Golden State’s housing crisis laid bare as skyrocketing prices force Californians to flee in record numbers

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Skyrocketing housing costs are forcing residents to flee California faster than other state in the US.

An eye-popping analysis by Realtor.com, provided exclusively for The California Post, lays bare the true scale of the Golden State’s housing and population decline, and the state’s shocking lack of affordability, over two decades of failed Democrat leadership.

The report highlights a number of shocking and never-previously-published realities, among them:

• Nearly 1 million Californians leaving for the lower-cost state of Texas alone between 2009 and 2025

• A whopping 30.4% share of Golden State listings — often barely livable — priced at more than $1 million

• And residents crippled by mortgage costs that take up half of their monthly incomes

California’s housing crisis, which is marked by rising home costs — the median house price listing of $700,000 is more than seven times the median income — decreasing inventory and spiraling rents, with 24% of the nation’s homeless population living in the state, has been compounded by a litany of disastrous and misguided housing policies.

These include restrictive environmental, zoning, union and pay laws, which have all hindered or delayed new developments, been exploited by communities to prevent higher rise, denser and more affordable housing stock entering the market — and driven up the cost of building.

New construction remains limited, accounting for just 8.3% of listings, according to the report, ranking the state 42nd nationally. Even though new homes are priced slightly below existing ones, there simply aren’t enough of them to move the needle.

As a result, Realtor.com now ranks California as the third worst state in the nation for affordability, behind only Hawaii and Montana — with most homes for sale in the state being unaffordable for the majority of Californians.

When broken down on the city level, the lack of affordability gets even worse.

In the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro, for example, with the median listing price at $994,500 and median income at $91,380, homeowners could be shelling out around 72.4% of their salaries on their mortgages and monthly dues.

And as a result, Californians have been fleeing the state in droves. According to the report, “The data (CPS ASEC, 2009-2025) show that net domestic migration — outflows minus inflows from other US states — has been negative every year since 2013.”

On average, 448,000 people have left the state every year since 2009, with the figure rising to 467,000 each year after the pandemic in 2020.

Per the report, 24% of California residents who departed the state cited housing-related issues as their reason to find the exits — up nearly 43% on pre-pandemic.

“At its core, California’s housing problem is pretty simple: for decades, there haven’t been enough homes for the number of people who want to live there,” Realtor.com senior economist Joel Berner told The Post.

“Too few homes and especially too few affordable ones have been built, while demand has kept growing. Strict zoning and environmental rules, high land costs and long approval timelines have made it harder for builders to keep up.”

What’s more, he added, California is home to a number of high-income households than can afford homes in the millions of dollars, but the state’s middle- and lower-income residents have fewer paths to homeownership.

“Buying a typical home now takes well over 30% of a typical household’s income, which is a clear sign that housing is in short supply,” he said.

Spiraling costs and the $ 1 million dumps

In a sign of California’s out of control living costs, the report exclusively reveals that by December 2025, the state’s median list price stood near $700,000.

But the most jaw-dropping figure is the share of $1 million for-sale home listings, especially in Los Angeles. Even worse, it doesn’t buy much.

For instance, a 928-square-foot two-bedroom condo in Downtown Los Angeles — notably a home that looks out to the misery of Skid Row — asks a staggering $1.16 million and has sat idle on the market for 160 days, likely because most cannot afford it.

“California has plenty of high-income households who can afford million-dollar homes that would cost far less elsewhere, but middle- and lower-income residents have far fewer paths to homeownership,” Berner said.

Elsewhere, a two-bedroom, one-bath single-family home measuring just 990 square feet recently listed for $1.09 million. Nearby, a 1,400-square-foot home with three bedrooms is asking nearly $1.2 million.

And, of course, there are plenty more California regions that have even higher shares of million-dollar listings — pricing out everyone but the richest.

The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro has a 51.5% share of them. San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad has a 43% share and the Silicon Valley hotbed of San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara has a 54.4% share of them.

Inventory remains tight, too. Even after a modest recovery from pandemic lows, California ended 2025 with roughly 56,000 active listings — far below the 70,000 to 90,000 listings commonly seen before 2019. Homes are sitting longer, but not because demand has vanished. Buyers, particularly at middle-income levels, are simply hitting affordability ceilings.

As a result, Realtor.com’s team of economists gave California a flat-out F. With affordability at 5 out of 100, combined with a low rate of building new homes, the study says, “Without major improvements to the volume of new homes added to the housing stock in California, it will continue to rank toward the bottom of the class.”

Renting is also increasingly out of reach.

Across the state’s major metros, rents are far above national numbers. Across the US, the median asking rent is $1,770 per month. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara has a median rent of more than $3,300. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont — another notoriously pricey metro area — has a median near $2,850.

“We’re stuck, because Democrat policies ruined the state”

Rob and Jackie Waterman, of Lakeside, embody the middle-class squeeze that housing data alone can’t capture.

Rob, a California native who grew up in Long Beach, lives with his wife and their two teenage sons in a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment that rents for $2,400 a month — alongside Jackie’s father, a retired Navy commander, and her sister, a high school teacher, who also rent in the same complex.

Jackie moved to California at 14 when her father was stationed there with the military.

“I’m stuck in California and haven’t been able to afford a home for an embarrassingly long time,” Rob Waterman, 47, a 14-year Army veteran, told The Post. “I’m a military veteran and even had a six-figure job at one point — still couldn’t afford the ridiculous housing costs here.”

Even when the Watermans were earning what many would consider a solid living, buying a home remained out of reach.

At their peak, Rob said he was making about $100,000 a year in private security, while Jackie earned roughly $55,000, bringing their household income to between $150,000 and $180,000 with overtime. But when they applied for a VA loan in 2021 and 2022, they hit a wall.

“They would only guarantee $650,000,” Rob said. “The only thing decent was $750,000 and above. I would have had to come up with $160,000 on my own. Who has $160,000 in savings?”

He added that monthly payments on even a modest home would have run between $4,500 and $6,000 a month. “That’s insane,” he said. “That’s basically rent — for the next 30 years.”

The couple point directly to California Democrat leaders’ misguided policies as a turning point, particularly during the pandemic.

Rob said prolonged school closures forced him to quit a job to stay home with their children, setting their finances back years. “California decided to keep the schools closed longer than the rest of the nation,” he said. “When schools were open in Florida and Texas and nobody was dying of the sniffles, I had to stay home with my boys.”

Though Rob later returned to work, rising interest rates, escalating rents and stagnant wages erased any gains.

“Your raises are 1 to 3%, but your rent goes up 5 to 10% every year,” he said. “Any raise you get is completely eaten up by the cost of living. It’s impossible to save.”

“I’d like it to serve as a warning to anyone who thinks about coming to California. The fact of the matter is, Democrat policies is what has ruined the state and the prices of everything are up. And that’s the way it is, you look at everywhere in the nation run by the same type of policies and it looks the same,” Rob said.

For Rob, the toll is deeply personal. “It makes me feel like my 14 years of service to this country, my years as a first responder — it feels like I failed my family,” he said.

“That’s how it feels. It’s shameful. My kids deserve better.” Despite wanting to leave California, the Watermans say they are now trapped by timing: their sons are entrenched in high school, sports and relationships.

“Our last window was probably September 2020,” Rob said. “We should have moved to Texas then. Now we can’t uproot their lives.”

Jackie, who returned to nursing school to try to improve their financial future, said the sacrifices continue to mount. “I really wanted to give my kids a home and a backyard,” she said. “We’ve worked so hard for so long, and we still can’t afford it.”

The Golden ‘escape’

For many households, the result is not adjustment — it’s exit.

“We had been talking about it for a few years. And then once my husband retired, there was just no way we could afford to stay there,” Lily Wasluskas, 63, who left Anaheim for Texas after nearly six decades in California, told The Post.

They’re in lots of company. From 2009 through 2025, roughly 877,000 Californians relocated to Texas, far more than to any other state, averaging about 52,000 moves per year.

The shift has accelerated since 2020, when housing-related moves surged and Texas overtook nearby Western states as the top destination for Californians, Post-pandemic, annual housing-driven outmigration to Texas climbed to roughly 15,000 people per year, reflecting how remote work and soaring home prices weakened the need to stay in California while making lower-cost, lower-tax states increasingly attractive.

“We made a good little profit, and it gave us the ability to move out of state and live how we want to live,” she said. “Since moving to Texas, we now have more money in my bank account.”

Wasluskas described a cascade of everyday costs that finally tipped the scale.

“Gas, taxes, food prices, the politics, the traffic, I mean, everything there,” she said. “There truly is green grass out of California.”

Larry Bammer, 47, who spent his whole life in Orange County before relocating to Texas two years ago following his divorce, said the math simply stopped adding up.

“For a single person, without a doubt, you can’t get into a modest three-bedroom home for under $1 million,” Bammer said. “Either you’re making $200,000 or you have a double income.”

Bammer sold his California home for $1.25 million and used the proceeds to buy land and build a custom home in Texas where he now owns five goats, a dozen chickens, and is in the process of buying a donkey.

“You can’t have 6 acres in Orange County,” he said. “I was on an 8,500-square-foot lot.”

“The public schools in Texas are better than private schools in LA”

Matt Ingles, 41, moved from Los Angeles to Dripping Springs, Texas, with his wife and two children in 2021 after eight years in California.

“You could be making what anybody else in the country would think would consider a very, very good living in Los Angeles and feel poor,” Ingles told The Post. “Whereas if you took that same salary and moved to Texas, you would feel relatively rich.”

For Ingles, housing costs were only part of the equation.

“We were paying $30,000 a year to send our kids to kindergarten. Per kid. And that’s after tax dollars,” he said. “We could move here and have public schools that are, in my opinion, far superior to what we were receiving and paying a lot of money for in Los Angeles.”

Ultimately, it came down to high taxes and regulation. Ingles said, “people are more willing to pay higher taxes if they feel like they’re getting value for it,” but added, “I don’t think you’re getting value for it in California.”

Bammer echoed that calculation from a financial standpoint, saying the lack of a state income tax in Texas was “a huge draw,” particularly as he retired and began living on a pension.

“That will matter,” he said. “That will offset it.”

Others said politics played a more direct role in their exit. Wasluskas said decisions by California’s current governor factored into her family’s move, citing policies she disagreed with and describing them as “things that aren’t normal.”

‘There was no way we can afford to stay’

“You’re probably juggling not one job, but two,” Jenny Wallace, 44, a California native and military vet who moved to Texas with her husband and three children more than a decade ago, said.

“Being middle class in California right now comes with great sacrifice. It’s kind of like a dying tier there.”

Wallace now helps Californians relocate or invest in Texas, often after years of trying to make California work.

“A lot of your money is going towards housing, so you might not be able to do other activities, hobbies, recreational stuff because it’s tied up into the home,” she said. “It could prevent you from following your dreams.”

Wallace said the contrast is stark: her family’s former home in California measured 1,469 square feet, while their current home in Texas spans 4,153 square feet — a more than threefold increase in space — and was purchased for $899,900.

And according to Wallace, affordability in Texas has allowed her children to reach milestones that would have been nearly impossible in California.

“My oldest son is my youngest client,” she said, noting that he bought a home at 22.

“He has a brand new construction, three-bedroom house, in a really good location. He pays a little over $1,400 a month on the mortgage and he has a good job here in Texas.”

Wallace said her son is now financially independent, adding, “He’s off my payroll.”

Beautiful, but increasingly unlivable

Realtor.com’s economists say California’s housing market has shifted from cyclical tightness to permanent constraint. Inventory has never fully recovered.

With limited new construction, and even more limited affordability, taken together, the forces reshaping Los Angeles are structural, not temporary. Prices have risen, inventory has failed to keep up, rents remain elevated, and rebuilding has become slower, costlier and more uncertain.

California remains beautiful. It remains economically powerful. But for many households, it is no longer livable.

“My only regret about moving to Texas was that we didn’t do it sooner,” Wasluskas said.