CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2015, 2014 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“HOUSING NOW A HUGE, UNHERALDED STATE CRISIS”
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2015, 2014 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“HOUSING NOW A HUGE, UNHERALDED STATE CRISIS”
In the Los Angeles area, fewer than
one in four households headed by persons in their 20s or early 30s – known
demographically as “millennials” – can afford to buy the median-priced home,
which now goes for just over $500,000.
Overall, just 34 percent of households
in the L.A. metropolitan area can afford that same home. Which means that in
the housing department, it only helps a little to be older and more
established in a career.
Things are even more restricted in the
San Francisco Bay area, where the median-priced home costs about 8 percent more
than around Los Angeles. Just 14 percent of all households in the city itself
can afford the median-priced San Francisco home, which runs even higher than
the regional median. Affordability barely rises in Marin County,
where a mere 15 percent of households can afford a median-priced home.
Things
aren’t much looser in Sonoma, San Diego, Orange, Contra Costa, Santa Clara,
Alameda, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Napa counties.
In the larger regions of Northern and
Southern California, things loosen up as you get farther from the coast. In the
Inland Empire region of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, 47 percent of
households can buy the median priced home if they’d like, while half can in
Solano County.
The Central Valley is about the only
large part of California where housing is reasonably affordable, with 56
percent able to buy the median-priced home in Madera and Tulare Counties, 49
percent in Sacramento County and 64 percent in Kings County.
By comparison, the national average is
57 percent affordability.
If that’s not a crisis, it’s hard to
see what qualifies. But this crisis can’t be photographed as easily as a
half-empty reservoir, so it’s tough to dramatize the situation.
And yet, if you’re a 28-year-old father
who would like to live and work in the cooler, breezier climes near
California’s coast, you can pretty much forget it unless you’re a computer
programmer, lawyer, doctor or in another high-salaried job. Even young
professionals pulling down salaries approaching $200,000 a year often can’t afford
to buy in places like San Francisco, coastal Orange County or the West Side of
Los Angeles.
In part, the high pay of workers in
high-tech companies drives this crisis, which for many is much more serious
than the ongoing drought. There’s no sense worrying about cutting the watering
time on your lawn if you can’t afford to own one.
The Western Los Angeles County scene
is among the most dramatic. There, realtors report large numbers of home sales
now see straight cash payments. This in an area where the typical three-bedroom
house goes for more than $1 million.
“You’ll see scruffy-looking
20-somethings in t-shirts and jeans or cutoffs walk up and plunk down well over
a million,” said
one prominent
realtor.
This happens because of high salaries
offered to creative and highly-skilled employees of companies like Google,
Yahoo, YouTube, EA Sports, Twitter, Snapchat, Hulu, TrueCar, Edmunds.com and
many more with strong presences in the so-called Silicon Beach area. They drove
the price of one three-bedroom house that sold for $46,000 in 1973 to more than
$1.8 million last month.
Rents in the most desired areas have
risen comparably, to the point where a two-bedroom apartment in much of both
Los Angeles and San Francisco now goes for upwards of $3,500 per month, or more
than $40,000 a year.
One obvious solution might be more
housing, which ordinarily could drive prices down. But with thousands of new
units under construction and even more on the drawing board in the Playa Vista
planned community north of the Los Angeles airport, prices are rising, not
dropping.
Meanwhile, slow-growth advocates legitimately
concerned about what more housing might do to already gridlocked traffic want
housing growth to stop, and never mind affordability.
The result is likely to be very
slow growth in a state whose population increase last year amounted to
just over 1 percent – far below the influxes so common in California’s
high-growth 20th Century.
So the state will likely lose seats in
Congress after the next Census to states like Texas, Arizona and Nevada, where
housing is both cheaper and more available.
Mother Nature might eventually solve
the drought crisis, but it’s hard to see what might solve the housing
situation, fast becoming a frustrating catastrophe for many.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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ReplyDeleteLet's just hope for a better future
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