So far, the mortgage meltdown hasn’t been as bad in Texas as in the four Sand States: California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. These are home to half of the country’s foreclosures and a large majority of the defaulted mortgage money. Why is that?
Partly this is due to the Oil Bubble, which now appears to be ending. Oil prices over $100 per barrel kept the Texas economy strong in 2008, allowing debtors to avoid foreclosure, and to keep employment levels high. Also, the enormous amount of land and the lack of environmental restrictions on home development in Texas means that when the federal government stimulates demand, the supply of housing increases quickly as well, keeping housing prices reasonable.
Texas seems to have a more established Hispanic community. Hardly surprising really!
Finally, what was most important was how different was Texas’s economic and immigration history over the last three decades relative to the seemingly similar Sand States. Due to OPEC’s oil price increases in the 1970s, Texas experienced a huge construction boom thirty years ago. That mostly attracted construction workers from the rest of the U.S. rather than from Mexico, because Mexico was simultaneously experiencing its own oil boom following massive new discoveries. When oil prices collapsed in 1982, the economies of Texas and Mexico slumped simultaneously. The big wave of post-1982 unemployed illegal aliens therefore headed for California rather than for Texas.
That’s why San Antonio had “surprisingly low levels” of immigration from 1965 to 2000, according to the important new book quantitatively comparing Mexican-Americans in San Antonio and Los Angeles in 1965 and 2000, Generations of Exclusion, by sociologists associated with the UCLA Chicano Studies Program. The 2000 Census found that California’s foreign-born population (26 percent of all residents) was almost twice as large as Texas’s (14 percent). As a result, unlike the other Sand States in 2000, Texas had a large but fairly well-rooted, stable, and assimilated Mexican-American population that had a reasonable potential to make enough money in resource-extraction or other blue-collar jobs to afford to buy Texas’s cheap houses.
In sharp contrast, California had a huge and mostly new, ill-educated, and unassimilated Mexican-American population that didn’t have even a chance of making enough money in Silicon Valley or Hollywood to afford California’s already expensive houses. And Nevada, Arizona, and Florida were more like California than they were like Texas.
So, who are the bad guys here: Texans or Californians? That’s what people always want to know: who’s the bad guy and who is the good guy? The point is that our country’s two biggest states are just very different, and much of that has its roots in their very different terrain. For example, everybody in California would prefer to live near the Pacific because the climate and scenery are so nice. In contrast, in Texas (and the other Gulf of Mexico coastal states), the threat of hurricanes means people tend to prefer to live inland. Galveston used to be the dominant port of Texas’s coast, until the hurricane of 1900 drowned 6000 people, after which Houston (45 miles inland and 45 feet above sea level) became the main metropolis. So, Affordable Family Formation works better in Texas than in California.
This doesn’t make Texans or Californians good or evil, it just makes them different. And because the two states between them account for 60 million people, it’s crucial that Americans get a better grip on the differences between the two states.
