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Nos. 2, 3, 7, and 8 are basically about housing costs; as Glaeser and Tobio note in "The Rise of the Sunbelt": http://www.nber.org/papers/w13071, Sunbelt states like Texas are growing so fast because building housing there is cheap.

In most coastal cities, by contrast, building housing is exceedingly expensive and sometimes verges on impossible (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face...). So when demand rises, prices rise too, and existing residents see the purchasing power of their salaries erode because much of those salaries have to go to housing costs. In Texas, when demand for housing rises so does supply.




It's worth noting that building housing is cheap in Texas because it relies on illegal labor.

Ref. http://www.npr.org/2013/04/10/176677299/construction-booming... and http://www.npr.org/2013/04/11/176777498/texas-contractors-sa...


It is not only housing, because on this basis alone, other states would win out. I'd say that it is a big factor though when the other items mentioned are in place.




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