Since Rick Perry’s campaign theme – assuming he runs – will be It Worked In Texas, it’s worth observing that Texas’s success in recent years is partly based upon the fact that it is easy and often cheap to move there. That’s because, as Matt Yglesias points out, it’s easy to build houses in Texas.
In fact the average family in Houston is actually better off – once housing and transportation costs have been considered – than a comparable family in New York City. Since the great eastern seaboard cities have the advantages of antiquity and immense reserves of cultural capital that will always make them popular places in which to live, sunbelt cities such as Houston, Dallas and Phoenix need to find other ways of competing. Houston’s complete lack of zoning laws is one such way of doing so. Cities need people otherwise they end up like Detroit.
Still, as Reihan Salam observes, cheap housing is only one part of a broader range of Texas policies that make it a much more attractive place to do business – and hence hire workers – than, say, California. This will be the basis of any Perry campaign. This is preferable to what Megan McArdle rightly considers the GOP’s fetishisation of business “experience”. Running a business, you see, is not very much like running the federal government. However creating, maintaing or operating the political framweork within which business may have a chance of thriving is something that politicians can do even if here again their main task is to avoid blunders that make their state or country hideously uncompetitive. (Hello California!)
Meanwhile, I wonder what would happen if Glasgow or Liverpool or Newcastle scrapped zoning regulations. Internal migration is a much bigger thing in America than in the UK, but if you want to help the north compete against the pull of London and the south-east cheap housing is one way to help lure companies north of the Watford Gap.
Alternatively, of course, a plethora of cheap housing might soon be no kind of plethora at all if it ensured that Glasgow, say, became especially attractive to immigrants looking to better themselves and provide greater opportunities for their families. The Lib Dems proposal for “regional” immigration visas has some obvious practical difficulties but as a principle it still seems quite a decent proposal and one that, if it were politically or practically feasible, could be part of a range of policies that might actually revitalise the British cities that most obviously need new blood.
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