It’s been 14 years since the Census Bureau began issuing reports on poverty that factored in the cost of living. Ever since, it’s been clear that California — not Mississippi or West Virginia — is the epicenter of American poverty, with the highest percentage of households living paycheck to paycheck. This led Gov. Jerry Brown to say in 2015 that bringing down the cost of housing should be an urgent state priority. Since then, dozens and dozens of “affordable housing” bills have been enacted.
A decade later, these laws have provided new funding for extraordinarily expensive subsidized government housing, made it easier in some cities for “granny flats” and similar additions to be built, and eased some obstacles to approvals for housing projects. But overall, they have not come close to generating enough new units to reduce high housing costs.
This is made plain by new state housing data. It shows San Diego County, Orange County and Santa Barbara County are on track to soon Marin, San Mateo, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties in the Bay Area as places where an individual earning $100,000 will qualify for programs helping “low income” residents with the cost of housing.
This is a grim milestone. It’s hard to imagine a better example to illustrate the point made by veteran journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their recent book “Abundance”: Many of their fellow progressives don’t care nearly enough about embracing policy agendas likely to broadly improve the lives of Americans.
This is true even though the formula for adding housing stock is on display in many states, including “purple” ones with millions of Democrats. That formula starts with eliminating most of the laws that give NIMBYs, greens and construction unions de facto veto power over many projects. It goes on to making land costs much cheaper by rezoning many commercial and agricultural parcels. It continues with embracing the modular housing revolution that has yet to truly arrive in the U.S. even though it’s led to hundreds of thousands of inexpensive, sturdy units being quickly added elsewhere, most notably in Sweden — where 45% of new homes are built offsite — and Japan.
The contrast with California couldn’t be more telling. Here, even alleged technocrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom somehow still think rent control — camouflage that does nothing to help with housing shortages — is constructive. Until fresher thinking finally takes hold, mass poverty will remain a defining fact of life across the Golden State.
