California's Housing Crisis is Self-Inflicted
- jeff5971
- Apr 3
- 2 min read
New RAND Report Has the Details
We wanted to take a break from our recent series on our approach to winning campaigns to talk about an issue near and dear to our hearts, and an issue in which HexaCom Group has run and won a lot of campaigns: housing issues and housing affordability in California.
This new RAND report out today is devastating for California and more directly for the ongoing and endemic housing crisis in the formerly Golden State.
Some highlights:
California is the MOST expense state to produce housing.
It takes 22 months longer in California than Texas to bring a housing project to completion.
Impact fees average $29,000 per unit in California versus $1,000 per unit in Texas.
The high cost of housing in California, which is killing/has killed the "California Dream," is simple. Demand exceeds supply. And the problem is entirely on the supply side.
Let's also be clear what is not the problem. It is not "landlord greed" or "profiteering developers." Housing providers are the path to the solution, not the enemy.
California is millions of units short of producing the housing needed to keep up with demand, saddling residents with ridiculous housing costs.
What's worse, it's created a vicious cycle in California. Bad policies led to increases costs and lower supply. This drove up costs even more, and instead of addressing the underlying problem, policy makers sought populist "solutions" like rent control and inclusionary zoning, along with vacancy taxes, which have only further constrained supply, driving costs up further.
The damage to California’s housing markets are self-inflicted. Bad policies followed by more bad reactions to their failure. It’s time for this to change. No more false promises and declarations that "this year we mean it" from elected officials to address the housing crisis.
Let this RAND study be a wake up call to policy makers at the state and local level in California to face the music, and get serious about making it easier, faster, and less expensive to build millions of new housing units across all housing types!