By Ben Christopher and Manuela Tobias, Calmatters
California is an expensive place to call home.
It’s such a fundamental part of California life it almost feels silly to say. Along with good weather, sunny beaches, Hollywood and the Golden Gate Bridge, the skyhigh cost of housing has become part of the state’s national identity.
The high cost of housing touches virtually every aspect of life across the state. It shapes where we can and can’t live and with whom, where our kids can grow up and go to school, where we can work and how long our commutes are. It is the root cause of some of the state’s most pressing crises, like homelessness and poverty, and there are few challenges Californians face that aren’t made worse by the relative scarcity of affordable places to call home. High rents widen the gap between rich and poor. High home prices make wealth generation an ever-more exclusive pursuit. Expensive cities force more workers to commute, which means more driving, traffic and greenhouse gas emissions. “There’s no issue that impacts the state in more ways on more days than the issue of housing,” Gov. Gavin Newsom has said. “This is the original sin in the state of California.”
We know all of this is true. We live it every day. But how did things get so bad? And is there anything we can do to make California affordable again? Here’s what you need to know about California’s housing costs.
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What an excellent analysis! Thank you CalMatters —and Edhat for publishing their work.
For SB at least: location, location, location.
I wanted to build an ADU, util I found out the city of SB charges $25K for an over the counter permit. Crazy!
Seems they are ok with ADU’s as long as they make an outrageous amount of money,
Have you looked into pre-approved ADU’s? I glanced at it and added up $6k.
https://santabarbaraca.gov/preapproved-adu
Someone has to pay for the over-staffed City Departments!
Hilariously one of the reasons for the delay in permitting is because there are very few people at the City processing these permits for ADUs. Part of our most recent Housing Element actually calls for +1.5FTE to that department to help speed things up and make things less expensive. But I know facts aren’t EdHat commenters’ strongest areas.
Federal,state, and local governments throw obstacles at every stage of the building process. It’s no wonder there is a housing shortage.
Instead of working for us they work against us.
66% of all units built from 2014 to 2022 were located in the Priority Overlay zone (“downtown”).
Zero were market rate moderate income – because of the blatant bias in AUD zoning against smaller units. Maybe the bias is intentional.
“the blatant bias in AUD zoning against smaller units” – not sure what this refers to. The City’s AUD report released in 2023 (https://santabarbaraca.gov/sites/default/files/2023-10/AUD%20Progress%20Report_2023_Public_0.pdf) showed that we built quite a bit of new, market-rate apartments that were significantly smaller in size due to the City’s AUD program, and unfortunately the report concludes that instead of lowering the cost of housing, the AUD program simply drove up the value of land (the logic: if you can build more, smaller apartments that you can rent for $5K-$6K a pop, you can make even more $$ than before for the same piece of land), while failing to make a dent in the cost of housing for local workers.
“Market rate moderate income” is an unfortunate oxymoron – it doesn’t exist in Santa Barbara, at least for new developments. Moderate income is defined as people who make between 80% and 120% of our area median income, which in the City of Santa Barbara is $91,200 – $136,800 for a single individual. The new units being built right now are unfortunately only considered affordable (defined as spending less than 30% of your income on housing) for those who make over 120% of the area median income.
I’m all for density – but only if it’s actually going to be affordable.