I wasn’t trying to say one was better or not, just different. Californians wrap up a large amount of their retirement savings in their houses though, so keeping those home prices high is important to them and that’s a reason for stalling development.

I think Californians do, a lot of time, retire with a higher net worth. But most of them do that because they’re more relatively house-poor during their lives - they take out larger mortgages, and save more into their net worth.

As opposed to Texans, who have higher disposable income since they have smaller house payments. It’s less incentive to save so they may spend more.

So that’s a partial advantage to California - the expensive homes force a higher savings rate, naturally.

But, at retirement age, a lot of their net worth is tied up in their home. So to unlock a lot of those savings they need to move to a lower cost of living state like Arizona, Nevada, Florida, etc.

While the Texans can just stay in their paid-off house.

So yeah it’s just different.

Texans are just paying off their home throughout their life and staying in it. They have larger disposable income to go towards other stuff (kids, lifestyle) while Californians gotta pay that mortgage

It all depends on how those things are calculated. Are you including home value in retirement savings or not?

It's not that they're "intuitively better" it's that prior generations of them have passes less insane state and local law and they're not at the tail end of a ~20yr industry boom so "pay down my house and cash out to somewhere cheaper" doesn't make sense as a retirement strategy for as many of them.