National Report: Puts Cal Housing Shortage in Perspective
By Trevor Bach
A national report has shed new light on California’s well-documented housing shortage.
“America is experiencing a housing crisis,” begins the executive summaryof “Housing Underproduction in the U.S.,” an analysis published last week by Up for Growth, a Washington, D.C.-based pro-housing policy group.
Nowhere is the crisis more acute than in California. Residents of L.A. who can’t afford the market have transformed the Inland Empire into one of the nation’s fastest-growing regions.
California’s housing shortfall — pegged in a widely cited McKinsey & Company analysis at about 2Mil units — was created over decades, mainly by a combo of high population growth and restrictive building policies.
Both reports target the regulatory environmental laws (CEQA), tht they claim most hinder construction.
Up for Growth’s report also cites the “extreme example” of California municipalities’ building fees. The Up for Growth’s 77-page report puts California’s situation in a national context. And that context shows that California is in a class by itself.
The nation as a whole has a “housing underproduction” — or deficit — of 3.8 million units, twice the number from 2012, the group calculated.
Its underproduction figure for California is 978,000 units, more than three times the number for Texas (322,000) and more than four times the number for New York (234,000).
Up for Growth based its existing housing count on 2019 housing numbers and used various factors, including so-called missing households and unit occupancy levels, to determine housing needs in all of the country’s 309 Metropolitan Statistical Areas.
In absolute terms, the epicenter of California’s shortage is Greater. L.A (Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro statistical areas). The report cited a shortage of 389,000 units, the most of any metro area in the country.
The Inland Empire, or Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, has a shortage of 153,000, the country’s fifth highest, and San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley has a shortage of 114,000, the country’s seventh highest.
San Diego, San Jose and Sacramento metro areas also ranked in the top 25.
When the shortage is measured as a percentage of existing housing stock— a data point that better controls a given metro area’s population; California metro areas dominate the list even more
.
Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura has a deficit of 10.9% Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario ranked third, with a deficit of 10.4%; the Central Valley city of Merced ranked sixth, at a deficit of 8.7%.
Los Angeles.-Long Beach-Anaheim ranked eighth, with a deficit of 8.4%.
The report helps illustrate just how far apart the Golden State has diverged from the rest of the country on new construction.
It also helps explain why California consistently dominates yet another ranking: of the country’s most unaffordable housing markets.
