The California housing crisis is a result of restrictive local policy preventing housing starts, not a shortage of materials.

onerous and overly burdensome regulations make it nye impossible to build in this state. The environmentalists have a throttle on California. That is coupled with the wealthy not wanting their home values to go down with new low cost housing built anywhere near them. These add up to skyrocketing home prices in CA.

> That is coupled with the wealthy not wanting their home values to go down

I keep hearing this criticism but I think it’s less about home values and more about how many people - wealthy and not wealthy - simply value their quality of life and don’t want that to be damaged by forced rezoning.

A large majority of SF residents support upzoning: https://growsf.org/pulse/growsf-pulse-october-2024/#allowing...

Aren't there a lot of people in the Palisades still waiting for permits to rebuild from the fires almost a year ago?

It's utterly absurd looking from the outside that officials are claiming the permits are being "fast tracked" even now.

The 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fires destroyed thousands of homes in the Santa Cruz mountains, a "wilderness" area that has been filled with mountain homes

Many (most) have not yet had permits issued for rebuilding, most commonly because the owners can not meet, or are unwilling to meet, the standards for septic systems.

There have been decades of higher standards for all sorts of code. Nothing nearly as stringent for multifsmlt housing, a code which makes housing six times safer than single family housing. But still strict enough that four decades of no-growth policy left most people completely unaware of how hard it is to build housing.

And the state and country are happy to leave them hanging indefinitely. property seizure via regulation.

As somebody who would like to swim in the San Lorenzo River with my children, I'm not super enthusiastic about allowing them to continue to pollute the river.

It may be that the septic regulations are excessive, but oddly I've never heard anybody argue that the regulations are unnecessary, they just argue that they don't want to follow them because they didn't have to in the past. I'd be a bit more sympathetic to the mountain folks if they had an argument that the regulations were incorrect.

The real property seizure is what's happening to the public land so that people can live for cheap and not cover their own pollution. People still have the land. Though if they want to try to overturn Euclid v. Amber and make zoning illegal, I'm there to help them! Necessary environmental regulations are not something I want to overturn, however.

That is indeed the conflict. IDK if the regulations are unnecessary to maintain a swimmable river either.

however, it is undeniable that there was a change in regulation and restriction, even if that is going from a river quality is optional to the priority.

Beneficiaries are happy to benefit, and if that takes away powers and property from others, so be it.

This is the dynamic that I am highlighting.

"almost a year" isn't a very long time for West Coast permits

The duplex I'm in took... 4-5 years of permitting? Something like that.

Totally insane waits, I agree.

Yes.

https://recovery.lacounty.gov/rebuilding/permitting-progress...

2162 permit applications received; 1916 applications have full plans submitted. 534 permits issued so far.

I bought some furniture from a guy in Ben Lomond and he told me that after the CZU fires, permitting was the bottleneck for most folks, to the point that even four years after the fires some people still were waiting. It's insane. IMO the bottleneck here is likely staffing. If someone wanted to streamline this they'd actually allocate some emergency funds statewide for this.

We really need to focus on streamlining and automating the process rather than hiring more government employees. Every county should be forced to use a single standardized API for permit applications. And if an application isn't denied within 30 days then it's automatically approved.

literally any attention on this problem would be a tremendous improvement.

I mean, it was 16,000-18,000 homes that were destroyed? That's a hell of a lot when you consider that all the other new builds are still in the queue to be permitted too.

Sure! But you could treat it as an emergency and staff up. It could even be through a mutual aid system the way utilities team up to do repairs after disasters, borrowing permitting experts from other jurisdictions.

>borrowing permitting experts from other jurisdictions.

I don't think those people exist... State/City budgets have already been cut lean on this stuff and most places that aren't in the middle of a disaster are many months behind as it is.

The cost of permits alone would easily pay for the extra staff and overtime. Most places in California charge what, $1-3k per house?

These are not hard things to understand or solve, it's just that the majority of people don't want to understand them or face reality and the politicians will always serve up these kinds of con artist lies to placate people.

You cannot add ~60 million foreign national people to the US population in the last 25 years without severely impacting the housing situation when the USA has only built 1.1 million housing units on average over that period; most of those being locked into high prices due to the massive inflation over that time.

What makes it even worse is this obsession with both concentrating populations and jobs in urban centers, while at the same time being concerned with climate change and environmental protection. They are mutually exclusive things. This is an iron triangle issue, you can only have two of three things: affordable housing, immigration, climate/environment protection.

> They are mutually exclusive things.

Source: You made it up.

Being closer to where the things are so you can walk significantly drops the amount of fuel needed for transportation and opens up public transportation as a workable option.

> USA has only built 1.1 million housing units on average over that period;

That's a government issue, not a practical one. How many housing units did China build in that same amount of time?

Please go back to reddit with your nonsense

I don't understand why this is a iron triangle situation.

Higher density housing -- and a lot of it -- solves for all three, right? If not, why not?

It's because the triangle is missing the secret forth vertex: single family housing with a big private backyard and a lawn in the suburbs that's only accessible by car.

I don’t understand, why is urban concentration anathema to environmental protection? It seems instead to be in service of it?

What an incredibly weird take. Higher density cities are better in virtually any environmental metric per capita. This is widely supported

Even as measured by pollutants per breath inhaled?

That would be a health metric, not an environmental one. While brake dust is a major contributor to this, a suburb next to a freeway is going to be pretty damn bad too.

> While brake dust is a major contributor to this, a suburb next to a freeway is going to be pretty damn bad too.

Relative to the rest of the area, for that specific pollutant, yes. Relative to a city dwelling of the same distance, no. Volume (ie Traffic) matters when comparing health impacts.

Freeway traffic next to suburbs is really the major driver here, with high speeds and tire microplastics (the biggest source of microplastics in the SF Bay Area is tires).

A suburbanite driving on their river of pollution for 50 miles every day is a much bigger impact than somebody taking the bus and train in the city. And even city streets do not see the level of pollution caused by freeways that snake through suburbs throughout the Bay Area and LA.

But honestly the gas stoves in most California kitchens are the true killer, yet nobody seems to even bother talking about that.

In any case: environmental metrics I had always thought about things that impact the environment: reduction of ecosystem, death of a particular types of animals (especially the ones we like), unhealthy water ways, etc. On all these, suburban life is absolutely horrific, urban and very rural life is pretty good. If you can drive to the Costco, you are probably living in the least environmentally friendly way possible.

As far as health metrics, whether from environmental effects or crime or the actual real killers: obesity, smoking, blood pressure, and heat disease, cities do better than rural areas:

https://schaeffer.usc.edu/research/rural-americans-dont-live...

Our cars are killing us in every way yet we refuse to acknowledge the massive health effects.

>> > While brake dust is a major contributor to this, a suburb next to a freeway is going to be pretty damn bad too.

> A suburbanite driving on their river of pollution for 50 miles every day is a much bigger impact than somebody taking the bus and train in the city.

This is moving the goalpost. Now it's distance plus traffic to reach for a pre-decided conclusion.

> As far as health metrics, whether from environmental effects or crime or the actual real killers: obesity, smoking, blood pressure, and heat disease, cities do better than rural areas:

Rural is not the same as suburb and not rural. A suburb is generally still a city, albeit smaller...depending on how one wants to define "city", I guess.

I have health conditions, originating from congenital defect. I have an electric stove. I moved out of a SoCal city, as I was raised next to a major (5) interchange. I live in the largest city of my state, which would be called a suburb somewhere else and my medical care is EXCELLENT for reasons that are particular to my area.

There's an argument to be made that cars provide economic and financial mobility, leveraged by the upper classes, which is why cars are not properly demonized. That's a separate topic from health.

I hope this helps you make stronger arguments in your next exchange, because I share some of these views as well.

> This is moving the goalpost. Now it's distance plus traffic to reach for a pre-decided conclusion.

What goalpost was moved? The freeway is the major producer of pollution, the major concentration of it. This is well documented in the literature on PM2.5: being close to a freeway is a major risk factor but urban areas are not a major risk factor.

If there's a freeway, it's not an urban area, it's a suburban area.

> I hope this helps you make stronger arguments in your next exchange,

I have no idea how you think you poked any holes at all in my argument, but this statement clearly thinks you have! Could you clarify what you think I said was wrong and how?

Living next to a major interchange is definitely living a huuuuge health risk, but again it's mostly a suburban risk.

> There's an argument to be made that cars provide economic and financial mobility, leveraged by the upper classes, which is why cars are not properly demonized. That's a separate topic from health.

If there's an argument, it's very weak. Cars are very expensive, draining the bank accounts of those on the lower end of the economic scale. Yet because we have capped density, those same people on the lower end of the economic scale must travel long distances from farther away, instead of being allowed a place in a city. Density plus transit offer a cheaper alternative without the burden of large car payments, the huge repair bills of cheap used cars, the monthly car insurance payments, and the debt trap of having to buy a car to even get a job.

It's ultimately a measure of the concentrations of pollutants in the air, which I would classify as an environmental measurement although perhaps a health one too.

Working backwards from not wanting immigrants to be here paints them into some nonsensical corners.

You want immigrants that plunder the indigenous population while at the same time enriching the upper class at the expense of the lower classes, but you project your own nonsense on others, thereby proving you are full of it. Why do you support the ruling class using "immigrants" to plunder the non-ruling class? You do not even have the capacity to understand that, but you speak on it anyways.

I benefit immensely financially from "immigrants", but that does not mean it is just and I have the integrity to be honest about that. You clearly do not. Stealing by abstraction and supporting it makes you a bad person, not at all the good person you think you are by supporting "immigration", regardless of whether I get richer today than you make in one year or not because of immigrants.

Multifamily housing developments take years to plan and build anyway, especially in California and especially in these urban areas.

No single thing will fix housing, and lots of things will interact to make any fix complicated and slow. The fast single things like forms of eminent domain and retrospective law changes turn out to incur massive legal cost to enact.

Short of seizing property and approvals for already lodged designs which were turned down for local opposition, it's all about time now. Time to start doing things under a new legal planning system.