CA's local governments have basically reached crippling levels of stupidity. I live in Mountain View, the home town of Google, but every city around here has made building so difficult, that it barely happens. What we do build are expansive planned "communities", where a developer managed to navigate the web of red tape and got it approved, and the amount of red tape involved is so huge that it's not worth trying to build small developments, like duplexes or triplexes, which would help a lot here!

To give you some concrete examples; in Mountain View, adding a new unit of housing requires about $80k in impact fees and permit fees from the city, and the permits require bending over backward, since they're sometimes self conflicting. We've now banned natural gas, so homes have to be electric. The only way to heat electrically efficiently is heat pumps, but those are affected by noise ordinances, so it's tricky to place them. Solar panels are mandatory, but you need to pay for a permit to install them. Electric car chargers are mandatory. The fire code, city code, and state building codes conflict at times, so you sometimes have the fire inspection, then change stuff around for the city inspector, etc.

Everybody knows how broken it is, so everyone cheats, and inspectors sign off on temporary kludges, knowing full well they'll be changed right after inspection, but the i's must be dotted, and the t's must be crossed. But hey, "we're" doing something!

Sheesh. I wish tar and feathering of politicians made a return to modern political discourse.