Yep. In California, there are two answers: density (no cars, remove highways, etc.) or people need to stop moving there.
It’s physics. There is no other way around this.
It’s physics. There is no other way around this.
Severely restricting cars is the only way to have viable local businesses tailored to non-car shoppers and political support for advancing non-car infrastructure (i.e. sufficient density for sufficient people to live without cars and support businesses in walking/bicycling distance).
The second a road more than 4 small car lanes across gets constructed (or 40ft), you make walking too cumbersome and risky.
i would imagine these local small shops cannot have the economy of scale that would allow a big retailer like costco to have cheap items. Which means the cost of living is going to be higher - it may or may not offset the savings of not having to pay for a car.
I could even add kids not being able to play outside freely. Could maybe even more stratified societies and less communal atmospheres due to cars allowing people to be spread out.
But also, once you have and permit cars, there's more that can be done with a car, and other characteristics tend to support them:
- Large car parks and less walkable space.
- Businesses distributed more broadly across the city or town.
- Lack of services for pedestrians (e.g., deliveries for purchases, bus service or transit, etc.)
- Greater risk for pedestrians and cyclists (more and faster traffic).
Et cetera.
So the initial imbalance grows with time.
That might look different post-Covid, but that was a recipe for an affordability disaster even without growing faster than the US as a whole.
(I think the high-asset crowd is overall at least as responsible as just the high-income crowd, though. Billionaires gentrify the millionaire neighborhoods, the millionaires displace some of the 500kinaires, etc, etc.)
Instead of having people buy up the property and jack the prices to shit, just have some notion of "Californian citizenship".
* If you were born there, you're grandfathered in by birthright.
* If you move out, we'll pay you some money or whatever.
* If you want to move in, either pay a big sum of money or convince the government you're helpful.
Then they could use the money from these sales to invest in the community, rather than it going to property speculators.
> In the exercise of its taxing power, a state may not discriminate substantially between residents and nonresidents. In Ward v. Maryland the Court set aside a state law that imposed specific taxes upon nonresidents for the privilege of selling within the state goods that were produced in other states. Also found to be incompatible with the comity clause was a Tennessee license tax, the amount of which was dependent upon whether the person taxed had his chief office within or without the state. In Travis v. Yale & Towne Mfg. Co., the Court, although sustaining the right of a state to tax income accruing within its borders to nonresidents, held the particular tax void because it denied to nonresidents exemptions which were allowed to residents. The "terms 'resident' and 'citizen' are not synonymous," wrote Justice Pitney, "... but a general taxing scheme ... if it discriminates against all non-residents, has the necessary effect of including in the discrimination those who are citizens of other States ...." Where there were no discriminations between citizens and noncitizens, a state statute taxing the business of hiring persons within the state for labor outside the state was sustained.
[0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-4/sec...
e.g. if you go don't go through immigration, you can physically live there, but you'll have to pay 105% of your income in tax
Otherwise, it sounds like a distinction without a difference. How do you imagine a "going through immigration" process that doesn't effectively produce "resident"/"non-resident" status?
Prop 13: Mission accomplished.
I think there are other potential solutions, however. Finding ways to create incentives for not speculating on property, huge taxes for vacation homes, etc. may work. Though it’s dangerous because you might get something that sounded good at the time but turned out to be a disaster like Prop 13.
By keeping people out, this will actually increase the scarcity and drive up "prices" even more. Your "big sum of money" acknowledges as much.
So this is a terrible, unfair idea. And if we were to ever implement such a scheme, the only way to make it remotely fair would to heavily heavily tax this wealth, perhaps by charging existing residents a highly monthly rent to stay, and for those that get a grandfathered-in prize, they should have to pay a large amount of capital gains.
It's a recipe for even more massive inequality.
I think it's important to remember that California's wealth comes not from internally, but from externally. By exporting the goods from labor in the state, labor that is largely the result of immigrants into the state, California is leading the way to a more environmentally friendly path, with greater wealth, for all of humanity.
Wishing to cut that off because of a few conservative "native born" Californians don't want to see apartment buildings is the height of foolishness and greed.
Water supply issues notwithstanding, which could easily change California’s intrinsic desirability.