The extreme cost of housing in urban and suburban California isn’t just another problem in a state with plenty of them. Instead, it needs to be seen as a crisis, one that creates misery across the Golden State, with many middle-class and low-income households routinely spending more than half their income on housing, making it impossible to save for retirement, help children with college bills and much more.

Consider the concept of home ownership, long considered part of the American dream. The Apartment List website recently released a survey of more than 30,000 renters. “Millennial” renters — those under 35 years of age — are staggered by the cost of homes in California. Among those surveyed in San Diego, 89 percent see home ownership as unrealistic. In Los Angeles, 83 percent share that view; in San Francisco, 81 percent.

The survey becomes even more grim upon a closer inspection. In years needed for millennials to save enough for a down payment, California cities — San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego — were the four worst in the nation.

This is not a problem that can be addressed with feel-good fig-leaf solutions — like funding affordable-housing programs that deliver relief, lottery-style, to tiny fractions of the hurting. Instead, it needs broad, basic, far-reaching solutions. This idea has yet to take hold in the state Capitol — or in San Diego City Hall. But in the region that is at the epicenter of California’s housing crisis — the Bay Area — it is finally having its moment, as chronicled in a April 17 analysis in The New York Times.


It details the efforts of the 2-year-old SF Bay Area Renters’ Federation to get San Francisco and its suburbs to acknowledge that more housing stock is the only way to broadly bring down housing costs — starting with rent that averages $3,770 a month. “You have to support building, even when it’s a type of building you hate,” founder Sonja Trauss told the Times. “Is it ugly? Get over yourself. Is it low-income housing? Get over yourself. Is it luxury housing? Get over yourself. We really need everything right now.” What are her policy prescriptions? She’s on the same page as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, seeking changes in zoning regulations and environmental rules that make it so costly and onerous for developers to pursue housing projects.

These are the same obstacles blocking housing relief in San Diego County. A 2015 study by Point Loma Nazarene University found that complying with regulations amounts to about 40 percent of the cost of housing in all price ranges here. Based on a weighted average of sales and rentals, the hit ranged from $125,000 in Santee to $282,000 in Carlsbad.

Trauss and di Blasio may get nowhere. But at least they make a forceful point: We can make different choices. We don’t have to accept being a state in which housing costs yield endless misery — unless you’re lucky enough to 1) have a mortgage from the pre-bubble era or 2) be well-paid and have a well-paid spouse. And we don’t have to be a state in which the American dream for poor people is brutally downsized to this: avoiding homelessness.