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As poll after poll finds that housing costs are driving Californians to pack up and move, a new survey paints a detailed portrait of the anti-growth mindset that has been widely blamed for the short supply of homes underlying the problem. What the survey found surprised veteran pollster Mark Baldassare: Nearly two-thirds of adults in California — and 70 percent in the Bay Area — favor building in their cities to meet the need. “Obviously we asked this question because Californians are so often associated with NIMBY-ism, Not in My Backyard, but maybe because we’re at such a crisis point with housing costs that so many people recognize that it’s a problem — and for so many people it is a problem for them,” said Baldassare, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that conducted the poll.

Three of San Francisco’s largest residential projects have been stalled by months of infrastructure approval delays, another obstacle in the push to alleviate the city’s housing shortage.

The projects, Parkmerced, Schlage Lock and Treasure Island, are at three different corners of the city and collectively contain more than 15,000 housing units, including thousands of affordable units.

Despite winning Board of Supervisors approvals years ago, each project has grappled with various technical approvals required by the city, according to developers, city officials and building permit documents. None have started construction on their housing phases, despite previous schedules calling for work to start by this year.

. . . A source, who works on one of the three projects, said there are “fundamental disagreements” between city agencies about project details, such as the shape of a driveway or the design of a building façade. That’s led to numerous delays.

More than half of California voters say the state’s housing affordability crisis is so bad that they’ve considered moving, and 60 percent of the electorate supports rent control, according to a new statewide poll.

The findings from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies reflect broad concerns Californians have over the soaring cost of living. Amid an unprecedented housing shortage, rents have skyrocketed and tenants have faced mass evictions, especially in desirable areas.

“It’s an extremely serious problem,” said poll director Mark DiCamillo. “People are being forced to consider moving because of the rising cost of housing – that’s pretty prevalent all over the state.”

Of the 56 percent of voters who said they’ve considered moving, 1 in 4 said they’d relocate out of state if they did.

Trevor McNeil and Sarah Montoya, both 35, would love to buy a home in San Francisco, but like many young couples, they make too much money to qualify for a below-market-rate unit and too little to afford a market-rate one.

So for now, they are stuck in their one-bedroom, third-floor walk-up apartment in the Sunset District, with twin boys who were born in January and a 2-year old girl. When one is crying, it’s hard to get the others to sleep, but the hardest part is taking the kids out. Their landlady won’t allow strollers in the lobby, so they have to lug a double and a single up and down two flights of stairs or put their daughter on a leash — something Montoya thought she’d never do.

Housing is expensive for everyone in the Bay Area, but it’s especially challenging for middle-income buyers. Most new supply is at the high or low end. The gap in between is often called “the missing middle.”

The major components of a legislative package aimed at addressing California’s housing affordability crisis cleared their biggest hurdle late Thursday night when the Assembly passed six bills in a tight vote. Legislative leaders had previously negotiated with Gov. Jerry Brown over measures to generate money for low-income housing development, fund housing programs and streamline the approval process for new projects. But Democrats in swing districts hesitated for weeks to pass one funding bill that could be described as another tax hike, after earlier this year raising the gas tax and renewing a climate change program that could also increase prices at the pump.

New figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show California has the country’s highest poverty rate, with nearly one in five residents facing economic hardship when factoring in living costs such as housing.

California’s political leaders, having ignored and even abetted our housing shortage, now pretend that they will “solve it.” Don’t bet on it. Their big ideas include a $4 billion housing subsidy bond and the stripping away of local control over zoning, and mandating densification of already developed areas. None of these steps addresses the fundamental causes for California’s housing crisis. Today, barely 29 percent of California households, notes the California Association of Realtors, can afford a median-priced house; in 2012, it was 56 percent. At the heart of the problem lie “urban containment” policies that impose “urban growth boundaries” to restrict — or even prohibit — new suburban detached housing tracts from being built on greenfield land. Given the strong demand for single-family homes, it is no surprise that prices have soared. Before these policies were widely adopted, housing prices in California had about the same relationship to incomes as in other parts of the country. Today, prices in places like Los Angeles, the Bay Area and Orange County are two to three times as high, adjusted for incomes, as in less-regulated states. Even in the once affordable Inland Empire, housing prices are nearing double that of most other areas, closing off one of the last remaining alternatives for middle- and working-class families.

Land-use restrictions are a significant drag on economic growth in the United States. The creeping web of these regulations has smothered wage and gross domestic product growth in American cities by a stunning 50 percent over the past 50 years. Without these regulations, our research shows, the United States economy today would be 9 percent bigger — which would mean, for the average American worker, an additional $6,775 in annual income. For most of the 20th century, workers moved to areas where new industries and opportunities were emerging. This was the locomotive behind American prosperity. Agricultural workers moved from the countryside to booming cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit. In the Great Migration, some six million African-Americans left the South for manufacturing jobs in cities like Chicago and Buffalo. Today, this locomotive of prosperity has broken down. Finance and high-tech companies in cities like New York, Boston, Seattle and San Francisco find it difficult to hire because of the high cost of housing. When an unemployed worker in Detroit today finds a well-paying job in San Francisco, she often cannot afford the cost of housing there.

One common refrain among housing advocates and politicians is that high-rise construction is a solution to the problem of housing affordability. The causes of the problem, however, are principally prohibitions on urban fringe development of starter homes. Critics also note that high-rises in urban neighborhoods often replace older buildings, which are generally more affordable. One big problem: High-density housing is far more expensive to build. Gerard Mildner, the academic director of the Center for Real Estate at Portland State University, notes that development of a building of more than five stories requires rents approximately two and a half times those from the development of garden apartments. Even higher construction costs are reported in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the cost of townhouse development per square foot can double that of detached houses (excluding land costs) and units in high-rise condominium buildings can cost up to seven and a half times as much.

There is no debate or question that we have a serious housing affordability crisis in this state, and we didn’t get here overnight. Each year, we need to build roughly 180,000 homes just to keep up with population growth, and over the last decade we have fallen short by at least 1,000,000. At the core of our exploding housing affordability crisis is basic economics: we have spiking demand coupled with stagnating supply, this leads to skyrocketing housing prices. This is a critical issue for small businesses who are seeing their workforce driven out of this state due to prohibitively high housing costs.

Unfortunately, Senate Bill 2 (Atkins), Senate Bill 3 (Beall), and Senate Bill 35 (Weiner) do nothing to address these fundamental economic realities, but instead raise more taxes on struggling small businesses and working families, put California further into debt, and drastically raise labor costs to build a home.

The bad news is: there’s very little housing in this housing package.

The new funding will produce only a tiny fraction of the affordable housing Californians need. And given the economic and regulatory pressures on housing, such housing won’t be produced quickly or cheaply.

The bills leave in place the tax, environmental, and regulatory regimes that add so much to the expense and difficulty of building housing in the state. And in some places, legislators have offered goodies, in the form of wage and other protections to labor interests to get their buy-in. Such incentives may add to the cost of housing, when the state desperately needs to make housing cheaper. The way that the building trades, in particular, have leveraged this crisis would be shameful, if organized labor in this state were still capable of shame.

One of the striking signs of delayed adulthood is the rising number of young adults who live in their parents’ home – now the most popular living arrangement for young adults. A third of young people, or 24 million of those aged 18 to 34, lived under their parents’ roof in 2015. More young adults lived with parents than with a spouse in 2016. Almost 9 in 10 of the young people who lived with their parents a year ago are still living there.

More than 100 local governments have inclusionary ordinances. But a 2009 state appeals court ruling exempted rental units.

So as part of an overall package of housing bills, Democratic lawmakers want to overturn that exemption. Two identical bills are under consideration in the Legislature, AB 1505 and SB 277.

U.S. new-home sales fell sharply in July, providing fresh evidence that a shortage of housing inventory is depleting activity across all segments of the market.

California’s economy grew robustly during the past decade even as state-imposed environmental standards to combat climate-change helped lower greenhouse gas emissions. But authors of a report released Tuesday cautioned that the future might not be so rosy: They found that transportation-related emissions have begun to rise due in part to longer commute times for California workers who can’t afford to live in the cities where they work. The report cautioned that the affordable housing issue must be addressed by policymakers for the state to meet its ambitious longer term emissions goals.