It was the migration trend that Republicans couldn’t stop bragging about — Americans fleeing crumbling, crime-ridden blue states for the lower taxes, cheaper homes and family-friendly values of such red-state havens as Texas and Florida. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis summed it up with a smirk in 2023, waving a ‘poop map’ of San Francisco in a TV debate with Gavin Newsom over California’s sky-high housing costs, woke classrooms and sidewalk squalor.
DeSantis said: ‘They actually at one point ran out of U-Hauls in the state of California because so many people were leaving.’ And for a while, the Republican politician wasn’t wrong. In 2024, some 191,000 more Californians moved to red states than the other way around, according to an analysis by The Economist . Many sought cheaper housing in nearby Nevada and Texas.
Businesses sprang up to help — Conservative Move specializes in relocating families ‘right’ so they can live in a community that’s safer, more affordable and more aligned with their values. But here’s the twist: the red-state dream is running out of steam. Booming demand in such places as Dallas, Miami and Phoenix has begun to push housing prices higher, and red tape is starting to look suspiciously blue, new research shows.
In fact, experts say the once-unstoppable red-state migration may be hitting a wall. A bombshell study from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania found that home building in Sun Belt cities has dramatically slowed, leading to skyrocketing prices. Atlanta, Dallas, Miami and Phoenix ‘were once building superstars,’ write the economists Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko in their 45-page report, which was released in May.
‘New housing growth rates have decreased and converged across these and many other metros, and prices have risen most where new supply has fallen the most,’ it says. They add: ‘America’s suburban frontier appears to be closing.’ In Miami, home prices have surged even faster than in such blue-state strongholds as San Diego and Los Angeles, says the report.
The reason? Red states are running out of sprawl. For decades, cheap land and suburban expansion kept housing affordable. But now, says Daryl Fairweather of real estate firm Redfin: ‘The good places are already taken.’ Builders can’t simply pave over farmland anymore, because Sun Belt cities have spread out so far that there’s no available land left within a reasonable commute time from city centers.
At the same time, building up is proving just as difficult. Zoning laws in ‘freedom-loving’ red states are more restrictive than many realize. Research by Alex Armlovich, a housing expert at the Niskanen Centre think tank, found that Atlanta’s zoning rules are nearly as strict as those in LA, with both cities banning apartment buildings on vast swaths of land. And it’s not just the laws — it’s the delays. Developers say getting approvals in cities like Atlanta now takes twice as long as it did a decade ago. Red tape is strangling red-state growth.
The revelations come as developers nationwide say they’re struggling amid a brutal summer. Rising material costs, high mortgage rates, and President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration pile pressure on an industry already teetering. A shocking one-third of America’s construction workers are undocumented, and tougher enforcement has builders warning of potential massive delays in homes, schools, hospitals, and even data centers.
A new survey from Evercore ISI paints a bleak picture: 71 percent of builders say this spring’s selling season was ‘slow,’ with the rest calling it just ‘a little slow.’ Not a single respondent described the market as solid — a stinging sign of just how dire things have become. Developers have even started offering mortgage rate buy downs and downsized ‘starter’ homes as budget options for wary buyers. But even these incentives have failed to jolt the market back to life.
Ironically, it’s blue states like California that are finally waking up and fighting back. In a rare bipartisan moment, Newsom signed a major housing reform bill in June that strips away a law long used by environmentalists, unions, and NIMBYs to block housing projects. Senator Scott Wiener said the move gave California a chance to ‘build again’ and cut housing costs for cash-strapped residents who might otherwise be looking for the exit. If the plan works, it could reverse the tide of the blue-to-red exodus.
That would have enormous political consequences. Every migrant out of California chips away at its representation in Congress and the Electoral College. The state is already projected to lose up to five seats after the 2030 Census. But if the outflow slows, that shrinkage may stall — or stop entirely. And with it, a favorite Republican talking point might disappear too. So while the narrative has long been that Americans are voting with their feet — fleeing liberal chaos for conservative order — the truth may be more complicated.
As Sun Belt cities start to look a lot more like their coastal counterparts, and blue states learn to build, the lines between red and blue may blur — at least when it comes to bricks and mortar. According to Gyourko, the end of affordable options in America’s red-state boomtowns will have consequences far beyond partisan point-scoring. ‘If this goes away, it will be the first time in American history where we don’t have affordable housing markets with high job growth,’ Gyourko told Brookings , a think tank.
