How?
There is a total war on private homeownership, family cars, freeways, and liberty, moving millions of Californians from freedom to dependency to tyranny.
Authoritarian California laws work tirelessly to drive people out of the mobility and safety of their family cars and their family homes—into concrete cells in high density, high tower apartments, public housing, public transit, and ultimately homelessness.
In 2023–2024, a package of bills allegedly dealing with “affordable” housing were passed and signed into law. Instead, these bills advanced expensive taxpayer-subsidized public housing by other names. What was missing was any increase in the free-market supply of single-family homes. Gone was the prospect of the American dream continuing to prosper in California.
How did California get to where it is now?
It was a long way and a long time coming.
It started well and ended badly.
Housing Shortage
According to Hans Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), California has a housing shortage of 3.5 million housing units. That’s for a population of 40 million.
In September 2023, the Orange County Register reported that California’s largest cities, metropolitan areas, were short by over 800,000 units. This 6.5 percent housing shortage was twice the national average.
With a median home value of $900,000 in 2024, California’s “young”—including 40-to-50-year-olds—cannot afford what few homes are available. And there was no respite in renting. The smallest apartments often cost more than the massive mortgages for which few could qualify.
Legislation in 2023 to 2024, establishing Below Market Rate (BMR) housing, was rent control by other names.
For decades, rent control and limits on evictions have discouraged private construction of apartments in California—so unions can do it at high expense, serving the millions who need housing that’s more affordable than an old car or Mommy’s bedroom.
Homelessness
Besides mental illness, disease, and drug addiction, the decades-long slow-motion moratorium on building housing has contributed at least in part to the violent deaths of the homeless, out in the open and vulnerable to human predators, as well as medieval diseases.
Homelessness in California does not stop with drug addicts, the mentally ill, the diseased, and the poor. It ends up on your doorstep and/or your neighbors’.
Welcome to the New Homeless Californians—children and grandchildren living in old cars, rundown trailer parks, sky-high concrete box apartments, Mommy’s spare bedroom, furnished garages, or backyard spaces under tiny roofs.
Meanwhile, hotel rooms are offered to illegal immigrants. Our children and vets need not apply.
Who Is Next?
But for Proposition 13’s limits on annual increases on property taxes, grandparents might be joining their progeny on the sidelines of society. Nearly half of California’s homeless are over 50 years old.
Though it’s difficult for older folks, those who can escape from California for the less comfortable climes of baking deserts or steamy states, are doing so. The vacancies left by escapees add little to solve shortages of affordable housing.
Indeed, California’s relative population loss in the 2020 census dictated a first-ever loss in representation in the U.S. Congress.
What can people do to continue living in family homes? The most affordable housing is located miles and hours away from jobs.
Commute Marathons
Thousands of Californians drive for hours from affordable homes in faraway suburbia, in San Bernardino-Riverside and the Central Valley, to urban jobs in Los Angeles and San Francisco-San Jose, respectively.
They commute two or three hours a day from the Central Valley to the Bay Area; 80,000 drive over the Altamont Pass to and from San Joaquin County and the Bay Area. Seventy-five percent drive alone to jobs in San Jose, Fremont, or Pleasanton.
Virtually none, 2.5 to 3 percent, take public transit, a bus, or a train.
How Did This Happen?
Local government building codes prevent families from building modest housing for their elderly parents or children on their own private property.
Laws reduce private homeownership, highways, and cars—and instead substitute public transit and public housing. They limit suburban growth and the number of cars and highways getting people to and from home and work. This reduces the liberties and choices of citizens.
So most housing shortages and long commutes are the direct result of public policies intended to eliminate “sprawling” suburbs with their “ticky-tacky” housing tracts. Low to no parking compels you to “choose” to give up your car too.
Reducing Housing
The high building fees, California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and other environmental policies have driven housing prices sky-high and caused housing supplies to be far short of what’s needed.
Building fees reach $50,000 before a single shovel breaks ground on a single-family home.
The net result of the environmental assault on affordable housing and highways is more greenhouse gas emissions from auto emissions—longer commutes and traffic congestion.
Legislation in 2023 to 2024 exempted CEQA requirements but added others, producing up to 40 percent more expensive “prevailing [union] wage” constructed housing; in effect, public housing. Those over 50 units required union-sanctioned apprenticeship training and health care. Educational and religious institutions were mandated to provide social services—childcare and community centers for mere handfuls of tenants.
Public Housing
There is also the return of discredited public housing “projects,” high-rise Soviet and Beijing style.
High-density housing promotes crime, social disorder, and disease. Life mimics rats in cages, filthy and frightened with lives that are cruel, nasty, and short.
San Diego’s 50-story residential tower will likely lack thug-free elevators.
In June 2024, Senate Bill 469, which would have permitted public housing projects without voter approval, was dropped.
The beginning of the end came in January 1975 when incoming governor Jerry Brown turned Reaganesque budget surpluses into budget deficits. In the name of protecting the environment stopped all ongoing freeway projects, the lifeblood of state commerce and cancelled future ones. Brown returned 36 years later to finish up what he began the destruction of the Golden State with his successor sweeping out the remnant of prosperity into the dustbin of history.
ReplyDeleteGreat comment by commentator. IMO we see strife purposely created by bogus made up reasoning all around the USA, it's affecting everyone one way or another; I believe the masses have had enough of insanity at Government levels in this Nation, something has got to give, citizen's are not being heard, served, or satisfied, IMO!
ReplyDeleteForget yonder, American's have to clean up our own backyard with goings on our own soil, IMO!