Let’s turn it over to Conor Dougherty, a reporter based in the Bay Area.
California has a conundrum: Half the state’s residents are struggling with housing costs, but there is little political appetite for building the millions of units it would take to keep prices down. A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute offers a list of suggestions for how the state could ramp up housing production.
The report’s prescriptions will be familiar to anyone who has followed the state’s housing mess. It suggests steps like building on vacant urban land, building denser apartments around transit hubs, and making it easier for homeowners to build extra units like backyard cottages.
“We need all of this, it’s not a choice,” said Jonathan Woetzel, director at McKinsey, who lives in Los Angeles.
The math is simple: California added 544,000 households from 2009 to 2014, but only 467,000 net housing units, and that deficit is set to get worse. The state is on pace to add about a million new housing units at the current rate of construction, but by then the population will have grown by 3.6 million.
All this explains why California ranks 49th of 50 (Utah is 50th) for the number of housing units per capita. And the result is that half of Californians can’t afford the cost of housing in their markets.
That might seem inconvenient and unfair to the volumes of young tech workers who make six-figure salaries and still can’t afford their rent. But for the state’s poorest residents, and even those in the working class, that burden means forgoing necessities like food and medicine.
The soaring cost of housing around college campuses was one of the main reasons a recent survey showed that close to half of the University of California’s administrative workers —– who make an average of $23 an hour -– go hungry. It is also a threat to California’s economy. The McKinsey report estimates that onerous housing costs rob California of $140 billion in economic output a year.
Many of McKinsey’s ideas would require big changes in how California cities operate. But one small solution is sitting in plain sight: The many thousands of vacant lots that are already zoned for multifamily development. In our interactive graphic, we mapped every vacant lot in San Francisco and Los Angeles Counties. These maps provide a block-by-block view of where these units might be built and some of the challenges they could face.
California has a conundrum: Half the state’s residents are struggling with housing costs, but there is little political appetite for building the millions of units it would take to keep prices down. A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute offers a list of suggestions for how the state could ramp up housing production.
The report’s prescriptions will be familiar to anyone who has followed the state’s housing mess. It suggests steps like building on vacant urban land, building denser apartments around transit hubs, and making it easier for homeowners to build extra units like backyard cottages.
“We need all of this, it’s not a choice,” said Jonathan Woetzel, director at McKinsey, who lives in Los Angeles.
The math is simple: California added 544,000 households from 2009 to 2014, but only 467,000 net housing units, and that deficit is set to get worse. The state is on pace to add about a million new housing units at the current rate of construction, but by then the population will have grown by 3.6 million.
All this explains why California ranks 49th of 50 (Utah is 50th) for the number of housing units per capita. And the result is that half of Californians can’t afford the cost of housing in their markets.
That might seem inconvenient and unfair to the volumes of young tech workers who make six-figure salaries and still can’t afford their rent. But for the state’s poorest residents, and even those in the working class, that burden means forgoing necessities like food and medicine.
The soaring cost of housing around college campuses was one of the main reasons a recent survey showed that close to half of the University of California’s administrative workers —– who make an average of $23 an hour -– go hungry. It is also a threat to California’s economy. The McKinsey report estimates that onerous housing costs rob California of $140 billion in economic output a year.
Many of McKinsey’s ideas would require big changes in how California cities operate. But one small solution is sitting in plain sight: The many thousands of vacant lots that are already zoned for multifamily development. In our interactive graphic, we mapped every vacant lot in San Francisco and Los Angeles Counties. These maps provide a block-by-block view of where these units might be built and some of the challenges they could face.
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