Joel Kotkin, a demographer and academic, asks in an Orange County Register column:
Dave Cogdill, president and ceo of the California Building Industry Association, has at least some of the answer to Kotkin’s question.
Kotkin notes that the state’s birthrate is at a historic low, especially in coastal communities, and the population drop among those under the age of 17, and among Latino and Asian households, is dramatic. What’s more, the trend is running in stark contrast to places where there’s less expensive housing, like Texas, Arizona, and the Carolinas. Kotkin writes:
Housing affordability certainly drives migration. Major metropolitan areas where the cost of housing is at least four times that of annual incomes have seen a net out-migration of 900,000 since 2010. This compares to a net gain of 1.1 million in the more affordable areas.
Hardest hit of all are the groups who will dominate our future — young people, minorities and immigrants. California boomers, as we discussed in a recent Chapman University report, have a home-ownership rate around the national average, but for people aged 25 to 34 the rate is the third-lowest in the nation, behind just New York and Washington, D.C. The drops among this demographic in the San Jose and Los Angeles areas since 1990 are roughly twice the national average.
The way these dominoes continue to fall is that California’s losing its future, its next generation of workers.
Again, Cogdill asserts that Californians–the elected official ones and the voting ones–have only themselves to hold accountable for the decline in families and in next-wave economic prosperity, nobody else. California’s shortfall of new-home development is running at 100,000 units annually, Cogdill says, and that’s why the state is stuck in a vicious circle. Recent Realtor.com research shows that of exactly 401 zip codes in the nation whose median home price listing exceeds $1 million, Southern California is host to 94 of them. Factor in Northern California, and you’re probably near half of all of America’s seven-figure zips.
In a manifesto aimed at California state and local policy-makers and addressed to “interested parties,” Cogdill plays out a grim scenario of falling dominoes from the State Legislative Analyst’s Office that looks like this:
- The inability for employers to recruit and retain employees.
- Middle and lower income wage income earners migrating out of California.
- The inability for low and middle income families to attain home ownership as a means to build wealth.
- The continuation of overcrowded housing, to the detriment of educational and behavioral health outcomes.
- An increase in the poverty index — according to the LAO, California households with incomes at the bottom quartile report spending 67% of their income on housing, 11% more than other such households spend on housing elsewhere in the country.
So, it would seem that the answer to Joel Kotkin’s question–“is California anti-family?”–would be a yes, in so many words.
Dave Cogdill focuses on four policy culprits, California-branded measures that effectively suppress the volume of new housing development necessary to tip pricing to where more ordinary household incomes can pay more ordinary monthly payments for homes and apartments. They are:
- Mandated Residential Prevailing Wage on Privately Funded Residential Projects.
- Inclusionary zoning.
- Overly burdensome and costly environmental mandates.
- Policies that implement costly mandates, price controls and/or construction taxes on new, market-rate housing.
It would seem the fault for such onerous and ultimately harmful conditions would be elected and appointed officials in the state legislature, Sacramento, and in city and town commissions and boards who set planning and zoning rules of engagement. Cogdill’s role and appropriate focus is on trying to get such officials to see what they’re doing in the light of consequences they may or may not intend in their efforts to adopt measures that protect and sustain quality of life for the voters who put them in office.
Which reminds me of a perspective our 2016 Hive dean Dowell Myers–professor of urban planning and demography in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development, at the University of Southern California–offered.
“Housing has a public relations problem.”
He said it this way not to deflect attention and blame away from elected officials in California, but to shed light on a root cause of their positions on the issues, people, voters, current homeowners, community leaders, crusaders for causes. Californians, in other words.
Joel Kotkin asks, “is California anti-family?” Dowell Myers looks at all those policies whose effect is to suppress attainable housing and observes:
“The people who have no housing can’t vote. The people who own homes use their votes against the ones who want to own them.”
Follow the logic through, and you quickly see a very strong match between the “people” in the first sentence–the ones who have no housing [and] can’t vote”–and the young, the minorities, and the immigrants, the future of the workforce.
Cogdill’s manifesto is as strong a statement as any in identifying specific interventionist policies states, local governments, and communities develop as protective or supportive measures. He reflects builders’ and developers’ sharp challenge to the effectiveness of those measures to achieve their intended goals; and he voices builders’ and developers’ assertion of, perhaps, an unintended consequence those measures create.
That is: a choke hold on the future workforce, and the economy. As Myers put it:
“I’m worried because Los Angeles is losing its young people, and if the trends continue, there will be no people to come into the jobs we need them to do, and no people coming up demanding the homes we need them to buy to support the rest of the housing economy. It’s a human capital issue.”
California has a crisis, but California is not alone. Other states, other counties, other municipal and community jurisdictions are playing out versions of the same game of risk. People who vote use their votes to protect lives, livelihoods, surroundings, and lifestyles they value. People who don’t vote don’t get a say, and as a result, they may get priced out of living one place or another.
So, they leave. That’s a risk voters and their representative officials seem willing to take. One day, they’ll awaken to realize that other voters, the new, vibrant workforce in some other town, or city, or state, will have voted with their feet.
No state can be anti-family forever.
