I gave you a compensatory upvote because I agree with some of what you say in spite of mostly considering myself a liberal. People are too dogmatic about their

I gave you a compensatory upvote because I agree with some of what you say in spite of mostly considering myself a liberal. People are too dogmatic about their political ideas and too unwilling to look at areas where their particular brand of politics has failed to produce meaningful positive results. Both conservatives and liberals are guilty of this. People need to think about politics like engineers. Dump the ideology and football game cheerleading for "my team" and look at what works and what doesn't. Liberals in California should be asking what the hell Texas is doing (or not doing) to maintain low property prices in the face of economic and population growth. Texas and California are quite similar in many ways: big, sun belt, on the border, culturally unique, ethnically diverse, and economically growing. Why can a middle class person afford a house in Texas but not in California? Of course I suspect the answer is that Texas lets developers build new housing stock in response to market demand, while California lets NIMBYs obstruct at every turn. It's grade school economics. If you have increasing demand and you limit supply, you get runaway price increases.