How California Became America’s Housing Market Nightmare
Noah Buhayar and Christopher Cannon
November 6, 2019
Bloomberg
Quote:
California, the land of golden dreams, has become America’s worst housing nightmare. Recent wildfires have only heightened the stakes for a state that can’t seem to build enough new homes.
The median price for a house now tops $600,000, more than twice the national level. The state has four of the country’s five most expensive residential markets—Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Orange County and San Diego. (Los Angeles is seventh.) The poverty rate, when adjusted for the cost of living, is the worst in the nation. California accounts for 12% of the U.S. population, but a quarter of its homeless population.
How did we get here? Simply put, bad government—from outdated zoning laws to a 40-year-old tax provision that benefits long-time homeowners at the expense of everyone else—has created a severe shortage of houses. While decades in the making, California’s slow-moving disaster has reached a critical point for state officials, businesses and the millions who are straining to live there.
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Bloomberg
Some take aways:
1] CA has the highest poverty rate when adjusted for cost of living.
2] CA needs 3.5 million new homes, right now.
3] Cost Burden: CA has the highest share of households spending more than 30% of their income on housing.
4] CA has held the second highest home prices for decades [only behind Hawaii, for obvious reasons]
5] The cost burden hits all income brackets.
6] Job growth exceeds the growth of the housing supply. The Bay Area saw 5.4 new jobs for every unit of housing it built between 2011 and 2017.