I’m building a house in the middle of nowhere near SF. Costs for the house itself are trending well under $400/sqft (would be closer to $300 pre-
tarrifs; maybe it’ll drop a bit).
Once you add in questionable California regulations, the price jumps up to about $$750-800 per square foot. (None of this extra money is in the house itself; it is in the surrounding site.)
I think existing homeowners have been voting through “wouldn’t it be nice if everybody else paid for X, even though I would never do that myself” NIMBY regulations which further exasperates the housing shortage.
Two concrete examples:
In my neighborhood, accessory dwelling units (ADU’s) are capped at 1200 sq ft, but primary homes are capped at 6000 sq ft. There are no colleges nearby, and per TFA, only 50,000 houses under 1400 sq ft were built next year. The ADU is too small to be rented to a family. It is only for au pairs, inlaws and airbnb. The stated purpose of the ADU rule is to increase housing supply. Heh. If this was for adding housing stock, the rule would be “two houses, not to exceed 7200 sq ft”.
We are being forced to upgrade our driveway to the point where runoff and landslides may be an issue (the existing driveway is adequate for heavy construction equipment). We will probably need to add retaining walls, and maybe an underground cistern to mitigate the environmental impact of the driveway.