When a chip fab is announced, does local housing actually move?
A common pitch: a multi-billion-dollar semiconductor fab lands in a ZIP code and rents and home values take off. We test that claim directly. For every major U.S. fab with a documented public announce date, we line up the local Zillow home-value (ZHVI) and rent (ZORI) series against the fab's own metro and the U.S. national series — same calendar window — and measure the abnormal growth that is left after the nationwide 2020–2024 boom is differenced out.
Each statistic below is the median, across the studied fabs, of local cumulative growth minus control cumulative growth over roughly three years after the announcement. A positive number means the fab's ZIP outran its control; zero means it tracked it. The metro comparison is the cleanest test — it nets out regional housing conditions.
Read this honestly: a median home-value tilt of a couple of percentage points over three years is real but tiny. It is the same order of magnitude as the normal spread between any two ZIPs inside a metro. Rent shows no consistent fab premium at all. We can see a faint, mostly-positive lean — we cannot call it a clean, reliable fab effect.