A poor person can't afford a home in either Texas or California. Not unless you cherry pick living in the middle of nowhere, in which case both states are perfectly affordable.
And if you get sick or injured in Texas, well, I hope you have good health insurance from your job.
Maybe not outright poor, but compare home prices vs. median income in most of Dallas (excluding the most expensive neighborhoods) vs almost anywhere in LA or SF.
Ninja edit since I can't reply: no, they are not even comparable:
Just wow. Try finding that anywhere in SF, LA, OC, or SD. I see a lot of decent homes under $200k. I don't mean trailers.
My point is about optics as much as reality. A lot of people look at San Francisco to see what liberalism is going to do since that city has a reputation (right or wrong) as being a kind of capital city for the Democratic left. When they look they see a city with massive wealth divides where nobody but the rich can afford a reasonable home and there are drug addicts on every street corner. They think "wow, so this is the future that liberalism is going to give us."
I'm not sure this is totally wrong either. I wouldn't want the country run by the head-up-the-arse crowd that runs San Francisco any more than I want it run by the current bunch of clowns occupying the executive branch.
If you think Austin or Dallas isn't going to go through that same reality then you would be ignorant of how things are playing out.
I live in Texas. Dallas and Austin are no different and home prices are already soaring off the backs of tech companies moving down here and the local government being unable to build infrastructure or support a growing population. This has nothing to do with 'liberalism' and everything to do with cities in America built on top of bad city design, terrible infrastructure, gentrification and unsustainable growth.
American city designers love the von Neumann bottleneck! They see two problems. Jobs and homes. They solve them independently and then connect them with a central bus. The end result is that everyone has to cross the central bus to get from one to the other.
And if you get sick or injured in Texas, well, I hope you have good health insurance from your job.