America's Best-Weather Counties Have the Weakest Home-Price Forecasts

Humboldt County on California's redwood coast has some of the most temperate, even weather in the country. Santa Barbara is the postcard. San Diego is the one everyone names when you ask where they'd move if money were no object. All three sit near the rock bottom of our five-year home-price forecast — the 1st, 1st, and 7th percentile of every county we score.

That isn't a fluke of three cherry-picked coastlines. Run the whole country and the pattern is remarkably orderly: the nicer a county's natural setting, the lower its forecast for home-price growth. It's one of the cleanest trade-offs in the entire dataset, and it cuts directly against the instinct that the best places to live should also be the best places to own.

First, what the score actually measures

The Boom Town Index isn't a livability ranking, a "best places to live" list, or a quality-of-life grade. It's one narrow thing: a machine-learning forecast of how much a county's home prices are likely to rise over the next five years relative to the national market, expressed as a 0–100 percentile. A score of 90 means the model expects that county to outpace most of the country on price growth. A score of 10 means it expects the county to lag.

So read what follows carefully. A low score is not a verdict that a place is bad, unsafe, or a mistake to move to. It's a statement about price headroom — how much room the model thinks values have left to run — and nothing else.

And what "best weather" means here

We're borrowing an actual government yardstick: the USDA Natural Amenities Scale, which scores every county in the lower 48 on six physical traits people tend to prefer — warm winters, plenty of winter sun, mild summers, low summer humidity, varied topography, and access to water. The six pieces get standardized and summed, so the scale runs from roughly −6 (think flat, gray, humid) up past +11 (think coastal California).

One honest caveat up front: because the index rewards winter sun and low humidity, a few arid Western counties score high without matching anyone's mental image of "perfect weather." A sunny, bone-dry desert basin can out-score a green, drizzly one. Keep that in mind when a name on the list surprises you — the scale is measuring nature's raw amenities, not your personal comfort.

The gradient

Sort all 991 scored counties into five amenity bands and the average forecast falls in a straight line as the scenery improves:

The best-scenery counties land around the 21st percentile of forecast growth, on average. The worst-scenery counties land around the 61st — roughly three times higher. In raw terms the model still expects prices to rise everywhere; it just expects the plain, humid, flat places to rise about ten percentage points more over five years than the gorgeous ones.

Why nice places forecast slower growth

The model doesn't dock a county points for being pretty. Amenities are just one of about twenty-odd ingredients it weighs — alongside the local price-to-rent ratio, job and wage trends, building permits, and how cheap or expensive homes already are. The inverse pattern is something the model discovers in the data, not a rule anyone wrote into it.

The most plausible reading is the boring one: the best places are already priced like it. Decades of people wanting to live somewhere beautiful have long since been capitalized into the price tag. Coastal California is the cleanest example — Humboldt, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, and San Diego all pair top-tier amenities with forecasts in the single digits to low teens, because there's little fair-value gap left to close. We made the same argument the other direction in our piece on the housing P/E ratio: when a market is expensive relative to its rents, the model leans cautious on future growth.

The cheap, plain places get the opposite read. Low prices relative to local incomes historically leave more room to drift up toward fair value — the same "catch-up" dynamic that drives most of the model's affordable favorites. Call it the value-investor's view of geography: the bargains aren't where everyone already wants to be.

The flip side: the cold, flat winners

If the best weather sits at the bottom, who's at the top? Overwhelmingly the Great Lakes and the older industrial Midwest. Among the lowest-amenity counties that still earn a top-quartile forecast, Ohio leads with 17, Michigan has 13, Indiana 10, with Wisconsin and Illinois close behind. Gray winters, flat horizons, cheap houses — and, by this model, the most price headroom in the country.

That rhymes with something we've found before. When we looked for the safest, most affordable places with a strong forecast, the winners clustered in the exact same upper-Midwest belt. And it's the engine behind the cost-of-living arbitrage math that makes a move from an expensive metro pencil out. Beautiful and booming rarely travel together; affordable and booming travel together constantly.

The 11 places that beat the trade-off

Because the relationship is a tendency and not a law, some counties manage both — genuinely high natural amenities and a strong forecast. Set the bar at an above-average amenity score (3 or higher) and a top-30% forecast (BTI 70+), and exactly eleven counties clear it:

Notice the geography. This is a Western list — Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, the California interior — plus the Florida Keys and one slice of upstate South Carolina near Lake Hartwell. And it's exactly where the amenity-scale caveat bites: Imperial County and the New Mexico entries score high on winter sun and low humidity, which is to say they're warm and dry, not lush. What they share underneath is the rare combination of real natural draw and prices that haven't fully caught up yet — many of them satellite counties an hour or two out from a pricier hub, where the desirability is bleeding outward faster than the price has. They're the closest the data comes to having it both ways; you can pull each one up in the most-undervalued-housing ranking to see the valuation gap for yourself.

What this does — and doesn't — mean for a move

So don't read this as "don't move somewhere nice." If you want mild winters and an ocean within reach, that's a perfectly good reason to buy in San Diego, and no county score should talk you out of a life you actually want. The honest takeaway is narrower: you are usually paying for the weather twice — once in a higher price to get in, and again in slower expected appreciation after. If raw price growth is what you're optimizing for, the model keeps pointing at the places with the worst Januarys. If you want a bit of both, the eleven names above are where to start looking.

FAQ

Does a low Boom Town Index score mean a place is a bad place to live?

No. The score only forecasts five-year home-price growth relative to the national market. It says nothing about safety, schools, jobs, or whether you'd enjoy living there. Plenty of low-scoring counties are wonderful places that are simply already expensive, which leaves the model expecting less future price growth.

Are the best-weather counties going to lose value?

The model doesn't predict that. It still projects positive appreciation for most high-amenity counties — just less of it than for cheaper, plainer places. "Weakest forecast" here means smallest expected gain, not a decline.

Why do desert counties show up as high-amenity?

The USDA Natural Amenities Scale rewards winter sun and low summer humidity, so warm, dry places score well even though many people wouldn't call a desert "nice weather." It's measuring physical traits, not personal taste.

Where can I see the underlying lists?

The best-natural-amenities and most-undervalued-housing rankings cover every qualifying county, and each county's own page shows its amenity score and five-year forecast side by side.