California is facing the WORST housing crisis in the United States
Visible homelessness is out of control.
One of the reason California is in this mess? Most cities use zoning to require single family homes. Multi-story housing is significantly cheaper to build than single family homes. Yet most California cities ban multifamily housing.
Take for instance Los Angeles. The pink area is single-family homes ONLY:
That's right. The second biggest US city doesn't allow multi-story housing in a majority of its land.
Texas is run by a bunch of religious weirdos. Yet they don't have a housing crisis. You know why? Because these religious weirdos are building housing at over twice the rate of California:
In 2020, a California state senator named Senator Scott Wiener introduced a bill to change zoning rules
His bill would have automatically allowed multi-story housing near train stations, metro stations, bus lines and schools. This is not a radical proposal. This is common sense.
California politicians killed the bill.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/business/economy/sb50-california-housing.html
Today, he is trying again.
Bill SB-79 will make it legal to build more multi-family housing near rail stations and rapid bus lines, including in areas where such homes are currently illegal.
https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb79
Housing experts support the bill 🏘️
Transit agencies support the bill 🚍
Amtrak supports the bill 🚆
Yet some angry homeowners are now calling their politicians, urging them to kill this bill again 🤦
Take for instance columnist Steve Williams:
Recently, powerful Senator Josh Becker - who represents Menlo Park, Mountain View and Palo Alto - said he changed his mind. His constituents want to kill affordable housing:
Why is LA spending money to build metro stations in the middle of fucking nowhere 🤨?!
More housing near transit is a great idea.
If bill SB-79 is killed, this will be a huge defeat from the transit system and affordable housing.
https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/04/committee-chairs-housing-policy/
There is a fucking housing WAR happening right now. If you don't fight this war, young people, renters, transit users, and new home buyers will lose.
Please call your representatives. Tell them to support Bill-S79:
I think the zoning is not the complete picture. Our houses also cost more because we have to design for seismic safety, energy efficiency, and fire mitigation. It’s the building code.
They built a big high rise apartment right next to the light rail station near my house. The commercial space on the ground floor is vacant, and so are half the units. It’s been like this six years… But it has a rooftop pool. The units are crazy expensive and it’s run by a corporation. It was allowed to be built but it’s not benefiting the neighborhood, nor is it reducing prices.
There’s only one thing we need to do to drastically change the housing market toward affordability: Only residents can own property in California - and only 1 property per taxpayer. The housing “problem” will disappear overnight. The only problem is greed and it is happening everywhere.
There's also labor costs which are higher in California.
Also land, especially in the cities, is more expensive in California. This is due to there just being less developable land in Californian cities due to geography. Look at a map of the bay area and half of it is water or mountains, compared to the mostly flat plains of Austin. This is also due to speculation , which would be better solved by something limiting housing hoarding like you said.
If such a law came into effect, you would remove all rental properties from the market overnight. Don’t you think that would lead to catastrophic homelessness? There must be a mechanism for people and companies to buy and offer rental accommodation. A LOT of people can’t afford to buy a house.
I think the solution is clear: the business case for rental property should be made worse. A comprehensive land value tax without exemption has been championed by notable economists for more than a century. It’s as close to a perfect tax as it gets. It aligns public and private interests, which are currently opposed. Owners are encouraged to use the space efficiently, so they build up and lobby for laws which make it easier for them to build. With less demand for land, prices drop, and land prices are tightly correlated with rental rates.
It would not. It would remove people buying up housing just for the purpose of renting them out forever; or doing like Blackstone, Blackrock, and other copycats of buying up property to leave them vacant to create scarcity and drive up prices.
If anything it would flood the market with housing, tanking the prices and bringing a lot of housing into the realm of affordability for a lot of people.
But for your second paragraph, of course. I've also said that owning multiple houses should come with exponential tax increases for every additional property.
Housing should be for homes not investments.
Thanks. I’m obviously not a lawmaker. I think older rentals (30+ yrs) should revert to public ownership - the profit has been made and all the rent needs to be reinvested to keep or replace the structure.
Anyway the idea is corporate and foreign ownership is the problem. I don’t think tax is enough - that may just raise rents even more. There needs to be actual blocks from ownership - not an open bid process. Otherwise the rich will out bid us every time - in rent and in ownership.
The reason that governments don't seize assets is because it makes the country (or state) uninvestable. See what happened to Zimbabwe. Seizing assets always leads to very bad social outcomes across the board. It's much less destructive to tax things we want to happen less. A high tax on land ownership would reduce land ownership (and demand, and therefore price).
Some countries use some combination of only permitting residents to purchase certain types of property. Denmark, for example, requires non-EU non-citizens ask for permission to purchase property. Of course this then requires very strict immigration controls. If those aren't in place, then anyone can walk into the country and buy whatever they like, and the policy is meaningless.
The various corridors where it's illegal just so happen to be in more well-to-do areas.
As an aside, you can blame the zoning laws on why the fires spread as much as they did, since lack of condensed housing creates sprawl, which creates the Wildland-Urban Interface, which helped to form the 2 big fires earlier this year.
There are many factors leading to destructive wildfires. Probably the biggest one is power lines through vegetated areas. Another might be allowing building on hills. But I don’t think people were pushed out into the hills by zoning. It’s all about the view.
Also permit fees are ridiculous. I think mello roos is 30k a unit minimum in my town