Property costs are high because NIMBY blocking denser housing. Traffic is bad because housing density is too low for the population. Homelessness is bad because houses are too expensive.
Wildfires and earthquakes are the only problems not self inflicted
Massive wildfires (vs small distributed fires) are the result of the policy framework that (a) prohibits preventative controlled burns (b) requires immediate containment of any new fire. The old (more flammable) undergrowth never has a chance to burn off and free up the space for (less flammable) new generation.
As a result CA is one of the most polluting states in the nation as far as co2 emissions https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-wildfires-ca...
Trees trap carbon. When they die, trees release carbon. Unless you bury dead trees underground (e.g. as paper, furniture, etc., in deep landfills), in terms net amount of carbon capture, there's no difference between a massive forest fire, periodic controlled burns, decay, etc.
They differ in time cycles. Even a sequoia will eventually die and release its carbon back into the atmosphere.
There's this myth that forests somehow reduce carbon in the atmosphere. Left to themselves, they store carbon, but they can't capture carbon. They're carbon-neutral. If you cut them down and release the carbon, you have a one-time emission. If you plant new ones, you have a one-time carbon capture.
The only real net change to CO2 comes from:
1) Extracting dinosaur-era carbon, and releasing it.
2) How we handle our waste. Ironically, composting releases all the plant carbon eventually, while burying it underground stores some carbon away from the atmosphere.
More buildings should be constructed from wood, less from concrete, which itself causes major co2 emissions.
I believe the way it's performed elsewhere is a controlled burn after the older trees had been felled. The burn is for the undergrowth.
My age group is at the age of looking to put roots down and have children. For many of us it makes more sense to leave than to wait 10-20 years and hope things get better.
But most of you don't leave because of family who live in CA - the very people who prevent any fixes to the situation, in the first place.
Certainly just increasing density with no other controls just increases traffic congestion.
The best approach would be increasing density while decreasing reliance on personal transportation.
https://www.transformca.org/transform-blog-post/our-take-gre...
Now it’s possible (maybe) for many more people (although they’ll need larger housing units).
Fancy way to say 'car'.
Only if you don't need to go to work. Which is working wonderfully in pandemic era. I can pretty much walk anywhere I could need in terms of stores and services.
But jobs, unless you work in one of those stores or services, are of course far away, not in the middle of denser housing. Tech company campus won't be between housing rows.
My town has built tons of housing over the last two decades. Offices are still in the industrial campuses farther away and all that new housing means tons of new local traffic. Uncomfortable but true.
It used to be 2 minutes and one stoplight to get to the highway. Now it is 7 stoplights and up to 15 minutes to get to the highway (from the same house).
It would be wonderful if for every new housing block there was an adjacent office complex block, so most people can walk to work, but that's not how it goes. So in practice, yes, increased housing density just means tons new traffic to fight through.
Hopefully I can just remain work from home forever!
Transport infrastructure (roads, buses, railroads, trams), housing, everyday service infrastructure (supermarkets, medical services, restaurants, haircutters) and employment infrastructure needs to be planned holistically or you're just shifting between problems - in the case of only going for denser housing, you'll lower homelessness a bit but get traffic issues in return.
And on top of that, city planning needs to take entrenched interests into account. Often enough NIMBYist complaints are founded in real fears of exploding traffic or a loss in property value - but these can be counteracted and compensated, if one is willing to.
Dense industrial areas are hard
I'd love that too, but it's not happening. FAANG isn't building their new HQ campus into the first floor of a new apartment complex. It'll be where it'll be and we'll have to fight through ever increasing traffic to get there.
Take New York as an example. Limited land area. Lots of money. Drove up density and has a low reliance on cars and has an ok public transportation system.
Everywhere else it’s just cheap as hell to buy land and build. California is getting to the point now that some areas are expensive and density is increasing. But its also easy for people to just move somewhere else still
You could build a million homes in the middle of nowhere and you’d wind up with a million empty houses.
Even if people are saying this, what they actually do is quite different. People in CA moving out are generally moving into other metropolitan areas or smaller cities. They're not living some kind of Stardew Valley fantasy in the fields.
There's less space but you can always build up. But none of the Cali cities allow this. That's why despite California's huge population you don't see any cities with skyscrapers and traffic is so bad.
Building upwards also solves the transportation issues.
Look at places like Tokyo and Singapore in comparison to Cali coasts. They're are all space constrained but these places managed to fit 20X the people in the same space and they still don't have Cali level traffic problems
As an aside, I came across a Tokyo density map overlaid on a map of CA (Greater Tokyo Area, not just the city of Tokyo) and it would be like taking the entire population of CA and condensing it into the city of Los Angeles.
Water usage in my small, coastal, mountain constrained town has decreased even as population has increased and number of connections to the water system have increased.
Check out page two of this PDF for the statewide picture; our use statewide urban water usage is going down, from a peak in 1995, even as our population increases:
https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/...
I first became aware of this when lots of people were complaining about water use for a new apartment complex that included below-marker-rate units, as it seemed preposterous that <100 new apartments could have any significant impact, especially when the alternative is for the same people to live further out in bigger places that need more watering of lawns.
Turns out that our city's urban water use had decreased quite a bit, despite a slowly growing population, as shown on page 25 of this PDF:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20484267-2020-annual...
There's a lot of really bad and environmentally counterproductive thought from the 1970s that needs to be fact checked. People don't require a fixed amount of resources, they require a fixed amount of services, and we have gotten better and better at providing those same services with far less resources.
This is the same as the hard energy versus soft energy debate from around the same time period. We don't care about total energy available to a person, we care about the services that the energy provides. So things like greater efficiency through insulating homes, switching to more efficient lights, etc, doesn't actually result in more energy usage.
The same surprising (to some) result applies for water, apparently! Swapping out all those old, bad water fixtures, and being better about lawn watering, makes a huge impact.
Thats the issue with your approach. Supply and demand will cause housing in an area to be knocked down and replaced with denser housing. Townhouses, apartments, skyscrapers eventually.
In some places this natural replacement cycle is feircly resisted and local governments are bent to the will of incumbents.
HN leans heavily liberal but this is one place where conservative "small government" lack of regulations works better. In liberal areas local residents will co-opt the systems for making local regulations to protect their own investments. In conservative areas it's more difficult to NIMBY your way to halt development.
Self-identified liberals are more receptive to nearby apartments than self-identified conservatives.
But the bigger effect is homeowners versus those in apartments. People in apartments are far more supportive of new apartments, and homeowners are less supportive, and this effect is bigger than the political divide.
PG&E?
But instead of going there people prefer the big established cities elsewhere
I've never lived there, but I bet the east and west sides of lake Tahoe have similar quality of life, similar amenities, similar schools, but living just a few km across a border could mean you keep thousands more per year of your compensation.