Home prices keep rising to shocking levels around the Bay Area, while rents remain out of sight. Now, state lawmakers in Sacramento are responding with a torrent of proposals.
Legislators have introduced about 130 bills to address what has become a statewide housing crisis. The sheer quantity “is unprecedented,” said Jason Rhine, legislative representative for the League of California Cities.
“I don’t think anyone can recall a time when we’ve had this many bills on housing — or on any one thing, period,” he said.
The legislative avalanche — bills to mitigate affordability concerns, boost housing production and protect tenants — demonstrates that the “crisis has reached its head,” said Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco).
“In the Bay Area in recent years, we’ve had the highest home prices, the highest rents and the highest eviction rates in the country. But now … every pocket of California is experiencing this crisis,” he said.
Seems they focused on increasing supply, which is the right approach. But we landlords are the easiest of targets. I won’t be surprised if they tightened the rent control crap to appease the pitchforks.
Can they really increase supply when local governments have to approve zoning and building plans? It seems a lot of it is centered on requiring projects to have more affordable units. We all know that leads to less construction, since the builder has to charge even higher prices on market rate units just to break even.
“The state Department of Housing and Community Development calculates that California on average built 80,000 homes annually over the last decade – but needed to build 180,000 each year to keep pace with demand.”
They aren’t going to quickly fix this. If the need stays the same at 180K/yr, then they’d have to start building 280k/yr to close the gap over 10 years. That’d be a 3.5x increase in construction. I bet there’s not even enough construction workers in CA to support that.
They want to pass protection so illegals can’t be evicted for being illegal. If they really want to lower housing costs for citizens, then they should kick out all the illegals. It’d create a bunch of vacancy lowering rents and housing prices.
CA has the highest poverty rate in the country. Clearly, everyone isn’t sharing in the prosperity despite all the policies that are designed to create more equal income outcomes.
If prices are going sideways and incomes are increasing, then affordability will improve over time.
“Homeownership, which collapsed during the housing crash a decade ago, is just off bottom, and foundering.”
Statements like that always worry me. We learned what happens when you get rid of lending standards to increase home ownership. Also, not everyone wants to be a home owner. They don’t state what home ownership rate they think is acceptable or the goal. It’s just an ignorant statement to make us think we need to do something.