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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Try to keep the scale in mind. Even if the state spent 100% of that revenue building housing the most optimistic production rate would be half a million dwellings per year which, while substantial, is essentially treading water and will do nothing to address the accumulated deficit from the last 40 years of under-building.

Whenever someone says "image a billion dollars" just remember that amounts to 1000-2000 small apartments at best.

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Whenever someone says "image a billion dollars" just remember that amounts to 1000-2000 small apartments at best.

A billion dollars for a thousand apartments is one million per apartment. Even in corrupt, dysfunctional California that's crazy high.

The cost should be a few hundred dollars per square foot to build, plus land cost. Anything over that is overhead California forced on itself.

And you can find houses for $500k in California right now, so clearly they can build them, but where people want?

Don't know if this will work, but Zillow found 285 properties between 475-500k built in 2022 that are houses:

https://www.zillow.com/ca/?searchQueryState=%7B%22pagination...

> clearly they can build them, but where people want?

its time for the California City Development Company to shine. It's already the 3rd largest city in the state so surely they can adequately handle the population growth with current infrastructure.

http://www.desertnews.com/article_7ffe4cb4-fa34-11eb-b387-53...

https://laist.com/news/california-city-podcast-investigation...

It is clearly not in accordance with the state’s adopted climate and energy policies to build five million houses in sprawling car-choked desert hellscapes.

It is clearly not in accordance with the state’s adopted climate and energy policies

Then they are part of the housing problem. You can't have everything - more immigration, cheaper housing, and more restrictions on building.

Apparently building much of anything isn’t in accord with their policies what with the homeless piling up.

I wonder if a state can put a “bugger off we’re full” sign on the border?

This isn't quite a million, but a current candidate for San Jose mayor, Matt Mahon, makes the point that the "housing solution" for homelessness is now costing over $100K per new unit. He has a proposal to build them for $8K / unit.

Is that realistic? I don't know, but it seems clear that any real solution has to be cheaper than what's being spent now.

Is that crazy high though? That would barely get you half a toilet in SF.

“Plus land costs” is doing a lot of work in your analysis.

You forgot the high-speed rail line to every apartment.

> Whenever someone says "image a billion dollars" just remember that amounts to 1000-2000 small apartments at best.

No, small apartments do not cost $500,000-$1,000,000 to construct in CA. In dense urban cores (whuch are very small parts of even major metro areas) they may cost that much to buy, but that’s not construction costs.

They 100% do, because local government regulation has launched the "soft costs" into the stratosphere. A developer has to count on carrying their project for a minimum of 4 years while the city considers their application, their EIR, their design review, their historical resource evaluation, etc etc etc. Even when projects are city-funded, the per-unit costs are generally 600k-1m per unit. See: Berkeley Way/Hope Center, 189 total units on city-donated land for $120 million. See: https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2022-06-20/ca...

> They 100% do, because local government regulation has launched the "soft costs" into the stratosphere.

Even if that was true, it would be irrelevant in this context, since we are talking about the cost of a hypothetical program that would be enacted through State law, not private action by developers. And State law can (as demonstrated by things like the builders remedy) suspend or otherwise bypass local administrative barriers.

The whole article is about how the bypass is imperfect.

This subthread, not the article, is about a proposal that the State use its power and funds to directly build housing, and, were it to choose to do so, it could alter the power of subordinate jurisdictions to impede that in any way it chose. So, current local administratively imposed costs are not, legitimately, part of the building cost the state would necessarily face in such a hypothetical, only actual construction costs or federally-imposed administrative costs.

Hypothetically, the state can dissolve any city with a simple majority vote in the legislature, clearing the decks of any irritating "lead agencies" with bothersome CEQA conclusions. But realistically, the state has only ever dissolved one entity involuntarily.

Short of dissolution the state cannot simply ignore local agencies, as we see with UC vs. Berkeley.

> Short of dissolution the state cannot simply ignore local agencies

No, short of dissolution, it can also adopt any restriction on or state immunity from local authority it wants. (There are some resrictions that might take a ballot measure rather than just the legislature, but since the hypothetical didn’t limit the methods by which the proposed program would be adopted, that is immaterial.)

> UC vs. Berkeley.

UC, while established by the State, is not coextensive with it and does not independently exercise the full powers of the State.

I appreciate both your willingness to follow the replies, and your openness to practical solution that so few seem to consider. This isn't a federal system where the cities have real powers. All the power in our state lies with the state, but the state government so seldom exercises it.

Imagine if you spent that billion dollars on improving the situation around housing to add incentive for affordable housing projects, purpose-built rental, and multi-tenant dwellings, so that the path of least resistance (and most profit) would be to build the housing that the community needs.

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