California Wakes Up to Housing Cataclysm

Stifling building restrictions in one of America’s most progressive states have choked off access to housing for people of modest means, making homeownership the preserve of the state’s corporate elite even as low-income people are forced into homelessness or back-breaking commutes. The New York Times reports:

A full-fledged housing crisis has gripped California, marked by a severe lack of affordable homes and apartments for middle-class families. The median cost of a home here is now a staggering $500,000, twice the national cost. Homelessness is surging across the state. […]

The extreme rise in housing costs has emerged as a threat to the state’s future economy and its quality of life. It has pushed the debate over housing to the center of state and local politics, fueling a resurgent rent control movement and the growth of neighborhood “Yes in My Back Yard” organizations, battling long-established neighborhood groups and local elected officials as they demand an end to strict zoning and planning regulations.

Now here in Sacramento, lawmakers are considering extraordinary legislation to, in effect, crack down on communities that have, in their view, systematically delayed or derailed housing construction proposals, often at the behest of local neighborhood groups.

Wealthy communities in the superheated economic zones of California—the Bay Area and parts of Los Angeles—have successfully managed to block necessary construction for decades, usually using progressive appeals to anti-developer and pro-environmentalist sentiment. But the end result is merely to entrench power in some of the most privileged areas of the country, driving up home equity for the well-off while blocking middle-class families from moving in.

California’s surging living costs have also changed the political character of the state, heightening inequality and probably making it more liberal as the white working class left for cheaper states elsewhere in the Southwest. The problem has perpetuated itself because as people in the middle left for greener pastures, the constituency for affordable housing got smaller. Now things have reached a boiling point.

It’s good to see that Sacramento is taking this urgent problem seriously. Other big urbanized states should take note, so that they can head off a similar crisis before it hits.

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