I suppose even if there was an effort to increase the supply of housing by changing zoning restrictions, progress would be excruciatingly slow. Like, every year a 140 unit low rise apartment block built on a former mall parking lot appears. Woo, at that rate there will be enough housing in only 500 years!
Every square inch of buildable land in Orange County is more or less already built on or has something planned. And its all unsuited to any kind of density, being mostly made up of cul-de-sac subdivisions and the like. Like the horribly unambitious and low density redevelopment of the military bases in Tustin and El Toro.
Also are some kinds of density more or less naturally affordable than others? Older cities in the East Coast and Midwest with a great deal of small lot rowhouses, bungalows, small apartments, etc can be affordable. But can West Coast style point towers ever be affordable, even if supply and demand equilibriate and there is a filtering/trickle down effect? Or will they turn into poorly maintained dumps due to the natural costs of upkeep of a high rise combined with the monolithic single owner/condo status?
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Heartless people on this forum. It’s not just homes, you know. There are actual people inside of them just trying to do the best for their family the way that you or I would. Yes moving there was probably a mistake, but as the article points out for people with marginal educations and incomes options are limited.
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Or they move out of California completely, to even more sprawling and environmentally unfriendly places like Houston.
I mean how dare some hardworking and moderately skilled person who'd dare call themselves 'middle class' if they lived literally anywhere else have a reasonable quality of life?
I guess if you can't get on the waiting list for your government subsidized affordable studio apartment in a mixed use development in Santa Monica you are a bad person for living in such a place like Riverside County.