President Barack Obama’s administration weighed in Monday on a political issue that’s especially critical in California – local land-use policies that exacerbate the state’s ever-worsening housing shortage.
The White House released a “toolkit” that explains how restrictive zoning and planning policies depress housing supply, raise housing costs and drag down the larger economy.
“We need to break down the rules that stand in the way of building new housing,” the White House paper declared, calling for more density, speedier regulatory permitting and fewer rules that restrict or prohibit auxiliary dwellings – often dubbed “granny flats” – on single-home lots
While White House involvement indicates that the housing shortage is not confined to California, it’s also evident that the nation’s most populous state has a particularly acute shortage that’s driving housing costs through the roof.
The state’s population has been increasing by over 300,000 people annually in recent years, mostly because we have over twice as many births as deaths. Immigration from other countries is scant and we lose more people to other states as we gain, thanks in part to our high housing costs.
We need roughly 100,000 units of new housing each year to accommodate that growth, but our net increase has been scarcely two-thirds of that, thus increasing the shortage each year.
View Article