California has a housing crisis — that much we all know — but we should not grow paralyzed by the idea that it’s politically or substantively insurmountable. Paris has turned around a comparable situation with remarkable speed.

Though the French capital and its suburbs house less than one-third the population of California, the region produced more new homes last year than the entire Golden State.

To do so, French officials did not rely on magic tricks that are unavailable to California policymakers. My research has shown that the Paris region’s housing policies could be adopted stateside.

There are two problems at play in California’s housing market, and though they’re interrelated, they have different consequences and require multiple solutions.

First, housing production has not paralleled population growth. In 2018, just 2.5 houses were built per 1,000 residents. That’s about half the rate of new construction the state saw in 2004 and far lower than in places like Texas.

Limited housing production has nefarious consequences. It forces families to compete for an ever-dwindling supply of homes, allowing landlords and sellers to increase rents and prices in the assurance that someone will be willing to pay the going rate.

For those who can’t afford such costs, living in California may simply not be worth it. So it’s no surprise that many Californians have recently decamped to other states.

The second problem is that California has failed to address the needs of its poor residents. Almost 30 percent of the state’s renters spend at least half their income on housing. Some have been shut out of the housing market altogether, which has left about 130,000 Californians homeless.

Expanding housing production would help because older units would become available to lower-income people as wealthier families move into new homes. But the housing needs of the poorest can’t be solved by private development alone.

One answer is increasing public subsidies. But the federal government’s housing assistance programs have not expanded to account for rising costs. The number of public-housing units in California, for example, has declined 38 percent since 1996. Where are poor people supposed to live?

The Paris region, home to 12 million people, offers a useful example of how to address both problems. Much like California, the area has suffered from decades of inadequate housing production. Affordability, especially for the poorest, is increasingly challenging.

But my research shows that recent reforms allowed housing construction in the Paris region to expand rapidly, from about four units per 1,000 residents in the 1990s and 2000s to almost seven — similar to Texas’ rate —in the last few years. This has not only increased the number of homes but has also done so in an environmentally responsible manner, concentrating construction in high-density development around transit stations.

How were French officials able to do something that has so far eluded California’s leaders? Local, regional, and national leaders worked together to prioritize housing growth.

First, they developed new funding to support affordable-housing development, ensuring that about a third of new housing is guaranteed to be affordable to low-income families.

Second, governments at all levels identified underused, publicly owned land where housing could be built. Examples include surface parking lots, closed factories and shuttered government facilities.

Third, they developed new zoning rules that prohibit cities from restricting development based on square footage, allowing small-scale infill in many previously exclusive neighborhoods.

Finally, they demanded more of municipalities. National mandates require 25 percent of housing in every city to be affordable to low- and moderate-income families by 2025. Cities that don’t comply face fines and even the use of eminent domain to make room for affordable development.

If similar rules were imposed in California, wealthy communities like Palo Alto and Beverly Hills would no longer be able to exclude low-income people from living within their boundaries.

California officials are thinking about how to expand housing affordability. Recently enacted state legislation facilitates accessory dwellings and requires cities to do more to plan for population growth and demand. Other important measures include legislation by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, to ease high-density development near transit; and a proposal by Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., to invest $1 trillion in affordable housing nationwide.

Such solutions can’t come quickly enough. From 2017 to 2018, California’s per capita housing production actually declined.

For the state’s residents, the housing crisis is a source of instability that needlessly lowers quality of life. State officials, perhaps inspired by France, must act quickly to fund additional affordable housing and increase construction to make up for a decades-long deficit.

Yonah Freemark is a doctoral candidate in MIT’s department of urban studies and planning. His research on U.S. and European housing policy has been published in the International Journal of Housing Policy, Urban Affairs Review and Housing Policy Debate.