The biggest thing in those states' favor is easily housing policy. They tend to permit much more sprawl, so housing prices in general, and especially the cost of a detached single family home stay more reasonable. Aside from Houston, they're still not great on allowing housing density though.
Meanwhile, blue states have a "worst of both worlds" kind of policy. They don't permit much sprawl, and also don't permit much density, thereby pushing people to states where they do permit sprawl. Then they tell you that this is good for the environment, somehow.
That said, while it makes for cheap single family homes, sprawl has a LOT of negatives. Strong Towns explains how it basically functions like a Ponzi scheme in the long term, and within older cities the sprawlier parts are usually subsidized by the denser ones. There's also more cost to the environment, to health, to noise, to safety, and for transportation costs for both the government and the user. There's a reason the US has an unusually high traffic fatality rate per 100k people for a developed country, and there's an impact on our collective national waistline as well.
> Meanwhile, blue states have a "worst of both worlds" kind of policy. They don't permit much sprawl
Many states smaller (and less populated) than the expanse of sprawl in the LA basin. The only parts of CA that has much limit to sprawl are places with hard natural geographic barriers, like SF and the Peninsula.
Driving on the east coast or west coast, I see hundreds upon thousands of miles of sprawl. Californian sprawl even extends across natural barriers, with houses clinging to steep hillsides, houses built on ridiculously unstable land, houses built in shrub forests that obviously have an annual fire season. If people want to live that way, it’s fine. But they leave, and they build more sprawl wherever they go...
Meanwhile, blue states have a "worst of both worlds" kind of policy. They don't permit much sprawl, and also don't permit much density, thereby pushing people to states where they do permit sprawl. Then they tell you that this is good for the environment, somehow.
That said, while it makes for cheap single family homes, sprawl has a LOT of negatives. Strong Towns explains how it basically functions like a Ponzi scheme in the long term, and within older cities the sprawlier parts are usually subsidized by the denser ones. There's also more cost to the environment, to health, to noise, to safety, and for transportation costs for both the government and the user. There's a reason the US has an unusually high traffic fatality rate per 100k people for a developed country, and there's an impact on our collective national waistline as well.