I really don’t understand why the California government doesn’t just build luxury condos at a large scale for profit. The state will get revenue and lower housing costs overall.
In particular, Gulf states have virtually unlimited money, which means that it doesn't matter whether a new construction costs $400k or $800k or what.
It's very rare to find state-owned companies which main goal is to provide service to the citizens and they turn a profit without some form of government subsidies along the way. Let me ask - if you think there is huge market for new construction and it's easy to make profit, why don't you start a construction company?
The only reason why I was able to get it done as a random person was because I used a non-commercial loophole to not have to get the inspections that are used as hostile clamp on disfavored competition, and the utility companies that could have charged me a gazillion dollars saw that I was just a guy with a family and took pity on my situation (they are used to dealing with large commercial developers) and gave me the easiest out at every opportunity.
If you are a favored developer you can get things done as easily and almost as cheaply as I did and make vast profits. If not you are fucked and you barely break even because either government workers, or government franchised utility monopolies fuck you at every turn. I lost count of how many times I basically saved $20k-$30k because someone decided not to fuck me that day over some inane detail that in the end doesn't actually make any meaningful difference (the only time I got unlucky -- a utility worker made me redo a survey which cost thousands and then LOLed later that I never needed it, eventually it turned out this person was literally just making shit up which is an astonishingly common tactic when some asshole just wants to delay dealing with you. I was only able to fire this utility company because I was on the border between two monopoly lines which created an unusual point of actual competition, and the next one used a ton of creativity to get the same thing done for relatively next to nothing).
They’d like be building at 1.5 to 2 times what private does.
Paying $1 to government shills and corrupt capitalists for every $1 spent on actual housing is still a hell of a deal compared to not being able to build anything, which is the status quo in many locked up parcels. A moral standoff and resting on your principles of not funding graft sounds nice, but doesn't accomplish anything.
And then some forensic accounting happens and a paper is published citing that government built homes cost twice as much as privately built, and the program stops.
Personally I despise the idea of public housing, but once something is there, it becomes easier to develop. There has to be some way of enticing all the factions stopping housing with productive greed rather than anti-productive greed. If public built housing gets something where there was nothing until the first paper gets published or whatever, maybe it's worth doing a deal with the devil.