> The fact that housing shortages are widespread in CA makes it a crisis that must be solved at the state level.
In practice you are probably right, but I'm still wondering if you are right in theory.
Let me explain: there's so much pent up demand in SF and SV that any individual location allowing more building won't make much of a dent in overall housing costs.
One can certainly see that as a problem. But it's also an enormous opportunity: real estate developers in that community can build and build and build without worrying about oversupply ever dropping prices.
A booming local construction industry would also create lots of blue collar jobs, even if it never makes a dent in housing prices. Or rather, exactly when it doesn't make a dent in prices: because then the booming local construction industry can just keep on booming forever.
Now my question is: why does it look like all cities in the area are colluding against this? What keeps even one city from breaking ranks and allowing massive amounts of construction?
Is it that they can't find ways to benefit from the extra commercial activity? (I heard that eg property taxes are capped? And they have no creative ideas for how to otherwise benefit?)
Is it that there are bay area wide mechanisms that keep communities from allowing more building?
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Btw, the whole discussion reminds me when back in the years of the Great Recession after the Global Financial crises inflation was--as hard as that is to believe today--stubbornly low, and people saw that as a problem, instead of an opportunity:
At a minimum you can have your central bank buy up the whole national debt with newly printed money, and if that still doesn't raise inflation, you can start buying up the rest of world dollar for dollar. (Eg index funds are happy to take your newly created money.)
At some point, either your country's central bank owns the world in return for some data base entries, or inflation will pick up. (If inflation picks up too much, you can always soak up some excess money by selling things off your balance sheet. Standard central bank operating procedure.)
Instead of seeing this opportunity, people mostly just.. gave up?
Btw, orthodox economists suggested more or less exactly what I laid out above to Japan during the 1990s Lost Decade, but this was not a popular policy recommendation during the 2010s.