California housing discussions are common here. Plenty has been said about it in yesterday's Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20527867

If you want a simple answer, carapace's comment stood out to me:

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It's because we're hella young out here. Relative to the East Coast anyway (I mean, London has Roman ruins...) Do an image search for old timey SF and you'll see: the Sunset was sand dunes until about last Tuesday, etc. Dudes used to pan for gold out by Lake Merced.

Also, this was the weirdo town. Bohemia on the Bay. Serious folk didn't really come here to be serious and sane. The old line was, "All the crazy people move to California, and all the crazy people in California move to San Francisco." To which residents add, "And all the people too crazy for San Francisco move to Berkeley."

So yeah, you've got a young town full of nuts and flakes that no one really paid much attention to until the last ~50 years or so, whadda ya expect, eh?

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Before Web 2.0, only the weird Ivy League graduates would consider moving out to the Bay Area. Now the secret's out and everyone wants to move here.

> I mean, London has Roman ruins...

Wait until you hear what Rome has!

NIMBYism, and NIMBYism, respectively.

Simple, Americans want large single family homes and california cities cannot sprawl in all directions due to water and mountains.

I personally think that a lot of it is because, other than preventing all development there is no way to insure that the building next to your house won't be some soulless, concrete eyesore or something else that lowers property value.

I'd like to see less efforts to demonize NIMBYism and more efforts to eliminate the factors that make NIMBYism necessary.

>> I personally think that a lot of it is because, other than preventing all development there is no way to insure that the building next to your house won't be some soulless, concrete eyesore or something else that lowers property value.

This is the definition of NIMBYism.

Primus, the people with the 20 million dollar Malibu mansions don't want their view spoiled by a 20 story affordable housing tower. So they use ecological impact studies and similar tools to enforce an impenetrable NIMBY shield.

Secondus, the people with the 20 million dollar Malibu mansions are the ones who pay for the politicians' campaigns.

my dude why're you talking in latin this ain't pompeii