I wonder if there are structural reasons why California's housing construction is lower than Texas, rather than intentional punching-down.

Not sure if you intended the pun, but the biggest structural reason is not engineering but procedural. The permitting, environmental processes in CA are often onerous making new construction much more expensive. That means the rents must be higher to break even, which in turn means new apartments go up where the incomes support those higher rents. Paradoxicall places where incomes are high also tend to have the most onerous permitting.

NIMBY is by far the main problem CA has. The permitting process includes incredible amounts of public feedback, which makes it difficult to build a chemical plant and a middle school next to one another, but also makes it impossible to rezone or densify neighbourhoods.

>The permitting, environmental processes in CA are often onerous making new construction much more expensive

Can you give an example of this?

Building a toilet cost $1.7m in SF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet

That's just one specific toilet with unqiue requirements. How is this evidence?

There's basically no zoning whatsoever in much of Texas. That's how you get industrial explosions like the 2020 industrial explosion right up against a residential neighborhood in Houston.

California's largely the other extreme. Even large parts of San Francisco are zoned for single family housing (or maybe duplex if you're lucky). So already things like larger apartment buildings or mixed-use buildings that can be more profitable are out. CEQA allows for a lot of public feedback which is in turn allowed to grind projects to a halt.

For example there's undeveloped land in Brisbane, just south of San Francisco. It's near a freeway (CA-101) and commuter rail (Caltrain). The city of Brisbane's been (successfully) trying to block any development that would include residential buildings — they want office jobs not new residents. I don't know enough about other cities to make relative comparisons, but again in SF the department in charge of permitting (DBI) has seen a number of bribery and conflict-of-interest charges recently. Look at any big project in California really. Corruption at the city/county level may differ but the process by which anyone can gum up the works is a state mandated one.

It’s inaccurate to say that there’s “basically no zoning whatsoever in much of Texas”. In Texas, zoning is up to the individual cities. Houston is notorious for having a lack of zoning laws, but all of the other major cities like Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, San Antonio all have very complex zoning laws.

> I wonder if there are structural reasons why California's housing construction is lower than Texas

Prop. 13 prevents localities from meaningfully taxing property values, capping nominal rates at lower than the national average effective rates and reducing effective rates even further by limiting assessment increases to much less than the usual value increase in between transfers.

This forces localities to rely on sales and income taxes (both local and redirected shares of state taxes, both directly and as allocations of state funding for particular functions), which are much more volatiles, and do not reward attracting moderate income residents who pay low income tax rates and for whom housing and sales tax exempt basics are a much larger share of their spending.

Three of the major Texas cities (Dallas, Austin, San Antonio) have far more room for growth based on geography they simply aren’t next to the ocean etc. This has significant impact on how infrastructure can be added and the availability of land for housing. California also has significantly increased construction costs dealing with earthquakes, and water scarcity issues.

But that’s a long way from explaining everything going on, government regulations have a real impact.

Texas is much more liberal in what you can do, which means that the market functions better. CA has much more - well meant - requirements and regulations.

  > well meant 

I dispute this. Parking requirements and stopping multistorey housing have no environmental justification.

The individuals behind these regulations (anti-housing activists like Marc Andreessen and the local NIMBY politicians) are well educated and wealthy. They know what they're doing.

Do you have evidence of this?

California has significantly stronger NIMBY forces than Texas.

Desirable real estate is also much more constrained by geography than Texas.

Specifically who is virtue signalling and then not building homes?

As far as I know the state government of California doesn't build homes. Smaller local governments can change zoning laws and the like but don't due to NIMBY stuff talked about here.

Home builders aren't virtue signalling.

Finally, if new apartments are constructed how would that be better solution to those already renting existing older apartments who are under rental stress?

Rich people need places to live but if there isn’t new housing for them to move into, they’ll live in the next only option: existing older units that could be rented out by lower income people.

Is this specific to California?

It’s a national issue but California policies like rent control and prop 13, make it worse

Does the state have any power. In Australia I think the state has power to generally zone things e.g. near a train station is high density and it is out of councils hands much to their chagrin.

States generally set the regulations that cities must follow. So they can constrain cities or choose not to.

For instance Washington State forces cities to make zoning plans that align with state housing needs. Similarly they set rules near public transit in some cases.

The degrowth leftists like Dean Preston or the state and federal Dems who either turn a blind eye to them or go so far as to endorse them (like Nancy Pelosi) despite their anti-housing track record.

What control does the federal government have in California housing regulations?

> TX builds over 2x more per capita than CA.

Ok, but this comes at the severe detriment of having to deal with the Texas government. Why not just move out of the country at that point?

Or the Democratic Party can get their house in order before the next federal election? They run a decent pro-growth platform at the federal level, but CA is a living counterexample that will be a sink on their credibility until it's fixed. It should be an existential issue for them given they'll lose a bunch of congressional seats in 2030 if they fail to start building.

Coastal California is one of the most desirable places to live in the world.

It will always be higher priced than most other places, unless maybe it looked like Hong Kong, but that might so reduce how desirable it is.

I am not judging them based on price, because price is not under their direct control. I am judging them based on artificially depressed housing starts per capita and the lack of will to address it.

It is possible that lots of people moving there would change the characteristics of the place, such as too many people on the trails/beaches/etc.

If coastal California added 10M apartments, I bet they would fill up. But what is the quality of life impact?

Most people don't have the ability to move out of the country