PD Editorial: Anatomy of California’s housing crisis

California’s population is quickly approaching 40 million people. Los Angeles now has 4 million residents, according to new state data, which also show that Sonoma County topped 500,000 for the first time in 2015.

Yet the number of new housing units completed statewide declined between 2014 and 2015.

Is it any wonder the state is experiencing a housing crisis?

OK, a little bit of perspective is in order here. California’s growth rate remains low by historic standards - about 0.9 percent in 2015. And state analysts say the 3 percent net decline in the number of new housing units last year is largely attributable to the loss of homes in catastrophic wildfires in Lake and Calaveras counties last year.

The raw numbers are nevertheless instructive: California added 348,000 additional residents and 67,000 housing units in 2015. That’s a 5-to-1 ratio.

This isn’t a one-year aberration. For a variety of reasons, including the Great Recession, housing construction hasn’t kept pace with population growth for the past decade.

Between 2005 and 2015, California grew from 36 million residents to 39.3 million, according to the state Department of Finance, while adding 936,000 housing units. That’s about 25 percent short of meeting the state’s housing needs, based on an average household size of about 2.9 people, the figure reported by the state Department of Finance.

The results include rising home prices and prohibitive rents, with some families spending 50 percent of their income on shelters. One recent survey showed that large numbers of young people living in California cities see homeownership as unrealistic.

There’s little agreement among policymakers and advocacy groups on the best way to restore a degree of equilibrium to the housing market.

This past week saw a sharply divided Santa Rosa City Council vote to draft a rent control ordinance covering about 13,300 rentals - about 19 percent of the city’s total housing units. Two weeks earlier, also on a split vote, the Healdsburg City Council put forward a proposal to eliminate a cap of 30 new housing units per year.

In Sacramento, legislators are considering a proposal to spend $1.3 billion on affordable housing. A San Francisco tenants group has started suing suburbs to try to force them to approve more housing, and candidates for supervisor in Sonoma County want to ease restrictions on granny units, to require builders to include affordable units in new subdivisions and to promote in-fill housing in the cities.

The most effective way to curb high prices isn’t any secret. Build more housing.

But the political obstacles are daunting. Much of the demand for housing is in coastal communities, and as the state’s nonpartisan legislative analyst pointed out last year, almost two-thirds of the area surrounding urban centers on California’s coast is unsuitable for development because of mountains, hills, lack of water and other environmental factors.

Many communities have enacted development limits in response to concerns about quality of life, and most development proposals run into neighborhood opposition.

The number of new units has been increasing, albeit slowly, each year since 2009. So the current crisis may pass, but high housing costs and tight markets are likely to last as long as California is a popular destination.