CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2023 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“HOUSING
‘SOLUTIONS’ NOT WORKING”
Rarely
has California seen so concerted and unified a campaign by its elected
officials as the drive for housing density conducted by Gov. Gavin Newsom and
allied state legislators over the past five years.
All
along, as legislators passed law after law easing the path to development of
high-rise apartments and condominiums, there have been three major goals: One
is to ease a housing shortage, another is to drive down the price of housing
and a third seeks somehow to ease the obdurate problem of homelessness.
In the
eyes of state officials, these things are linked. By creating new housing and
easing the existing shortage, real estate prices and rents were supposed to
come down, thus relieving pressure on many folks having trouble paying their
rent and allowing them to avoid eviction and homelessness.
But three
new reports make it clear this is not working. The more homeless who arrive in
housing newly provided for them in many cities and counties, the higher the
number of individuals living on the streets has risen. The more folks who
migrate out of California, presumably vacating their previous homes, the more
homeless numbers rise. And the greater the supply of housing, it’s now becoming
apparent, the more it will cost to use it.
These improbable results are not
only the result of folks like Anchorage
Mayor Dave Bronson, who openly advocates sending his city’s
homeless to cities with warmer climates, like Los Angeles and San Francisco,
before the Alaskan winter hits in earnest. Bronson is transparent about this,
unlike officials in Texas and Florida who have used state money to send busload
upon busload of recently arrived immigrants to California cities.
But the number of Californians who now are
housed but unable to buy homes far exceeds the unhoused populace.
The
latest official count showed California with about 170,000 homeless on any
given night, while the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development
now estimates the housing shortage at 2.5 million units. Those government estimates
of housing need have varied over the last five years between 1.8 million and
3.5 million, but fewer than 10 percent of any of thosd amounts have been built
in any one year.
One
reason may be that folks living in single-family residences have not seized
upon the 2021 laws known as SB 9 and 10 to build either high-rise housing or
dense apartment units on existing lots. Around the state, officials report only
tepid results from those laws, which allow high-rises to be built on or near
almost all “major transportation corridors” and give virtually automatic
approval to construction of as many as six homes on almost all current
single-family lots.
For
cities that do not get new plans for dense housing approved by bureaucrats at
HCD, a 2017 law known as SB35 (or the “builder’s remedy”) denies local
governments and their constituents the right to protest almost any building
plan that includes significant amounts of “affordable housing” that would be
made available to buyers with incomes at 80 percent or below an area’s median
level.
The
UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation reports this law has so far
caused construction of 18,215 units, a drop in the bucket of what HCD claims is
needed to satisfy demand.
Meanwhile,
median home prices did not abate their rise. In Los Angeles County, prices are
now up 30 percent over the last five years, according to a Zillow survey, with
the median price just shy of $1 million. Several California cities have already
crossed the million-dollar median mark (half the homes sold go for above and
half sell for below that level), including San Jose, Santa Maria, Santa Cruz
and San Francisco. The overall California median is second highest in America,
behind only Hawaii, fueled only in part by inflation.
The
Zillow average home value index for California was $743,361 at the end of June,
about five times the level in West Virginia, the nation’s lowest at $155,773.
All
of which demonstrates the need for far more conversions of vacant office, store
and parking lot space to housing. An alternative would be to build far out into
deserts and other ex-urban areas, a tactic that could contribute to climate
change as it would force ever longer commutes for those who still work in
offices.
-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.
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