The pandemic did weird things to the housing market. Things haven’t been the same since. In the United States, PocketSmith users have seen a 29% increase in housing expenses from November 2019 to November 2025.
Part of this increase can be attributed to investors taking advantage of lower interest rates during an inflationary period. Work patterns also shifted, leading more Americans to relocate to homes that were larger and better suited to remote work. The increased demands from families and investors happened during a time period where America’s already undersupplied housing market saw a severe reduction in new builds, whether due to supply chain issues or labor shortages.
Six years later, the impacts of those initial housing market changes still impact Americans’ bottom line when it comes to their housing budget. It may be easiest to see these pricing increases in high-cost-of-living areas like New York and California. Many Americans have relocated to lower-cost-of-living areas like Florida and Texas, lured in by lower home prices and a lack of state income tax.
However, before you make a big move, it’s important to recognize that housing costs don’t start and end at the sticker price on a four-bedroom home. There are other factors to consider, as the lack of affordable housing in America is a nationwide problem. You can’t necessarily escape it by hopping over state lines.
While homes in places like Texas and Florida tend to have lower home prices, these home prices are often lower to account for sky-high homeownership or flood insurance premiums. Whether you’re living in tornado alley or a place subject to hurricane season, when natural disasters are more common, you’re going to have to pay more to insure your property.
This is true in many parts of Texas, but in Florida, it’s even more extreme. The state’s insurance landscape is such an outlier that it’s often left out of national analyses. Florida’s data would skew things in such a way that it wouldn’t provide an accurate depiction of averages across the other 49 states.
If insurance premiums are too expensive to be affordable, opting out isn’t an option if you need a mortgage to make the purchase. Rather than letting you take on that risky risk, your bank will take out a forced-place insurance plan. This type of insurance only protects the lender — not you as the homeowner. Yet, the expensive premiums will still be rolled into your monthly mortgage payments.
States that don’t charge income tax tend to have higher taxes in other areas of your life. One of those areas is property taxes. This effectively means that the taxes you’ll pay on your home are less expensive in places like California than they are in no-income-tax states.
Texas, in particular, can get pricey quickly. Tax rates are set locally and are based on annual appraisals. That means even if the price you bought your home for was low, if property values rise quickly, your property taxes rise quickly, too. In contrast, in a state like California, there are caps on how much of an increase you can see year-over-year.
In Texas, you may also see additional property taxes if you move into a newer community. These property taxes could be in addition to what you’re paying at the county, city and school district level.
The general rule is that the offset of no income tax doesn’t really start affecting people in a tangible way until they’re making at least $250,000 per year, and the most benefits are going to people with net worths that make them millionaires. In lower-cost-of-living areas, those higher incomes are harder to come by. While there are some flashy tech jobs in places like Austin, the median household income in the state was $79,721 in 2024.
Places with a lower cost of living often come with a lower quality of living. The sticker prices on homes may be more expensive in places like New York City, but you’re also likely to have better access to things like childcare, worker protections and healthcare. For example, places like Texas and Florida are among the few states that have not engaged in Medicaid Expansion in 2025.
Higher-cost-of-living states also have better access to basic rights. For example, voting tends to be easier in these states, and there are better protections surrounding reproductive rights. If you are a member of any oppressed group, you may find that you have higher levels of overall safety in states that have not put anything labeled ‘DEI’ under legislative attack over the past several years.
That means that while there may be lower sticker prices on homes, things like property taxes and insurance premiums shouldn’t be your only consideration. Relocation can also have tangible effects on your day-to-day life that you can’t always measure in dollars and cents.
When you account for costs that underlie lower home prices, it quickly becomes clear that America’s affordable housing crisis is a nationwide problem. It’s not necessarily one you can escape by crossing state lines.
That doesn’t mean that all hope is lost, though. Much of the shortage of affordable homes can be attributed to policy — and a lot of that policy is local. Getting involved in grassroots efforts can change things like zoning laws and incentives for new (affordable) builds in your region. These policies can have an outsized impact on your local housing market. When you engage to make the affordable housing supply better for all, you’re also bettering your own prospects of becoming a homeowner and reducing your costs.
Brynne Conroy is an award-winning personal finance writer, creator of the popular women’s finance site, Femme Frugality, and author of The Feminist Financial Handbook, which was an Amazon #1 New Release across multiple categories including Poverty and LGBTQ Demographic Studies. Her work has been cited in academic texts, and she’s spoken at venues such as Vanderbilt University, the Financial Planning Association and the 529 Conference. Here at PocketSmith, Brynne covers personal finance within American financial systems.
