California housing war rages as construction lags
The war broke out a couple of years ago when the state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) ramped up pressure on local governments to accommodate more housing construction, citing “decades of underproduction underscored by exclusionary policies (that) have left housing supply far behind need and costs soaring.” Marin County, which has the state’s highest personal incomes and has built very little new housing in recent decades, is a hotbed of opposition to zoning quotas, even though it obtained a partial exemption. Activity has picked up a bit in the last couple of years, but is still well short of the 180,000 units the state says are needed each year and is particularly deficient in multi-family rental housing for poor and moderate-income families, which are hardest hit by rising costs.
