California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

Nowhere is building enough housing for growth. In low cost of living places, chances are if you look at population data, the metro region has been stagnant for decades which has alleviated pressure on supply. In any area with growth at all, prices rise because we don't build actual dense housing like we did before WWII (when row houses and mixed use development in walking distance to frequent public transit were the norm everywhere from Manhattan to Los Angeles to downtown Boise, Idaho). We build either tracts of single family homes by clearcutting wildlands adjacent to freeways, or far too little apartments in a single 4-5 story building spanning an entire city block.

In comparison to a block of 4-5 story row homes, these apartment builds are a compromise and will come back to bite planners in the coming decades as construction costs continue to rise. Since it's a single building, you can't redevelop this structure without leveling the entire block. That makes it impossible to do unless you are a deep pocketed development corporation, versus a row house that could be owned outright by an individual and redeveloped by that individual to meet the market demand of the growing city.

The challenge you have is that people view housing as an investment. Americans expect their home values to keep pace with inflation. And because housing values are so expensive, there's a tremendous amount of psychological pressure to "preserve" what they've purchased beyond their own property line (eg: "Neighborhood character"). For these reason, they're going to oppose any new supply entering the market.

The only way you're going to fix this problem for good is to have the government step in and force new housing supply into markets, which is going to be extremely unpopular with everyone, including most YIMBYs who would favor removing market barriers. So it's a political impossibility - you can blame it on Boomers but truth is Americans aren't ready to decomodify the housing market.

I feel like I got served an appetizer and a small dessert, with no main course in between.

California has a housing crisis in some cities. Californians are moving out of those cities. The cities that they're moving into are experiencing an increase in demand (directly restating the previous). That's pushing up prices (not shocking), which is preventing some people with less money from outbidding people with more money (also not shocking).

Conclusion: Single Family Zoning is bad, but only a few places have been enlightened enough to limit or ban it.

OK, maybe, but strikes me as an argument from declaration of opinion rather than a logical conclusion from the priors.

The only thing new I learned from this article is a rough estimate of how much higher an ex-Californian's budget is on average, which was novel but hardly surprising.

We changed it because it was baity. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

When we do that, we try to replace the title with representative language from the article itself (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). There's nearly always something—if not a subtitle, then a sentence in the article body—that neutrally summarizes the article. (The latter was the case here.) Doing this rather than making up titles ourselves lets the content speak for itself, and in the case of big media articles is probably closer to the author's intent, since authors don't write headlines.