Tons of millionaires or billionaires in Texas, Georgia, Michigan or even Missouri got rich from real estate because investment in real estate is not exclusively from capital gain alone. In fact, if treating real estate as a long term business, more gain may come from INCOME aspect of the equition. If managed well, the rental income and its inflation-adjusted gain will eventually create great income if you are able to use cheap loan to operate a significant amount of rental properties with good cash flow. Therefore, in spite of slow growth in these lower priced states, long term investors were able to make themselves very rich. They often bought much more properties than fast growth-high-price regions, yet all under great leverage. The secret weapon for slow growth low price states is their good cash flow, better leveraging capability and eventually translating to ultra-efficiency in building INCOME. Shh…, just don’t tell these secrets to Californians or New Yorkers, let them keep the pride. Ha, ha, ha…

I did some research on Texas and Atlanta. 
 
At that time, I did some research on Atlanta and Texas.

Atlanta has lots of similarity to Texas. I dug out the real reason why Texas’ price didn’t enjoy the growth as other regions. I remember the reason is not really because of lack of growth or too abundance of land supply. The real reason is that Texas’ local planning and development office are very pro-business, granting easy permits for zoning to encourage residential home building industries. The research report by Texas AM University pointed out that this easy government policy created abundant supplies of new land and new development that always meet the supplies of new demand, therefore, even if the demand has been growing over the years due to population growth, it never have been translated into high home price. Atlanta has similar issues.