The real problems, however, are the administrative constraints, social prohibitions, and poor economic performance. Decades of suburban life have conditioned everyone to demand certain characteristics. Renters are a transient and unsavory element that destroys the value, safety, and respectability of the community. Therefore only owner occupied single family units are permitted. Anything too small or too inexpensive will attract the poor and undesirable. So let’s only build homes large enough for middle class families to filter out the riffraff. Strangers loitering on the street are a menace. Homes must be buffered and isolated from the public realm. It is absolutely forbidden to conduct any kind of commercial or professional activity within the residential enclave.

Each condo is required by law to have a two car garage because there’s a perceived shortage of parking spaces in the neighborhood. This is in direct contradiction to the official desire to get people to walk, bike, and use public transit like the newly expanded commuter rail system. That train is meant to take people thirty miles to either downtown Los Angeles or the far reaches of Riverside, California to theoretical employment centers.

But opening a small mom and pop business on the corner is illegal due to zoning regulations, the need for multiple off street parking spaces, and the fact that a cash strapped municipal government just subsidized some national chain big box stores to move into the district in search of sales tax revenue — which killed any chance of survival for local shopkeepers.

Lots of new construction and increased density are required to expand the supply of homes and make them more affordable in a region with a severe housing shortage. Except there isn’t an “affordable housing crisis.” Instead we’ve had a national economic policy that’s consistently driven down real wages for the majority of the population for the last forty years and concentrated wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Those same policies have condensed access and opportunity to a small number of geographic hot spots and denuded all others. You can’t fix that by building more condos. And let’s not forget that a third of the space and cost of each new building is dedicated to parking two cars in their own snug living room.