| This is a common sentiment. How far does this concept go though? If a neighborhood gets too expensive, you can move without much trouble. The whole city and commuting area gets too expensive? Move again, but now find new company/personal relationships. What about all cities for <industry> get too expensive. Change careers maybe? At the very least the supply of housing should expand until it's proportionate to the amount of office space (jobs) in the area (although apparently office space is more lucrative for municipalities than housing, so we get more of it). It isn't unique to California either, most cities in the US with good job markets (NYC, Boston, Washington DC, LA, etc) have seen housing prices shoot up. I'm not sure it's true that building more housing has no effect on prices, Seattle has had a lot more housing built and apparently they haven't had quite as extreme price increases, although they also have a thriving tech industry. Raleigh/Durham has been growing incredibly fast but adding a lot of supply too. And more people moving in surely must lower the price at least where they are moving from, so if several places build prices can't go up everywhere. It might be late / politically difficult to address the issue in California, but the escalation of housing costs is such a common problem that the solution can't always be "move away from <job center>". Of course how to manage growth without excessively burdening existing residents or communities is another matter, but hopefully not impossible? Development doesn't have to go everywhere, but surely it should go somewhere? At least around transit hubs would make sense. |