though there are many other causes as well.
What the red spots indicate is that those areas have housing markets that are very hostile to would be home buyers.
… So, many of them leave, and look to buy a home in a blue area, where home buyers have more leverage in price negotiations, as well as generally lower price per sq ft.
Red does not indicate number of houses bought/sold, in absolute terms, nor in terms of total housing inventory, nor area population.
Californians objectively are leaving California, with huge amounts of money, to states with lower prices homes and goods and services, and functionally doing an interstate version of gentrifying small and medium sized towns and cities outside of California, driving up costs, making everything worse for locals.
This is happening, and they’re not wrong to complain about that.
They are abysmal at figuring out ways to actually solve or mitigate this problem, but they’re not wrong to correctly identify at least one actual cause, though there are many other causes as well.