Totally agree with the thrust of the article, but...
"In answer, all I can say is that more people choose to live there than in any other state."
Uh, you know we're suffering a population decline, right? Which is basically entirely about our crummy housing policy. Lower-income residents are moving out, and being replaced by higher-income people in smaller numbers. Average household size (as in number of people) is shrinking, while average dwelling unit size is rising. The cost of the services consumed by the upper middle class keeps rising because the people who deliver those services have to commute in from three hours away, and there are just fewer of them over time willing to do it.
Fundamentally this is all about the jobs-housing balance. My own county, San Mateo, has added roughly 10-12 jobs, for each new housing unit, year after year, for _decades_.
This goes back to your pretty bad take a few weeks back on housing supply. I would again urge you to go talk to some experts on the topic of housing in California. Call up the Terner Center at UC Berkeley, or talk to Chris Elmendorf at UC Davis or Paavo Monkkonen and UCLA.
We need to re-legalize construction of smaller dwellings, everywhere, so that folks who sling coffee, clean the streets, and so on, can live side by side with doctors and lawyers and engineers, and send their kids to the same schools. We've become economically segregated.
To be fair to California, pretty much _all_ of America has terrible housing policies. Ours are particularly bad both in terms of creating more veto points, and the spectacular awfulness of Prop 13 -- see https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/ -- but nowhere in the US is _good_. For an actually-good housing policy regime, you'd want to look at Japan. But plenty of places are at least changing faster than we are. Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, and Colorado are all good examples of places where Dem administrations are pushing hard to fix the housing crisis. CA has passed lots of individual bills, but they're all very incremental, and so far haven't moved the needle nearly enough to address the accumulated deficit of _millions_ of units we built up since the down-zoning wave of the '60s-'70s. Some of the Republicans in Montana are also taking the problem seriously. I'm sure I disagree with Greg Gianforte about most stuff, but he seems pretty good on housing.
Totally agree with the thrust of the article, but...
"In answer, all I can say is that more people choose to live there than in any other state."
Uh, you know we're suffering a population decline, right? Which is basically entirely about our crummy housing policy. Lower-income residents are moving out, and being replaced by higher-income people in smaller numbers. Average household size (as in number of people) is shrinking, while average dwelling unit size is rising. The cost of the services consumed by the upper middle class keeps rising because the people who deliver those services have to commute in from three hours away, and there are just fewer of them over time willing to do it.
The essence of "gentrification" is that there isn't nice new housing for rich people to occupy, so instead they displace poor people: https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/understand-citys-pace-gentrification-look-its-housing-supply
Fundamentally this is all about the jobs-housing balance. My own county, San Mateo, has added roughly 10-12 jobs, for each new housing unit, year after year, for _decades_.
This goes back to your pretty bad take a few weeks back on housing supply. I would again urge you to go talk to some experts on the topic of housing in California. Call up the Terner Center at UC Berkeley, or talk to Chris Elmendorf at UC Davis or Paavo Monkkonen and UCLA.
We need to re-legalize construction of smaller dwellings, everywhere, so that folks who sling coffee, clean the streets, and so on, can live side by side with doctors and lawyers and engineers, and send their kids to the same schools. We've become economically segregated.
Timely new research: https://www.ppic.org/blog/whos-leaving-california-and-whos-moving-in/
To be fair to California, pretty much _all_ of America has terrible housing policies. Ours are particularly bad both in terms of creating more veto points, and the spectacular awfulness of Prop 13 -- see https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/ -- but nowhere in the US is _good_. For an actually-good housing policy regime, you'd want to look at Japan. But plenty of places are at least changing faster than we are. Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, and Colorado are all good examples of places where Dem administrations are pushing hard to fix the housing crisis. CA has passed lots of individual bills, but they're all very incremental, and so far haven't moved the needle nearly enough to address the accumulated deficit of _millions_ of units we built up since the down-zoning wave of the '60s-'70s. Some of the Republicans in Montana are also taking the problem seriously. I'm sure I disagree with Greg Gianforte about most stuff, but he seems pretty good on housing.