In New York City, these conversations took center stage in a mayoral election that inspired the highest voter turnout since 1969. Meanwhile, in Phoenix, the fight over 226 affordable apartments got so heated that residents brought their farm animals to a neighborhood meeting in protest. And in Texas, lawmakers recently passed a bill to limit neighbors’ ability to challenge zoning changes in their neighborhoods.

These might sound like local quirks, but they’re part of the same national story. As COVID-19 pandemic-era migration reshaped who lives where, zoning fights and land-use rules have gone from sleepy, insider topics to some of the most emotional battles in local politics.

The difference in tenor of these discussions from city to city is a reflection of a larger, thornier problem plaguing America. Migration flows haven’t just changed where people live; they've also shifted who shows up to fight about what gets built—and that change has the power to rewrite which places stay affordable.

The big sort: How pandemic-era migration changed where Americans live

To understand how we got here, it’s important to first untangle the lasting effects of the pandemic. Remote work policies, low mortgage rates, and a need for wide-open spaces inspired Americans to pick up and move in ways that accelerated preexisting trends.

Before COVID-19, about 5 million metro-area tax filers moved counties each year. By 2021, that rose to 5.8 million, according to research from the Brookings Institution. At the same time, a slow pre-pandemic trickle of people leaving smaller metros for big, expensive ones flipped direction. And by 2022, far more households were exiting the largest metros for midsized and smaller markets.

That shift hit New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago hard, as more people left between 2019 and 2021. Meanwhile, places like Dallas, Houston, Tampa, FL, Jacksonville, FL, Charlotte, NC, and San Antonio gained residents through 2022, offering cheaper housing while still feeling like real cities.

If that sounds abstract, think of your own orbit: The cousin who bailed on New York City for a cheaper, larger place in Philadelphia; the friend who traded a San Francisco studio for a house with a backyard in Sacramento; the co-worker you used to see in the office every week who went remote. They’re far from one-off anecdotes, reflecting a durable flow of people, income, and new households out of high-cost hubs and into adjacent metros.

Remote work, higher incomes, and the new housing voting bloc

Those flows of new residents brought with them new ideas, new frustrations, and, of course, new voters.

Remote-friendly jobs are heavily concentrated in blue-leaning counties, but the people holding them landed disproportionately in red and purple states, according to an analysis of IRS and MIT Election Lab data by doctoral candidates Peter John Lambert and Chris Larkin. Within states, many movers traded deep-blue urban cores for more politically mixed suburbs.

These residents also arrived with above-average incomes, more flexible schedules, and experience with inventory-restricted and cost-prohibitive cities.

Austin housing advocate Nicole Nosek is just one example. After moving to Austin from California in 2019, she says she immediately recognized the same forces that had pushed San Francisco Bay Area housing out of reach: strict zoning rules, fussy building codes, and an entrenched “not in my backyard” mentality.

“I was shocked to see a few Austinites blocking housing reforms for the many—literally a few dozen Austinites filed a lawsuit to block missing middle housing for about 1 million Austinites like teachers, firefighters, and police who were being pushed out of the Austin metro every day,” she says.

Her urgency came straight from her California experience, where she lived “practically on top of strangers” in a three-bedroom apartment with another renter and a family.

“I felt lucky if I had $1,000 left at the end of the month,” she says. “The Bay Area experience was a crash course for me in what not to do on housing policy.”

So when she arrived in Austin, she was motivated to act, testifying at hearings and organizing a bipartisan coalition devoted to tackling affordable housing in the state.

Her organization, Texans for Reasonable Solutions, has played a crucial role in passing a slew of bills to incentivize building, like SB 840, which allows commercial land to be converted to housing; SB 15, which caps local minimum lot sizes in new neighborhoods; SB 2477, which streamlines office-to-residential conversions; and HB 24, which reforms zoning protest thresholds so small minorities can no longer block broad reforms.

The effects of her efforts are hard to ignore. Today, Texas earns top marks in affordability, according to State-by-State Report Cards from Realtor.com®.

'A townhome—heaven forbid'

Despite her success, Nosek says some longtime Austinites “didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat for a 2019 Californian ex-pat trying to change housing laws.”

To opponents of reform, she quickly became a symbol: “The California transplant using her energy and time to upend their neighborhoods with a townhome—heaven forbid,” she says.

It makes sense in a state like Texas, which has historically been suspicious of California and has an identity deeply rooted in its own sense of individualism, and even more sense for a place like Austin, which prides itself on staying “weird.”

But Nosek’s outsider status turned into her strongest credential.

“Our coalition of over 50 organizations talked about free-market fixes and held up California as a cautionary tale to what happens to young families and teachers when cities don’t make room,” she says. “I’d say, ‘Here’s how California destroyed their housing market. If you want to drive your middle-class families and businesses out of the state, just copy California’s overregulation.’”

Once people understood she wasn’t trying to “Californian-ize” Texas, but to prevent Texas from repeating California’s mistakes, much of the suspicion eased.

“It’s critical to build odd alliances,” she says. “When people who usually disagree all lock arms to actively walk the halls for a solution, the vote counts reflect that. If Texas can get Republicans and Democrats on the same page to keep housing affordable, places like California can surely do the same.”

Even shrinking cities can't escape the new zoning wars

It’s a potent message, considering that cities with out-migration are facing much of the same pressures as those with in-migration, but without the shock effect and experience of newcomers brandishing cautionary tales.

Instead, in out-migration cities, the coalitions showing up to make these decisions are younger voters whose entire adult lives have been shaped by high rents and scarce inventory.

“There are a handful of American cities that are focal points for migration of young, college-educated adults. Obviously, New York City is one of them,” explains Eric Kober, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “That's really changed the political topography in New York City.”

At the same time, the city is losing people at both ends of the income spectrum.

“The population turns over, sort of continuously,” Kober notes. Retirees continue to decamp for “sunnier places” and “people who are less affluent and can't find housing or can't find housing that's suitable to their needs migrate to cheaper parts of the country.”

The result is a constantly shifting electorate—and in that churn, candidates like Zohran Mamdani, who put housing affordability at the center of his campaign, can prevail by “correctly identifying this young, college-educated adult population” and what animates them, Kober says.

“If zoning were not so restrictive in New York City, there would be more in-migration and less out-migration,” Kober argues. People leaving for cheaper metros “can live better” even if they earn less, while those who stay or arrive are often paying the price of scarcity.

“Housing and, ultimately, restrictive zoning is the very root cause of a lot of these individual rational decisions that people make,” he says.

So even in cities that are losing population on paper, zoning battles are proving to be a central issue because they determine who can afford to stay, who has to leave, and which voters decide what gets built next.

What this means for affordability in the next decade

“Local zoning laws and land-use regulations are the main culprit behind our national housing shortage of 4 million homes,” says Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel. “When you artificially constrain supply this way, you get an affordability crisis to go along with the housing shortage.”

From here, the next decade can break one of two ways. In a best-case scenario, today’s churn produces coalitions that actually unlock more homes where they’re needed. In the worst case, migration exacerbates the politics that created scarcity on the coasts and freezes new construction in the very places that need it most.

The cities already waging these battles point to one crucial lesson. “Don’t wait until you’re in a full-blown crisis to act,” Nosek says. “California dragged its feet for years, and by the time they tried to fix things, home prices were through the roof and relief was slow in coming. Texas, on the other hand, didn’t hesitate.”

(Realtor.com, 12/5/25)

The individual financial consequences and generational economic fallout from growing homeownership despair could be profound, according to the study from economists Seung Hyeong Lee of Northwestern University and Younggeun Yoo of the University of Chicago.

The economists find that renters who give up on buying a home start behaving very differently from those who still hope to become homeowners, with the discouraged group squandering their money, slacking off at work, and gambling on risky investments out of desperation.

"Housing has become increasingly out of reach for younger generations, and many households are now abandoning the goal of homeownership altogether," the authors write. "Our empirical evidence demonstrates that renters who no longer expect to become homeowners behave very differently from those still trying to buy a home."

It comes as housing affordability remains at multidecade lows, with home prices at record highs and mortgage rates still elevated. Over the past five years, the typical mortgage payment has increased by 82%, while median incomes have grown by just 26%, according to a recent estimate from John Burns Research and Consulting.

The new study suggests that when the prospect of homeownership is out of reach, it changes the way renters think about the future, reducing their incentive to save or work toward long-term financial goals.

The finding turns conventional wisdom on its head: Instead of being unable to afford homes due to their wasteful spending, young people are financially reckless because they have no hope of ever being able to afford a home.

Instead of saving regularly, renters in despair begin splurging on entertainment and small luxuries, perhaps as a consolation for their bleak outlook on life, the study finds.

As well, those discouraged renters increasingly turn to risky investments such as cryptocurrency as a last resort, betting on the slim odds of a windfall return that could change their lives.

"For those priced out of the housing market, gambling on improbable but potentially transformative gains may appear rational, particularly among younger cohorts," the authors write.

Finally, housing despair also has an impact on work ethic, with those who feel locked out of the real estate market slacking off more and neglecting opportunities to boost their income, the study finds.

"As housing becomes less affordable, individuals who still aspire to homeownership increase their labor effort and exhibit disciplined behavior, while those who lose that hope reduce effort and shift toward less forward-looking choices," write Lee and Yoo.

For an individual, the financial consequences of these behavioral changes may be profound over a lifetime. Households that start out with identical net worths as renters tend to diverge sharply based on whether they give up on buying a home.

"Despite their similar starting points, the discouraged renter quickly falls into a near-zero wealth trap, while the hopeful renter gradually accumulates assets and substantially narrows the gap with initial homeowners," the economists write. "As housing affordability declines, more households fall into the discouraged group, producing a more polarized and unequal wealth distribution."

And, because children of homeowners are more likely to own a home themselves, the wealth trap of housing despair may severely impact the financial prospects of future generations, say Lee and Yoo.

“In this way, giving up homeownership can act as a transmission mechanism that entrenches and amplifies wealth inequality over generations, potentially leading to a society in which homeownership becomes increasingly out of reach for households without intergenerational transfers,” they wrote.

Realtor.com® senior economist Jake Krimmel notes that one of the surest benefits of homeownership is forced savings, with part of each monthly mortgage payment going toward principal and building equity in the home.

"Building wealth is a slow process because it harnesses the power of compounding over time. Trying to hit the lottery through speculating on financial assets from your phone—however fun it might be—is almost certain to fail in the long run."

Keith Griffith is a journalist at Realtor.com covering housing policy, real estate news, and trends in the residential market. Previously, his work has appeared in Business Insider, The Street, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Post, and Daily Mail, among other publications. He has a master's degree in economic and business journalism from Columbia University.

(Realtor.com 12/5/25)

Pantone Color of the Year 2026: Cloud Dancer About the color: In a first since it began naming colors of the year in 1999, Pantone has selected…white. Entitled Cloud Dancer, the wispy neutral is meant to act “as a whisper of calm and peace in a noisy world,” says the brand in their announcement. “Similar to a blank canvas, Cloud Dancer signifies our desire for a fresh start. Peeling away layers of outmoded thinking, we open the door to new approaches.” The white is balanced; not too warm, not too cool. It’s meant to display “a conscious state of simplification, encouraging true relaxation and quiet focus for those seeking moments of disconnection and rest.”

Paint with it: Well, what can’t you paint with a dependable white? Walls? Check. Cabinetry? Check. Furniture and window trim? Check, check. If you’re looking to refresh anything in your home, Cloud Dancer is a great way to do it.

James Hardie Color of the Year 2026: Iron Gray

About the color: James Hardie, known for their quality exterior siding, went all in on a saturated and chalky gray. The matte, stormy shade really comes to life when paired with rich, warm wood tones such as doors, flower boxes or decking. White trim and window casings keep it more traditional, while black leans modern. "With Iron Gray, we wanted a color that is expressive yet grounded, one that complements strong lines and invites highlight trims to pop,” says Samara Toole, Chief Marketing Officer of James Hardie. “It's exactly the kind of color homeowners and professionals are asking for—bold yet timeless."

Paint with it: As James Hardy is an exterior cement siding company, there really isn’t an option to use Iron Gray to “paint” anything, but, as intended, it’s the ideal color for the siding on your home if you’re going for a contemporary look without the sterile vibes.

Coloro x WGSN Color of the Year 2027: Luminous Blue

About the color: No, 2027 isn’t a typo. Trend forecasting and color expert partners WGSN and Coloro are living not a few months ahead of us, but well over a year out, due to the nature of their work, which informs product, design, and marketing decisions across a multitude of industries. A press release from the brands notes that this lapis-like hue is “both mysterious and eccentric, with versatility and a broad appeal,” adding to its transseasonal, gender-inclusive appeal.

Paint with it: A radiant color like Luminous Blue is not for the faint of heart. While it’s not something you’d likely put on a wall (or any facade for that matter), if used sparingly, the electric azul shade in your home can turn any simple thing into a powerful statement. Think about using a similar cobalt shade on a vase, a picture or mirror frame, or even a floor lamp.

Benjamin Moore Color of the Year 2026: Silhouette AF-655

About the color: Tailored suiting has made the leap from professional garb into the home for Benjamin Moore’s color of the year. “The connection between fashion and interiors has always been a source of inspiration but this year in particular, we’ve noticed a renewed interest in suiting and classic silhouettes, and the growing interest in the brown color family,” said Andrea Magno, director, color marketing and design at Benjamin Moore in a press release. “Silhouette embodies these qualities with its depth and luxurious blend of burnt umber and delicate charcoal undertones."

Paint with it: Silhouette is an elegant, almost regal, charcoal-espresso hue that would really bring some serious drama, especially when used top to bottom (a.k.a. color drenching). If opting for an almost-black-brown color for your walls seems too daring, stick to painting built-ins and other woodwork.

Sherwin-Williams & HGTV by Sherwin-Williams Color of the Year 2026: Universal Khaki

About the color: Sherwin-Williams and HGTV by Sherwin-William normally release separate colors, but for 2026 they came out with a joint color that leans into the “warm neutral” trend. Universal Khaki is an anchoring mid-tone tan that’s earthy and simply but also feels quietly luxurious in the right applications.

Paint with it: This color would be beautiful in a large living room that needs to be grounded. Wood-toned moldings or trimwork would also coordinate beautifully with the cozy neutral, whether your style is traditional or contemporary. And like other buttery COTY hues, you can’t miss by using Universale Khaki on cabinetry or furniture.

Krylon Color of the Year 2026: Coffee Bean

About the color: Not quite black, not quite brown, Coffee Bean strikes the balance between warm and edgy. It plays nicely with a full range of light and dark neutrals as well as metallics—though I’d love to see it paired with deeply saturated jewel tones.

Paint with it: Krylon offers a spray paint product in a matte finish, so Coffee Bean works best for freestanding furniture pieces. Dated honey oak dining chairs need a facelift? Or perhaps some hand-me-down vases that don’t quite fit your look? Give Coffee Bean a whirl.

Little Greene Color of the Year 2026: Adventurer

About the color: Little Greene’s Adventurer is a deep, rich and regal plummy aubergine. It has enough black in it to keep it from veering too purple—which cements it firmly into the world of the sophisticated grown up, rather than something better suited for a kid’s space). TLDR: If you like colors that feel plucked from a 100-year-old English cottage, you’ll love this one.

Paint with it: Any room you want to make feel intimate and cozy can benefit from Adventurer. Think: A listening lounge, a moody home office, a petite library nook. It feels especially textural in Little Greene’s Intelligent Matte Emulsion finish.

Behr Color of the Year 2026: Hidden Gem

About the color: The first COTY of the year out of the gate, Behr’s Hidden Gem is described by the paint company as a smoky jade that “embodies an air of mystery and sophistication.” It’s a saturated blue-green that’s a touch chalky (in a good way). The trend-forward color is incredibly versatile, the kind of hue you could use across a multitude of surfaces.

Paint with it: With its deep, rich pigmentation, Hidden Gem works well for walls, trimwork, and even ceilings. It would be beautiful on a bathroom vanity for a fresh yet unexpected color, or on kitchen cabinetry if you’re looking for a color with lasting power. For something a bit less daring, use it on your front door.

Glidden Color of the Year 2026: Warm Mahogany

About the color: Brown with red undertones, or red with brown undertones—however you look at it, Warm Mahogany is punchy and powerful, but still grounded. It’s a nod to the red trend of 2024 and 2025 without feeling overly trendy. In fact, in the right application, it could be fairly timeless.

Paint with it: If your tastes lean modern, try Warm Mahogany in a color-drenched application in your bedroom or home office paired with warm wood tones and a complementary color like blush or a brighter rust. For some 1990s nostalgia, try it on your dining room walls, or even in your kitchen to add depth to a white or cream cabinet backdrop.

Minwax Color of the Year 2026: Special Walnut

About the color: Special Walnut isn’t a “color” per se but rather a wood stain, though that doesn’t make it any less good. From a trend perspective, we are further away from the blonde woods that were so popular a decade ago and are becoming more comfortable with deeper browns, so Minwax’s COTY fits the bill nicely. It carries a warm tone reminiscent of hand-carved, authentic wood, and would add history and character to any room.

Paint with it: Nostalgic and honest, Special Walnut is ideal for stripped or unfinished natural wood furniture projects, wood fireplace surrounds and mantels, and shelving and bookcases.

Valspar Color of the Year 2026: Warm Eucalyptus

About the color: Calming and serene, Warm Eucalyptus is a rich sage green with warm undertones. “It’s a reflection of the comfort we crave in our homes,” says Valspar director of color marketing Sue Kim in a press release. This shade of green reads familiar and retro which makes it a strong pick for anyone wanting to sidestep trending hues for something with style resilience.

Paint with it: This Valspar pick would work well on the built-ins of a mudroom or butler’s pantry, on wainscotting with a coordinating wallpaper above the chair rail, or on the exterior of your craftsman, bungalow, or Victorian.

Dutch Boy Color of the Year 2026: Melodious Ivory

About the color: Melodious Ivory is the kind of warm, buttery cream shade that makes any room glow as if it’s a scene from a Nancy Meyers movie. If a sharp white leans too contemporary or sterile for your taste, this hue may be just right for you. It’s timeless, calming and with enough pigment that it feels intentional rather than a fill-in beige.

Paint with it: White cabinetry feeling tired? Melodious Ivory to the rescue. Try it on your kitchen millwork, in a master bathroom with great sunlight, or on the walls of a cozy living room.

(Realtor.com 12/5/25)