California hasn't exactly been anti-growth overall. Los Angeles is a worldwide poster-child for unrestrained sprawl. The state not only allowed it to grow, but built a ton of freeways, making LA the world's first real car city. The Bay Area has not only interstates and state freeways, but county freeways, and stretches 75 miles across, with sprawl from Walnut Creek to Gilroy. And yet it's still expensive. Meanwhile, Portland has a strictly enforced Urban Growth Boundary, and it's cheap.
I suppose it's possible that in the 21st century, someone will show that there's an alternative possibility: a giant metropolis that, through less regulation, has cheap housing. Maybe Austin will become the utopia with 20 million people and $600 rents? We'll see...
Yes. Zoning restricts what can be built in the city, so less housing is built than the market demands. Skyscrapers everywhere probably wouldn't be too pleasant, so there's a place for regulation, but if you want prices to go down, loosening regulations will help.
> Meanwhile, Portland has a strictly enforced Urban Growth Boundary, and it's cheap.
Portland is only cheap relative to California and a few other cities. The growth boundary is part of the cause. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, but there are costs.
http://www.kiplinger.com/tools/bestcities_sort/index.php?sor...
> California hasn't exactly been anti-growth overall. ... And yet it's still expensive.
California and most of the rest of America don't really control growth; they just force cities to grow horizontally rather than vertically. This is generally more expensive, and results in cities that are less walkable.
It's a pretty easy trend to notice on the most/least affordable lists that seem to come out periodically. If you look at this list of top 5 and bottom 5 affordable cities to buy a house, the trend is that the most affordable cities are ones nobody wants to live in (Indianapolis, Dayton, etc.), while the least affordable cities are ones lots of people want to live in (NYC, SF, Honolulu, etc.): http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/most-and-least-affordable-.... Even true within CA: it's not particularly expensive to live somewhere like Bakersfield, despite all the same minimum-wage/environmental/etc. laws applying there too.