It’s one of those things which shows up in your Facebook feed and you look at it and say “Huh,” and then later you wish you could find it again, but a few days ago I saw a state-by-state map showing median home prices. Louisiana, at $243,000, was one of the lowest in America. Florida, at $505,000, was among the highest. And then this study on housing inflation comes out, and it seems to prove the point…

With home prices rising just 86% since 2000, Louisiana has the lowest home-price inflation in the U.S. Home prices in Louisiana have increased from $104,800 in 2000 to $194,453 in 2023.

In New Orleans, home prices have increased only 78%, from $131,771 to $235,103, the No. 2 smallest rise among major U.S. cities.

Overall, home prices in the U.S. have increased 2,300% since 1963, while inflation has increased 900%. To put it into context, $20,000 in assorted goods in 1963 would cost $200,000 today — but a $20,000 house in 1963 would cost $480,000 today.

If home prices grew at the same rate as inflation since 1963, the median American home would cost only $177,511 today — almost 2.5x less than the $431,000 it actually costs.

Hawaii has seen the largest home-price increase since 2000 at a whopping 309%.

Unsurprisingly, 73% of Americans say home prices are unattainably high in their area.

And this with no less than four major hurricanes since 2000 which have come through and razed, or at least terminally damaged, a good deal of the housing stock in multiple markets in Louisiana. You’d think that would increase housing inflation rather than tamp it down, but of course when you get into things like the home insurance market what you see is that the cost of housing here is made up of more than just the price of real estate.

Of course, they’ve got colossal problems in Florida’s home insurance market, too, and that hasn’t stopped housing inflation from going through the roof.

The average price of a house in Florida is over half a million dollars now, because Florida is full. Everybody wants to live there, and the Sunshine State is loading up on transplants from New York, Illinois other places on the East Coast and…well, Louisiana, too.

But our housing prices have been pretty stable. Why? Well, when you oversee a moribund economy like John Bel Edwards did for the eight years he was governor, raising every kind of tax he could in his first year in office and then inflating the state budget through the roof to create a leviathan that gobbled up much of our private sector growth potential (see, in particular, what Edwards did to health care in Louisiana), it’s no surprise. And when you lose something like the population of the city of Baton Rouge in net outmigration over the course of Edwards’ eight years in office, don’t be shocked when housing prices largely just sit there.

Vast swaths of our cities contain houses the owners of which would sell but can’t, and instead rent to Section 8 welfare recipients because the value of the property is next to nil. They’re clearing maybe a few hundred bucks a month in rent ahead of mortgage, insurance and what minimum upkeep they can get away with, and that’s when the tenants can bother to pay. And the parts of our cities where this is endemic get more and more run-down all the time, because there’s no money being made anywhere around those places.

That’s what happens when your tax code is uncompetitive with your neighbors, when crime has all but strangled neighborhood commerce and when everything depends on an incompetent, overbearing government which regulates every line of endeavor down to nothing. Cities in our neighboring states are forests of construction cranes, while we’re more like a forest of empty storefronts.

That’s Edwards’ legacy. You can get more house for less money in Louisiana than practically anywhere else, at least until you try to get a mortgage without home insurance. He ought to be really proud of that silver lining for his failure.