High housing costs may be California's biggest problem
latimes.com
latimes.com
There are very few jobs for a convicted felon with a mental illness, and trimming weed was the one way to pay the bills. That's now dried up. On an individual level, just don't be a convicted felon and don't catch a mental illness. Easy, right? Society includes all of us and they need jobs to be paid so they can buy food.
I don't know if UBI is the answer, but California's underground economy has this massive hole in it due to legalization that's gone unnoticed and we're in line for a big cultural shift because of that.
we missed a decade of low interest rates to build, even in places with lax zoning regulations. obviously the zoning regulations are a problem and need to change, but that didn't keep developers from underbuilding in areas with lax zoning during the low interest rate environment. there's no fucking way the free market will solve this now that the cost to borrow + costs of materials + labor etc are so high (because that just makes the cost of housing higher). it will take both government investment and private enterprise.
Government permitting is now a huge percentage of the cost of building a house in many US metros. CA is maybe the worst offender.
It's not just NIMBY. State and local governments have gotten exceedingly greedy over the past several years.
I’m currently building something in a much more lax area, but even here, the few parts that require permits/inspection are by far the largest hurdles, because they impose a rigid sequential order of operations that have to happen before I can move on, and require a licensed master tradesman to pull the permit, whereas most other things can generally proceed as materials/equipment/people become available.
On your point about local government getting greedy, I went to the state of the county address in our area recently, and the county executive gave a long laundry list of how many millions he was splashing out to x and y, to fanfare for each spending figure, as if the goal was to spend more, rather than get the maximal impact for the dollars. I guess most of the audience were people from those departments receiving the additional money, but as a non-government worker, it was a bit sickening.
I don't see how a contractor could be efficient at all with this setup - I'm assuming they're better at getting things through building and planning, but even if it only took them a couple weeks, they'd need a pretty big pipeline to keep busy, to compensate for all the stalls.
zoning regulations and entitlements are only one piece of the puzzle. a significant piece, for sure.
The ADU legislation is a step in the right direction.
this data point groups together disparate zoning areas like san francisco and minneapolis so it's hard to parse out where exactly it all happened: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
this is not my expertise, just something i'm interested in and learned about when i worked on a big project about california's housing. curious to learn more from folks here/find ways i'm wrong.
that stat you grabbed doesn't exist in a vacuum. that stat matches the same time as the white flight demographic shifts that happened in all metro areas in the south.
now do huntsville.
[https://www.redfin.com/state/California/housing-market]
When the line keeps going up and to the right, everyone builds that into their spreadsheets and times are good.
When the line starts going down and to the right, they hope it’s temporary. But after awhile, they need to update their spreadsheets - and then times are bad.
As long as the fed keeps rates high, the crash is inevitable. I give it another year or two.
Bankruptcies are likely to be incredibly painful.
The market also does seem strangely stubborn to correct.
We’ll see when things change, but for now they’re not freeing up cash. And the housing market in particular’s momentum has been steadily changing.
All that's necessary is for the government to get out of the way. i.e. dramatically reduce zoning and permitting requirements.
Remember there's a limit to how many of those can be sold. Once you've sold them all they'll build sometime else
But only if the government lets.
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...
"The recent industrial development of the City of Cleveland, following the railroad lines, has already reached the Village and to some extent extends over into it. In its obvious course, this industrial expansion will soon absorb the area in the Village for industrial enterprises. It is in restraint of this prospect that the ordinance seeks to operate. In effect it erects a dam to hold back the flood of industrial development and thus to preserve a rural character in portions of the Village which, under the operation of natural economic laws, would be devoted most profitably to industrial undertakings. This, the evidence shows, destroys value without compensation to the owners of lands who have acquired and are holding them for industrial uses."
"...the ordinance of its own force operates greatly to reduce the value of appellee's lands and destroy their marketability for industrial, commercial and residential uses; and the attack is directed, not against any specific provision or provisions, but against the ordinance as an entirety."
Congress really can’t (the existing federal judiciary would be more likely to find any federal legislative attempt to limit local zoning a violation of the 10th Amendment than to give it effect); SCOTUS could, either directly or collaterally, but it seems unlikely (for one thing, to even make it to the merits you’d probably need someone who took ownership when the property wasn’t subject to zoning restrictions and where a claim wouldn’t be time-barred given the length of time since the zoning rule was enacted; its not 1922 anymore, and the problem isn’t new zoning.)
Congress could propose an amendment to overturn it – or to more directly limit zoning – but it would take a supermajority of states to sign on to give it effect, and if you had that, well, you’d probably have a supermajority of states limiting zoning without federal intervention, too.