[DannyBee]

Which would just make more people want to live there, and ... make supply lower, and make the cost go up.

California has a finite people carrying capacity. You can remove all the cars, build sky scrapers to the stratosphere, etc, etc.

It's like arguing that all the people in the world who want to live in hawaii should be able to live in hawaii.

[barrkel]

California isn't very densely populated. It's much less populated than UK, Switzerland, Italy, Germany etc.

Large swathes of the coastline are protected. That's not a particularly bad thing. But also, development in general is really wasteful of space. Spending time in California as a European was an object lesson in scale: everything is bigger than it needs to be, everything is spread out, walking places takes ages, roads are far wider than necessary, parking lots take up loads of space (legally mandated!), etc.

[gr33nman]

California's urban planning has long been guided by the assumption that everyone owns an automobile:

http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Environment/E_Casestudy/E_...

As vigorously promoted by the automobile industry:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con...