Moneybox

California’s Housing Crisis Is Drowning Renters. Houston’s Housing Boom Is Flooding Everything.

It’s a good time to own a house in Los Angeles.

Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

Million-dollar homes are popping up across coastal cities like a case of golden chicken pox.

According to an analysis by Trulia, San Francisco made the most dramatic vault into the seven-figures. In 2012, 1 in 5 SF homes were worth $1 million; today it’s 3 in 5. In San Jose, California, the percentage of million-dollar homes rose from 17 to 46. Rounding out the top 10 cities where the percentage jumped the most: Oakland, Orange County, Los Angeles, San Diego, Ventura County, New York, Seattle, and Honolulu. It’s a good group of cities to support the argument for geography’s influence on housing prices.

Or, equally, California’s influence on housing prices: Of the 10 housing markets with the greatest percentage increase in million-dollar homes, seven are in California. California homeowners are becoming millionaires like it’s going out of style. Not just in the bay, either, but also all down the Southern California coast.

The census estimates released on Thursday offer some context: In the 12 months ending in July 2015, California added just 80,000 units. Harris County, Texas, the sprawling home of Houston, added 37,000. This fits the five-year pattern. Since 2010, America’s most populous state has built 300,000 units; Harris County has built 121,000. (Texas as a whole has doubled California’s total in that time.)

The two places make for an easy comparison: California, constrained by geography and regulation, is making homeowners rich and tenants poor. (The state added nearly 2 million residents during that period.) In Houston, with its laissez-faire governance, lack of zoning, and endless green field sites, rents and home prices are essentially flat. (Employment growth there has also fallen flat due to the oil crisis and is well below the U.S. average.)

There’s an interesting twist here. One culprit in California’s housing shortage is the powerful California Environmental Quality Act, which is often (mis)used to contest infill development projects—rather than hilltop-clearing sprawl—and helps hold down development in the Golden State.

In Harris County, there are few such barriers to building. As a result, over the past quarter-century, the county has increased its paved surface by 25 percent. That’s making Houston’s flooding problem worse, FEMA director Craig Fugate told the AP this week. The agency has spent more than $3 billion on flood losses in Houston since 1998. Last month, floods following record rainfall killed eight people and brought the city to a standstill.

There you have it, folks: Drown in the Bayous or go broke in bay.