In 1956, Charles Tiebout introduced the idea of "voting with one's feet" in his 1956 article A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures. To pull from Wikipedia's synopsis of the article "the model holds that if municipalities offered varying baskets of goods (government services) at a variety of prices (tax rates), that people with different personal valuations of these services and prices would move from one local community to another which maximizes their personal utility. Similar to how shopping and competition lead to efficiency in private good markets, this model holds that individual choices on where to live would lead to the equilibrium provision of local public goods in accordance with the tastes of residents, thereby sorting the population into optimum communities. Basically, if an individual doesn’t like the public goods provision of one town, they can move to the next town over. The model has the benefit of solving two major problems with government provision of public goods: preference revelation and preference aggregation.

Abilene is no stranger to this concept.  The best expression of "voting with one's feet" was first seen when AISD redrew the boundaries between Abilene High and Cooper.  It was seen again, to a smaller degree, when AISD redrew the junior high boundaries and closed Lincoln Middle School. It was seen when AISD shuttered elementary school campuses in favor of largers campuses - even when the City of Abilene told them their prioritized school closures would produce the greatest, negative neighborhood impact. I say to a smaller degree because, by this point, preference revelation/aggregation was in full swing and home buyers had established a beaten path from Abilene ISD to Wylie ISD.

A nameless friend who is outwardly anodyne when it comes to real estate observed "in 2023, WISD and JNCISD passed their school bonds, the proposed school bond in Merkel ISD failed, and Clyde ISD and Abilene ISD didn't make a bond proposal".  Looking ahead, he speculated what this could mean as home buyers continue to reveal their preferences with the school districts they choose.

School preference shouldn't be seen as the only issue that impacts the home market in Abilene ISD.  About 1/3 of the land in the Abilene ISD lies in the flood plain and a redraw of those maps by the Army Corp of Engineers back in 2005 didn't help matters.  This puts an additional cost on redevelopment.  Wylie ISD had open tracts of farmland for development making new home development simple; Abilene ISD was largely developed with limited undeveloped tracts.

It's known among Abilene-area realtors that Dyess AFB personnel whisper among each other that Wylie ISD is the better choice.  We look at prices in Wylie ISD and we see higher prices v. Abilene ISD.  Most tangibly, we've seen Wylie ISD grow and Abilene ISD enrollment shrink. Now there are districts like Jim Ned CISD and Clyde ISD that are on the lips of home buyers because "the schools are better".

As a broker, my question is what sells at what price and how fast.  I ask these questions because I work with home buyers that want to move from an illiquid position in a home to cash that lets them move to a new home with the least amount of hassle.  It's undeniable that schools feature largely in this question.  To this end, I've pulled together some MLS data to help frame the question (and provided an overview if you don't want to wade through all the data and graphs).

Most of the dollarized data is in current terms - this means data is unadjusted for inflation. As a result, each month's data suggests we've gained in terms of price and homeowner's have experienced a real gain in their equity.  To correct for this, I used the Case Shiller Index to adjust some figures from current (nominal or inflated figures) to constant (what economists call real or inflation-adjusted terms) to enable comparability.