20 thoughts on “California Has A Housing Crisis”

      1. Exactly. The traditional California “build more housing” solution means commuters having to drive for over two hours a day on the few bumper to bumper “freeways” to live in affordable housing. I’ve often thought it would be fun to pay for billboards along the way with the message – “Enjoying sitting in traffic? Thank a Democrat”.

  3. More fake news.

    California has an illegal immigrant problem, deport a few and there will be lots of vacant space.

    1. Quite the opposite. California needs more undocumented citizens, for who else knows how to build houses, and then clean them and mow the lawns?

  4. They’re most likely to raise taxes on developers to punish them for not magically providing more housing in spite of the tax and regulatory environment.

    1. That, plus file some class action hate crime lawsuit for not providing enough housing.

      All I know is my home is a bit less than the California median price.

  5. We could do something radically different- one could allow real estate development on the continent shelf.
    I realize the politicians are woefully inadequate.
    But maybe Trump in his second term could try to push the ball in that direction- if he is bored with winning.

  6. SF/Silicon Valley is crowded because the digital robber barons want everything within easy reach so they can micromanage, instead of diversifying their company’s component locations. Plus flyover country is yucky.
    = Apple donut.

    SoCal is crowded because LA = Mexico.

    1. I agree with Fenster662 100%. The problem is high-tech companies wanting to locate 50,000+ employees within the same physical location so they can treat their employees are interchangeable Legos. Older companies such as Cisco, HP, Sun, IBM and Intel spread their offices around the Bay Area, Northern California and even across multiple states. Now, almost all of Apple is crammed in and around its new Cupertino HQ, Google is crammed into Mtn. View, Sunnyvale and North San Jose and with Facebook crammed into Menlo Park/East Palo Alto. The surrounding areas have become unaffordable and unbearable to live around. Those of us not at those companies have to suffer the consequences. It seems in their ideal world Silicon Valley would have the density of Hong Kong, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

  7. The first two answers on that poll are scary. How will rent control or government run slums solve any problems? Both will not solve the problem they are intended to fix but cause additional problems with housing prices/availability plus a slew of social problems.

    1. wodun, I didn’t realize till I read the article, that by “the first two answers” you meant “the two most popular answers”. Having a quarter of California respondents believe that they have high prices on real estate because of rent control and government funding for low income housing (28% and 24% respectively, probably mostly from the same respondents), indicates a big problem long in the making.

  8. I have a question. Using seament(also called Biorock), how much would it cost to build a platform off the coast of San Francisco? Say about 15 miles from the coast. This platform would have condos, and apartments. They would be made from seament, or from a 3-D printer.
    You make seament from chicken wire, and an electric motor. To travel to the coast, you can use an Uber type boat service.
    What would be the total cost to build something like that? You will need to build schools, jail, courthouse, and a post office.

    1. “Biorock technology arose from experiments in the 1970s when Hilbertz was studying how seashells and reefs grow, by passing electric currents through salt water. In 1974, he found that as the salt water electrolyzes, calcium carbonate (aragonite) combines with magnesium, chloride and hydroxyl ions to slowly accrete around the cathode, eventually coating the electrode with a material similar in composition to magnesium oxychloride cements and as strong as concrete. Over time cathodic protection replaces the negative chloride ion (Cl-) with dissolved bicarbonate (HCO3-) to harden the coating to a hydromagnesite-aragonite mixture with gaseous oxygen evolving through the porous structure. Later experiments showed that the coatings can thicken at the rate of 5 cm per year”
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biorock

      Time is money, so I would just use concrete. but one might use Biorock technology to make structures last forever. If structures have lifetime of 100 years or more, they are worth more than structure only lasting 30 year.
      How long a structure would last is important aspect, particularly in saltwater environment.

      Generally, with buildings costs are related to the cost per square feet of “living space”. Office building can quite expensive but they have a lot of square feet and could how low cost per square feet.

      Another aspect is cost of the land and the cost of property taxes of whatever you build on the land. So matters what the laws are, and future potential of these laws being changed in the future.

      And you also need water and electrical power- getting fresh water and managing sewer water. Build one structure in the ocean would expensive per unit compared to building a town. A town/city could worth trillions of dollars but has large need of water and power.

      I would say the main problem is government and laws you need.

      1. Also, like rockets, an important factor is safety. I would think an important selling point of living in ocean is safety/security. Or it has large potential of having this aspect- of course such a quality has to actually be deliverable.

    2. Peter Thiel put some money into studying this sort of thing under the name “seasteading.” He finally decided it would be easier to move to Los Angeles.

  9. IIRC, the Western Australian SF writer Greg Egan had a novel based on the biorock concept. I can’t remember the name of it but there was an artificial island created in the Pacific north East of Australia. The Australians didn’t like the idea so made direct travel to it impossible from Australia. Which sounds like what an Australian government would do.
    We have the same housing problem in Sydney and Melbourne as we import vast quantities of third world peasants to swell our population numbers and vote socialist.

  10. I don’t think California has many problems with new houses as long as they don’t require roads, water, power, garbage or sewage and aren’t built on public land and aren’t built on privileged private land and don’t block the view of anybody important and don’t contain any substances known to the state of California to cause cancer and have zero carbon footprint and can be built entirely of recycled material and whose inhabitants are guaranteed to vote democrat as long as the sun shall shine.

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