Mahan: The key to lower cost housing in California is building at a lower cost

"At the very root of our affordability crisis is the high cost of housing. High rents and expensive homes are driving families and high-wage jobs out of California. Our housing crisis makes it harder to hire teachers, child care workers and law enforcement officers; and it is closely linked to our crisis of street homelessness."

"Over recent decades, we've fundamentally broken our housing market by driving up construction costs and limiting the supply of new housing. For a range of well-meaning reasons, we've piled on excessive fees, created long bureaucratic approval processes and been hampered by junk lawsuits. We've essentially imposed an upfront tax on new housing so high that, when combined with rising land costs, many homes and apartments are simply impossible to build."

"The key solution to unlocking the millions of new homes that we need is to drive the costs associated with construction down, starting with the easiest costs to control - that is, the direct costs imposed on new housing in the form of taxes (cities call them fees) and the indirect costs created by long bureaucratic delays."

California faces a severe housing affordability crisis that drives families and high-wage workers out of the state while making it difficult to hire essential workers like teachers and law enforcement. Housing costs have become unaffordable even for middle-class families, preventing homeownership opportunities that previous generations enjoyed. The root cause lies in a fundamentally broken housing market created by excessive construction costs, limited new housing supply, high city fees, lengthy bureaucratic approval processes, and litigation barriers. These factors combine to make new housing construction economically unfeasible. Solutions include reducing construction-related costs, streamlining approval processes from political to administrative procedures, and lowering city fees that can represent up to 20% of housing costs, thereby enabling the construction of millions of needed new homes.

Read at The Mercury News