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One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

latimes.com

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Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#4
Using this database of regulation metadata,

https://quantgov.org/state-regdata/

the articles starts out saying that the California Code of Regulations "contains more than 21 million words". Which made me curious: how many words for Texas' code? Answer: 15 million.

  $ grep '^[[:digit:]]' admincode_california_metadata.csv | cut -d, -f5 | tr '\n' '+' | (cat; printf "0\n") | bc
  21172868

  $ grep '^[[:digit:]]' admincode_texas.csv | cut -d, -f7 | tr '\n' '+' | (cat; printf "0\n") | bc
  14929400
I'm not trying to make a political point, was just genuinely curious.

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#5
post #2

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps on moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it." - Ronald Reagan Looks like we're well along that curve for housing in CA.

Yeah, quote the guy who's arguably the most responsible for California's mental health and homelessness problems.

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#6
This might bite a little harder if you could look in any direction in Los Angeles and not see new construction. The current amount of space occupied by low density housing is something we could improve on but its just that. Occupied!

Hopefully all this commercial space rezoned for multi-purpose use (shops on the ground floor, apartments or offices above) will free up some of the low density real-estate but its not over-regulation keeping those houses high priced and full.

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#7
post #2

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps on moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it." - Ronald Reagan Looks like we're well along that curve for housing in CA.

California's property tax is less than half of that of Texas, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Combine that with the fact that CA has prop 13, and one of the highest GDP per capita, and... Does anyone really think it's the regulation that's making prices high??

Sure, they're not helping. But high incomes and low taxes are a recipe for high prices. The only other state with high incomes and this low of property tax is D.C.

And D.C. and California both have average home prices roughly double everywhere else in the country. I wonder why. Maybe because incomes are 33% higher and taxes are 50% lower.

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#8
post #5
post #2

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps on moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it." - Ronald Reagan Looks like we're well along that curve for housing in CA.

Yeah, quote the guy who's arguably the most responsible for California's mental health and homelessness problems.

Way off topic, but here's the NYT take at the time.

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-me...

It's time to put this cherished chestnut away and stop making these false claims.

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#9
Counting words and claiming there are too many isn't very convincing, especially since they admit that "some" of the regulations make sense. Could they maybe identify one regulation that imposes a significant cost burden but doesn't have a clear benefit?

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#10
post #5
post #2

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps on moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it." - Ronald Reagan Looks like we're well along that curve for housing in CA.

Yeah, quote the guy who's arguably the most responsible for California's mental health and homelessness problems.

I don't think that's fair. Reagan was simply following a national trend, a trend advocated by both civil rights activists and psychiatrists. The best succinct history I've found is this 1984 New York Times article, "How Release of Mental Patients Began", https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-me....

TL;DR: Reagan was trying to cut the budget and closing mental health hospitals was considered a win-win by everybody. That it happened under his governorship makes your statement literally true, but nonetheless very misleading.

It's important to recognize the history because when trying to address the problem now we hear the same retort--pills and freedom. But we got here precisely because we miscalculated the benefit of pills and the costs of an overly simplistic conception of freedom.

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