Right Price, Wrong Politics

Abortion access. Gun safety. The treatment of immigrants. The size of the safety net. Ease of voting. LGBTQ rights. On any number of policy issues, red states and blue states have drifted apart from each other over the past three decades, widening the gaps between what families in different parts of the country pay in taxes, receive in benefits, and experience when interacting with the government. At the same time, the cost of housing in these states has diverged, too. Blue states have throttled their housing supply, leading to dramatic price increases and spurring millions of families to relocate to red states in the Sun Belt.

These trends have intensified in the past few years, as conservative legislatures have passed a raft of laws restricting abortion access and targeting LGBTQ Americans and as housing shortages have spread. Now many Americans find themselves stuck in states that are enacting conservative policies they do not support, but where real estate is cheap.

That is one takeaway from a new Redfin survey of people who rent their home, are thinking about moving, or have recently moved. Respondents were much more likely to say that they wanted to live in a state where abortion and gender-affirming care were legal than not. But compared with those issues, they were twice as likely to cite housing costs as a major determinant of where they would live.

The report focused on two red states, Texas and Florida. They are among the 20 states that have restricted access to the medical termination of a pregnancy or banned abortion outright since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. And they are among the two dozen states that have implemented statutes affecting trans people: banning gender-affirming care, requiring trans youth to be identified by the gender they were assigned at birth, restricting trans kids’ participation in sports, or barring teachers from discussing what it means to be gay or trans.

Yet such states remain a draw for families from blue, coastal areas. “There’s this trade-off between living somewhere that you can afford and where you have access to jobs,” Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist of Redfin, told me, versus living “where the laws are the way that you want them to be.”

In the survey, not everyone professed a policy preference, but roughly a third of Texans and Floridians who had recently moved or were likely to move said that they would like to live somewhere with legal gender-affirming care for kids. That is eight to 16 percentage points higher than the share who said they do not want to live somewhere where such gender-affirming care is legal. About 40 percent of respondents in those states said they would like to live somewhere with legal abortion access, twice as many as said they would prefer to live somewhere without it.

But folks were still much more likely to say that financial considerations played a primary role in where they had settled or would settle down. The cost of living, access to jobs, the size of available homes, and proximity to family were more commonly cited factors.

Over the past two decades, the country’s growing housing shortage has prevented Americans from moving as often as they used to, and as often as would make sense given the country’s wage trends. Jobs pay much more in Boston and Oakland than they do in small towns in Alabama or exurbs in Utah, a differential that has grown over time. But housing costs in those places rose so much because of supply restrictions that they became unaffordable and inaccessible for many would-be residents.

People who are moving tend to be moving to cheaper places. Differences in housing affordability have pulled Americans to the Sun Belt and the Mountain West, and pushed them from expensive megalopolises to smaller cities, suburbs, and exurbs. Redfin’s data, for instance, show that the average home in Miami is selling for $515,000 versus $705,000 in New York, the most common origin of out-of-state movers. Homes in Dallas are half the price of homes in Los Angeles.

“Even if people would want, in a perfect world, to move to a different place that didn’t have whatever-it-might-be laws, they’re kept in place by these bigger, more salient forces for them,” Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me. (Frost did not work on the Redfin project.) “Even though there are abortion restrictions, people move because of affordability. Even though there are wildfires and more natural disasters in a place, people move because of affordability.”

Those migration trends have increased red states’ political influence. Texas and Florida alone have added more than 15 million residents over the past two decades, translating into a dozen additional congressional seats. Blue states, in contrast, have throttled their population growth. “It’s a policy choice on both fronts: California has chosen to protect abortion rights, and they’ve chosen to have policies that restrict housing,” Fairweather told me. “I don’t even know if policy makers understand this yet. But California’s housing policies have made the citizens of the United States have less access to those rights.”

In interviews, people personally affected by anti-LGBTQ laws described them as a strong motivator to leave the red states they call home. Jay Bates Domenech, a young trans person from suburban Utah, told me that the state’s political climate had pushed them to spend roughly $10,000 more a semester to go to an out-of-state college: Domenech is moving to Colorado this week.

Domenech told me that they had been harassed and bullied for their gender in high school. “A few months ago, a kid followed me down the hallway calling me a pedophile. He took out his phone to take a picture of me,” they told me. “From the moment I came out, there was an underlying anxiety that something was going to happen to me.” Concerns about their physical safety and ability to access health care pushed them to move, they said, adding that they felt targeted by the state’s anti-LGBTQ politicians. “The increase in suicide rates and mental-health diagnoses—it’s something I am seeing at a personal, individual level,” they told me.

But many other queer and trans people don’t have the money or flexibility to uproot their lives. Anthony, who asked me to withhold his last name to avoid any threats to his family, moved from Maryland to Florida five years ago, purchasing a fixer-upper for $220,000. “I’m scared about what the Florida legislature is going to do,” he told me. He and his husband would like to move back to the D.C. area. But high interest rates and the higher cost of living would make it unaffordable to do so.

Redfin’s finding that people would prefer to live in places with legal access to abortion mirrors that of many other polls. States barring or tightening access to abortion have seen an 11 or 12 percentage-point increase in the share of people who say the medical procedure should be easier to obtain.

In the long term, the loss of abortion access is expected to intensify the country’s already intense geographic inequality. The hundreds of thousands of people forced to continue unwanted pregnancies will end up sicker and poorer for it: Not being able to terminate a pregnancy makes a person more likely to become impoverished, unemployed, in debt, and subject to eviction, and an abortion is safer than carrying a pregnancy to term. Many companies are avoiding adding employees or doing business in states with strict bans.

Yet the Redfin data suggest that relatively few people will move because of changing health-care statutes. Abortion access is already heavily predicated on a person’s physical location and socioeconomic status: Wealthy Texans fly to Illinois for abortions; poor Tennessee residents find themselves stuck. “There are states that were destinations for people seeking abortions where clinics have closed post-Dobbs, forming abortion deserts, particularly in the southeastern and central United States,” Betsy Pleasants, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Wallace Center for Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health, told me. Those deserts are simply too formidable and expensive for many people to cross.

Sam Dickman is one person who did leave Texas as a result of the state’s changing legal abortion landscape. He is a physician and an abortion provider. He and his partner moved to Montana so that he could continue to do his life’s work.

“I see patients traveling in from Texas, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, all these states surrounding Montana, to get abortion care,” he told me. “The median abortion patient is a young, low-income person of color. These are populations who are struggling to afford rent.” He added: “If I asked a patient, Have you ever thought about moving to a place with better abortion access? It would be item No. 15 on their radar. They would look at me like, What are you talking about? I can’t afford to have a kid right now. Obviously, I can’t afford to move.”