Introduction
California’s housing construction has recovered slowly from its collapse from 2006-2009, with new permits escalating from 59,000 to 102,000 housing units permitted per year from 2012 to 2016.[1]
Homes are more expensive in California than in every other state except Hawaii. A median-priced California home was only 30 percent higher than the national average in 1970[6] where today it is 2.5 times more expensive in California than it is nationally.[7] Six of the country’s most expensive rental markets are in California.[8] And the median sale price of a home increased almost twice as much as nationally.[9]
As a result, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego are three of the four most unequal cities in the country.[10] And northern California is more expensive than southern California. The median rents in Los Angeles and San Francisco are $2,725 and $3,266, respectively.[11] Median rents have increased 49 percent in San Francisco and 25 percent in Los Angeles since January 2011.[12]
The cost of housing is so high that in 2017, 56 percent of all Californians surveyed said they had considered moving and 27 percent said they had considered moving out of state.[13] Where 56 percent of Californians could afford a middle-class home in 2012, in the third quarter of 2017, just 28 percent could.[14]
The young, the poor, and non-whites are disproportionately affected. Homeownership among baby boomers in California is close to the national average while just one out of four Californians between the ages of 25 and 34 own a home.[15] California has the third-worst state homeownership rate for millennials in all of the United States. And in the U.S. as a whole, the gap between black and white home ownership is now 30 percent, wider than at any point since the second world war.[16]
This matters to rising social inequality because homeownership has long been and remains the primary way that families accumulate wealth over time. Homeowners have a net worth that is 36 to 45 times higher than that of renters, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve.[17]
In 2015, more than half of California renter households and more than a third of mortgage holders paid over 30 percent of income toward housing,[18] a share that has historically been viewed as too high to still allow consumption of other basic goods.[19] In Los Angeles, half of households spend 30 percent of their income on housing; in Stockton, California, 61 percent do.[20] In 2016, nearly 30 percent of tenants in California put half of their income toward rent and utilities.[21]
Housing is so expensive that it is reducing economic growth. Land use restrictions nationally have reduced economic and wage growth by 50 percent over the last 50 years. Without those restrictions, the average American worker would be earning an additional $7,000 a year in income.[22]
California’s economy loses $140 billion per year in economic output because of California’s high housing prices, according to McKinsey — an amount that includes economic output from construction, as well as consumption.[23]
And the housing shortage is choking the growth of the high-tech industry in northern California. Between 2015 and 2017, San Francisco added 38,000 new jobs but only 4,500 new housing units.[24] And the situation risks becoming far worse if nearly seven million more people move to California over the next 20 years, as state demographers predict.[25]
The impact of the housing crisis can be seen in the streets. Some students at the elite University of California - Berkeley are forced live out of their cars.[26] And over the last two years, homeless encampments containing hundreds of people have appeared under highways throughout the Bay Area.[27]
Lacking shelter, homeless Californians are dying in record numbers. In Silicon Valley, 132 people died on the street in 2016 — up from 85 in 2015.[28] In San Diego, 117 people died in 2016, up from 56 the year before.[29]
Experts agree that the high price of housing in California is due to scarcity from a growing human population and insufficient new construction. The state Legislative Analyst’s Office says meeting demand would require increasing new housing construction by more than 100 percent, from 80,000 units per year to 180,000 or more.[30]
Meanwhile, California’s sales and income taxes are among the highest in the nation and, by some calculations, the highest, while its property tax burden is unequally distributed, and regressive. California has the highest sales tax in the country at 7.25 percent.[31] It has the highest income tax rate for the top tier earners at 13.3 percent.[32] At the same time, the majority of tax relief from proposition 13 goes to wealthier households. “About two–thirds of tax relief goes to those with incomes higher than $80,000,” notes the state’s Legislative Analyst’s office, “with the bulk of that relief going to homeowners with incomes in excess of $120,000.”[33]
As a result of our high cost of living, California has the highest poverty rate in America, according to the United States Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure — a rate higher even than Mississippi.[34]
Workers in California have higher incomes, earning 11 percent more than the national average,[35] but that amount is not enough for many workers to make up for home mortgage payments and rents that are 44 percent and 37 percent more, respectively, than the national average. Housing prices in Los Angeles rose four times faster than incomes between 2000 and 2015.[36]
California’s high housing prices are driving good jobs out of the state. For example, in 2014, Toyota started moving its headquarters — and the high, executive-level jobs with it — to Texas, so that its employees could afford housing. As executives with one of the world’s largest automakers leave the state, the possibility of creating high-wage manufacturing jobs within Toyota’s supply chain also diminishes.[37]
The Bay Area’s slow housing growth is sending good jobs to other parts of the country. Portland, Oregon, Austin, Texas, and Raleigh, North Carolina, notes Liam Dillon of the Los Angeles Times, are building new homes twice as quickly as the Bay Area, making it more affordable for company employees to buy homes.[38]
Meanwhile, electricity, natural gas, and petroleum in the form of gasoline are all more expensive in California than in other states,[39] and anything that increases the cost of basic needs like energy and food is regressive. The poor are disproportionately impacted by higher energy and food prices because they must spend more of their income on them.[40]
There is plenty of land physically available in California to build new homes, both in the cities and the suburbs. While California is the most populous state, it is also the third largest state geographically, after Alaska and Texas. Recently, McKinsey & Co. did a detailed mapping of housing potential in California and found large areas of land available even within desirable coastal cities, including San Francisco.[41]
The population density of California’s cities is relatively low compared to other states. Manhattan and New York City are four and one-and-a-half times more population dense, respectively, than San Francisco.[42] in San Francisco. Even Southern California is relatively population diffuse, with just 8,484, 10,983, and 4,326 people/mile in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and San Diego[43] compared to 69,467 people per square mile in Manhattan.
The cost of land does not appear to be a factor driving higher housing prices in California. Economic studies find land costs in California are about 10 percent of total project costs, which is low relative to the rest of the country.[44]
In September, 2017, Brown signed legislation passed by the legislature to increase the supply of housing.[4] The legislation seeks to streamline regulations and increase spending on affordable housing. Its authors say it could result in 70,000 units.[5] And Brown has put on the 2018 ballot another affordable housing bond that would raise $4 billion to subsidize affordable housing.
Gov. Brown last September signed new housing legislation to raise $250 million per year to subsidizing housing. But at current average required federal and state subsidy of $137,000 per affordable unit[45], that $250 million would be enough to subsidize just 1,824 units in total — about 92,000 short of what is needed.[46]
At $137,000 per unit, it would cost $69 billion to subsidize the building of the minimum of 500,000 housing units California needs to build over a three year period to meet demand. To put that amount of money in context, California’s total budget for 2017-2018 is $183 billion.[47] The $69 billion would represent 37 percent of the state’s total budget, or an additional $5,113 in taxes for every Californian family.[48]
And none of these measures would deal with the high cost of building new homes, which has reached record proportions. Today in California there are 14,000 housing units that have been approved for construction but aren’t being built because the cost of delivering them would require rent payments of $4,000/month and higher.[49]
Exclusionary Housing Policies
One of the main obstacle to more housing is that California isn’t zoned to allow more dense housing, and local communities can organize politically to stop homes that are legal for a zoned area. Local governments are currently able to reject new housing even when it complies with the rules.[52] Over 80 percent of all CEQA lawsuits are filed against urban “infill” housing projects. In Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, 98 percent and 100 percent, respectively, of all CEQA lawsuits targeted infill development[53]
Exclusionary housing policies didn’t come to an end, they simply took new form. The 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed redlining and afterwards, Richard Rothstein, “it was not primarily discrimination (although this still contributed) that kept African Americans out of most white suburbs… it was primarily unaffordability.”[54]
Environmentalism is used to justify de facto racial segregation in housing. Lawsuits filed under the state’s 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA, pronounced “see kwa”) are a major reason for longer delays and higher costs of new housing. “The core legal structure of CEQA,” notes housing attorney Jennifer Hernandez, “protects the existing characteristics of those neighborhoods and thus perpetuates land use practices founded in race and class discrimination.”[55]
Racial segregation in the guise of environmentalism is on display in Marin County just north of San Francisco on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, where 85 percent of the county is off-limits to new housing.[56] In 2009, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development found that the county’s housing policies contributed to the segregation of blacks and Latinos to just a few neighborhoods.[57] And new research finds that Marin has larger inequities between racial groups than any other county in California.[58]
One-quarter of all CEQA lawsuits are aimed at stopping new housing. CEQA allows multiple parties to sue anonymously even after work on a project has started and even completed.[59] “And once a project is approved, it faces an endless series of appeals and lawsuits that can add years of delay.” Write economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti:
Appeals are remarkably easy and affordable to file and can be done anonymously. This basically gives every neighbor a veto over every new project, regardless of how desirable the project might be. It’s as if BlackBerry had veto power over whether Apple should be allowed to sell a new iPhone.[60]
Most CEQA lawsuits are filed against projects in urban areas, and only 13 percent are filed by actual environmental groups. Over half of CEQA lawsuits are filed in San Francisco and Los Angeles urban regions. Many of the rest are filed by businesses seeking to undermine competitors, and by labor unions — particularly mechanical, electrical, and plumbing unions, known as the “MEP Trade Unions — seeking to stop projects that do agree to “project labor agreements” that require union labor.[61]
The MEP unions, which represent an older, wealthier, and whiter workforce than most unions, have blocked CEQA reform. Writes housing advocate Hernandez:
Even projects that are required by law, or agree to pay, the “prevailing wages” established by a state agency (which are typically just under three times higher than local wages for comparable work), find themselves targeted with CEQA lawsuits and lawsuit threats by union locals that demand that jobs go to their members — payments of prevailing wages alone is not sufficient[62]
The Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and other heavily funded environmental organizations oppose reforms to CEQA. While these groups file just 13 percent of CEQA lawsuits, they along with labor unions are one of the main obstacles to reforming CEQA in Sacramento.[63]
Between 1997 and 2002, 342,000 acres were converted from farming to housing. Between 2007 and 2012, that amount had declined by more than half.[64]
Between 2007 and 2013, the highest-income 40 percent of California households received three times more in solar subsidies — valued between $10,000 and $20,000 per household — as the lowest-income 40 percent. California households with over $100,000 in annual income benefitted from energy efficiency subsidies at twice the rate of households whose income was under $50,000.[65]
The housing crisis that is choking economic growth in California, particularly Silicon Valley, at a cost of $140 billion annually, is a consequence of the above alliance of rent-seeking interests.
And when faced with a growing population, California built a housing, transportation, energy and water infrastructure to accommodate it.[66]
Creating more abundant housing across California will require more housing in cities (“densification” or “intensification”) as well as in suburbs and exurbs (“extensification”). Building many new homes in cities near transit lines, as recently proposed by California YIMBY and San Francisco State Senator Scott Wiener, are unlikely to result in sufficient new supplies at low enough prices to meet California’s needs.
Even in San Francisco, noted housing economist Issi Romem, “hemmed in by mountains, water and a quasi-religious environmental mindset, 78.7 percent of new homes were built in low density areas” as of 1980. There was increased densification in the 1990s and 2000s, Issi notes, “but has been far too limited in scale to reverse the long term trend of decreasing densification.” [67]
This is true for physical, economic and political reasons. At a physical level, opening more of California up to housing construction creates more opportunities for increased supply. Economically, doing so results in lower prices. And politically, an agenda to increase housing everywhere is likely to create a wider coalition for reform, and the critically important sense that the burden of new housing is not falling disproportionately on any one group of people.
The most expensive housing is high-density housing. High-rise buildings are the most expensive housing units. Mid-rise buildings are the second most expensive. Suburban tract homes built on greenfields are the cheapest. A recent study found that the construction cost of building an apartment cost 2.5 times more per square foot than building a single family home, with the construction costs twice as high for the apartment as the home.[68]
These trends have led some housing analysts to conclude intensification-alone is highly unlikely. Writes Romem, "The control of planning decisions in the U.S. tends to be highly dispersed, and decisions made at a more local level tend to reject development because negatively impacted stakeholders are usually concentrated nearby, whereas the beneficiaries are not. Moreover, the expensive cities’ current trajectory ultimately benefits the haves, who hold more sway than the have-nots."[69]
Consider housing near the Oakland Coliseum. Everyone, McKinsey & Co. included, agrees the most potential for new housing is near urban BART and other transit hubs like the Oakland Coliseum.[72] It has easy access to BART, highways, and other mass transit. It’s a perfect spot for new housing.
The problem is that the new housing at the Coliseum would be $4.50/foot square, because of requirements that it be done at prevailing wage and with inclusionary units. That amount translates to $4,500 per month in rent for a 1000-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment.[73] If 30 percent of one’s income is going to rent, housing near the Coliseum would require an annual household incomes of $150,000. There’s not enough potential renters with those incomes, and so the people who would finance the building won’t take the risk.[74]
And many if not most of the people who could spend $4,500 on rent would be far better off financially investing that money into a home that they own, and yet 95 percent of all homes being built in California today are for rental units, which closes the door to wealth accumulation.[75]
What to Do
The first step is to reform CEQA along the lines proposed by environmental attorney Jennifer Hernandez and others. This should consist first of ending anonymity in lawsuits. Doing so would allow the public to see whether the lawsuit is being pursued by someone with a genuinely public and environmental interest or a self-interested business objective. Second, the allowance for duplicative lawsuits buy different parties should end. Lawsuits should be consolidated and dealt with. Finally, legislators should limit the ability of judges to block developments if a CEQA study finds harm, and instead require appropriate mitigation.[76]
This economic dynamic suggests that a broadly pro-housing alliance is required, one that unites all parties seeking more housing, whether intensive or extensive, to overcome organized opposition. The obvious constituents of such an alliance would be high-tech companies whose employees need housing; Millennials,; renters,; developers,; and labor unions, whose members make too much to qualify for subsidized housing and too little to afford to live near where they work.
The good news is that 65 to 70 percent of Californians say they support more housing in their own communities, which suggests that NIMBYs are a small but powerful minority. Even some prominent CEQA attorneys have called for reform to end the abuse of the law by NIMBYs, economic competitors, and unions seeking project labor agreements. “CEQA has… been misused by people whose move is not environmental protection but using the law as leverage for other purposes.”[77]
Wrote a progressive Berkeley professor recently for the New York Times. "I’m a committed environmentalist, and it made me rethink the way I engage with such issues: For example, I was a member of the Sierra Club for a more than a decade. But because of all the unwise battles waged by the San Francisco chapter against smart housing growth in the city, I quit to support other environmental groups.'[78]
[1] Data from U.S. Census Bureau, Building Permit Survey.
[2] Greenbelt Alliance, Elizabeth Stevens, "Migration Key To San Joaquin County Growth". December 30, 2015. Central Valley Business Journal. Accessed January 19, 2018; “San Joaquin Valley Demographic Forecasts 2010 to 2050”The Planning Center | Design Community & Environment, p.7, March 27, 2012
[3] “Net Energy Metering law (Public Utilities Code 2827),” California Public Utilities Commission, January 28, 2016.
[4] “Governor Brown Signs Comprehensive Legislative Package to Increase State’s Housing Supply and Affordability.” Office of Governor Edmund G. Brown, September 29, 2017
[5] Sen. Kevin DeLeon, President pro Tempore,”California Legislature Sends Historic Housing Package to Governor’s Desk,” September 2017.
[6] Allysia Finley, “Why Housing Is Unaffordable in California.”Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2017
[7] Data from Zillow. Data extracted on: 1/9/2018
This point was also raised in the following article: The Daily Breeze, Levin, M., August 27, 2017. “California’s housing crisis – it’s even worse than you think.” The Mercury News.
[8] Hans Johnson & Marisol Mejia, “California’s Future - Housing.” Public Policy Institute of California, January 2017.
[9] Where the median sale price of a home in California rose 80 percent, from $254,300 to $456,800, from the start of 2011 to late 2017, the rise in price in the rest of the country was 43 percent. And the median value of all houses rose 59 percent, from $323,700 to $515,800, while those in the rest of the country rose 30 percent, from $156,900 to $204,200.
Data from Zillow. Data extracted on: 1/9/2018
[10] Florida, R. April 13, 2017. “Mapping the New Urban Crisis.” Citylab.com.
[11] From Zillow, “Zillow Rent Index”. Data extracted on: 1/9/2018
[12] From Zillow, “Zillow Rent Index”. Data extracted on: 1/9/2018
[13] Mark DiCamillo, “Half say housing affordability an “extremely serious” problem,” Berkeley IGS Poll, September 19, 2017
[14] California Realtors Association, “Housing Affordability Report, 2nd Quarter, 2017,” August 9, 2017.
Data also cited in Kotkin, J., and Cox, W., “California politicians not serious about fixing housing crisis.” Los Angeles Daily News, September 10, 2017.
[15] Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, “Fading Promise: Millennial Prospects in the Golden State.” Chapman University: Center for Demographics and Policy, 2017.
[16] “The State of the Nation’s Housing”, Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2017
[17] Jesse Bricker, et al., “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2010 to 2013,” Federal Reserve Bulletin, September 2014.
Lawrence Yun, “How do homeowners accumulate wealth?” Forbes, October 14, 2015.
[18] Sara Kimberlin, "Californians In All Parts Of The State Pay More Than They Can Afford For Housing - California Budget & Policy Center",California Budget & Policy Center, September 2017.
[19] Chris Matthews, “Why should you only spend 30 percent of your income on housing?” Fortune, August 4, 2015. http://fortune.com/2015/08/04/housing-30-percent-rule/
[20] Benjamin Oreskes & Shelby Grad, “Essential California: The many different facets of California's housing crisis.” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 2017
[21] Andrew Khouri, "For Tenants On The Edge, Paying The Rent Often Takes More Than Half Their Income". Los Angeles Times. December 3, 2017
[22] Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, “Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation,” National Bureau of Economic Research, May 18, 2017. See also, Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, “How Local Housing Regulations Smother the U.S. Economy,” New York Times, September 6, 2017.
[23]Jonathan Woetzel & Jan Mischke, “Closing California’s housing gap.” McKinsey & Company, October 2016.
[24] Enrico Moretti, “Fires Aren’t the Only Threat to the California Dream,” New York Times, November 3, 2017.
[25] California State Department of Finance, “New State Population Projections,” March 8, 2017.
[26] Holly J. McDede, "Crammed Into Berkeley's Housing Zone, Students Get Creative—And Desperate”, Cal Alumni Association, October 13, 2015
[27] Tammerlin Drummond, "Homeless Encampment Crisis, Oakland Officials Under Fire To Find Solutions", The Mercury News, May 24, 2017.
[28] Eric Kurhi, "Santa Clara County Report Shows Surge In Homeless Deaths", The Mercury News, August 6, 2017.
[29] Gary Warth, "Candlelight Walk Honors 117 Homeless Deaths In 2017". San Diego Tribune, November 3, 2017.
[30] Legislative Analyst’s Office, “California’s High Housing Costs: Causes and Consequences,” March 17, 2015; Jonathan Woetzel, Jan Mischke, Shannon Peloquin, and Daniel Weisfield“Closing California’s housing gap: 3.5 million homes by 2025”, McKinsey & Company, 2016
[31]Jared Walczak & Scott Drenkard "State And Local Sales Tax Rates, Midyear 2017 - Tax Foundation,” Tax Foundation, July 5, 2017. Accessed January 11, 2018.
[32] Nicole Kaeding, "State Individual Income Tax Rates And Brackets For 2016 - Tax Foundation," Tax Foundation, 2016. Accessed January 11 2018.
[33] California Legislative Analyst Office, “Common Claims about Proposition 13,” September 19, 2016.
[34]Trudi Renwick & Liana Fox, “The Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2015.” The U.S. Census Bureau, September 2016.
[35] Sarah Bohn and Marisol Cuellar Mejia, “California’s Future: Economy,” Public Policy Institute of California, January 2018
[36] The Times Editorial Board, “L.A. has a serious housing crisis and it's time for city officials to do something about it.” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2015.
[37] Jerry Hirsch & Tim Logan, “Was Toyota driven out of California? Not so fast.” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 2018.
[38] Lian Dillon, “California lawmakers have tried for 50 years to fix the state’s housing crisis. Here’s why they’ve failed,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2017.
[39] Table 3 California State Energy Profile, U.S. Energy Information Administration, October 19, 2017
[40] “One in three U.S. households faced challenges in paying energy bills in 2015,” Energy Information Agency, 2017.
[41] Jonathan Woetzel, Jan Mischke, Shannon Peloquin & Daniel Weisfield,“Closing California’s housing gap: 3.5 million homes by 2025,” McKinsey & Company, 2016
[42] New York City has 28,211 people per square mile, Manhattan has 69,467 people per square mile compared to just 18,581 people per square mile in San Francisco. Data file from Geography Division based on the TIGER/Geographic Identification Code Scheme (TIGER/GICS) computer file. Data is from Census 2010. “Quick Facts. Population per square mile, 2010: San Francisco City, California.” U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population and Housing
[43] “Quick Facts. Population per square mile, 2010: Los Angeles City, California.” U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population and Housing; “Quick Facts. Population per square mile, 2010: Santa Monica City, California.” U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population and Housing; “Quick Facts. Population per square mile, 2010: San Diego City, California.” U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population and Housing
[44] Alex Lantsberg, “California’s Housing Crisis, Construction Labor, & The Costs Of Multi-Family Housing,” California Economic Summit, November 9, 2016.
[45] Data from federal and state LIHTC programs, as reported in the 2016 report from the Treasury of California.
[46] Mike Gatto, “10 points to keep in mind about housing affordability in California.” Los Angeles Times, September 20, 2017.
[47] State of California “2017-18 California State Budget” June 27, 2017
[48] From U.S. Census Bureau data, California’s estimated July 2017 population of 39,536,653, and average household size of 2.95.If a proposed 2018 bond measure passes, and $4 billion total is raised, significantly more housing units could be built. But assuming the money is well-spent, at the current average required subsidy of $137,000 per affordable unit, the bond would deliver just 29,187 units in total, or about three percent of what’s needed.
[49] Jennifer Hernandez, interview, January 5, 2018.
[50] Gavin Newsom, "The California Dream Starts At Home,” Medium, October 20, 2017. Accessed January 11 2018; Liam Dillon, “Gavin Newsom calls for California to nearly quadruple its annual housing production,” Los Angeles Times, October 3, 2017.
[51] Ibid
[52] Brian Hanlon, interview, January 11, 2018.
[53] Jennifer Hernandez, “California’s Environmental Quality Act Lawsuits and California’s Housing Crisis,” Hastings Law Review, Winter 2018.
[54] Richard Rothstein, “Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” Liveright, 2017
[55] Hernandez, 2018.
[56] Liam Dillon, “Marin County has long resisted growth in the name of environmentalism. But high housing costs and segregation persist,” Los Angeles Times, January 7, 2018.
[57] Caroline Peattie and Jessica Tankersley, “Marin County Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice,” Fair Housing of Marin, October 11, 2011.
[58] Advancement Project California; “Race Counts”, racecounts.org, Winter 2017. This Los Angeles-based non-profit used measures for performance, disparity, and impact in California counties to understand racial equity across seven key issue areas: crime and justice, democracy, economic opportunity, education, health access, healthy built environments, and housing. Data for each issue area is collected from metrics such as graduation rate and home ownership from sources such as US Census Bureau and California Department of Justice.
Racial groups are directly compared using rate differences from the metrics. A difference index averages the absolute rate differences between group rates and a reference rate (i.e., the best rate of a particular race for each metric), and expresses it as a percentage of the reference rate. To rank California counties by performance and racial disparity, z-scores are calculated for county metric total values and the difference indexes. These z-scores are averaged across indicators to provide an aggregate score for each county by issue area and overall.
[59] Jennifer Hernandez, “California’s Environmental Quality Act Lawsuits and California’s Housing Crisis,” Hastings Law Review, Winter 2018.
[60] Hsieh and Moretti, New York Times, September 6, 2017.
[61] Jennifer Hernandez, “California’s Environmental Quality Act Lawsuits and California’s Housing Crisis,” Hastings Law Review, Winter 2018.
[62] Jennifer Hernandez, “California’s Environmental Quality Act Lawsuits and California’s Housing Crisis,” Hastings Law Review, Winter 2018.
[63] Liam Dillon, “Labor unions, environmentalists are biggest opponents of Gov. Brown’s affordable housing plan,” Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2016.
[64] “Summary Report: 2012 Natural Resources Inventory,” U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service, August 2015.
[65] Andrew Campbell, “Bringing Fairness to Energy Programs,” Energy Institute, July 5, 2017; Severin Borenstein, “Private net benefits of residential solar PV,” University of Chicago Press, August 4, 2017.
[66] Kevin Starr, “Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance 1950 - 1963,” Oxford University Press, 2009.
[67] Issi Romem, “Can U.S. Cities Compensate for Curbing Sprawl by Growing Denser?” BuildZoom, September 14, 2016.
[68] Hernandez, Hastings, 2018.
[69] Issi Romem, “Can U.S. Cities Compensate for Curbing Sprawl by Growing Denser?” BuildZoom, September 14, 2016.
[70] Hayward, P., “The Myth of Affordable Intensification,” Making New Zealand for Urban Planning that Works,” September 1, 2016.
[71] Hayward, 2016.
[72] Woetzel, J., & Mischke, J., "Closing California’s Housing Gap,"Mckinsey & Company, October 6, 2016. Accessed January 11 2018.
[73] Matier, P. & Ross., A. "Oakland Has A Plan B For A’s. It’s Called The Coliseum," San Francisco Chronicle, December 9, 2017. Accessed January 11 2018.
[74] Jennifer Hernandez, interview.
[75] John Gamboa, interview.
[76] Hernandez, Hastings Law Journal, ibid.
[77] E. Clement Shute, Jr., Reprise of Fireside Chat, Yosemite Environmental Law Conference, Environmental Law News, 2016, cited in Hernandez, 2018.
[78] Moretti, E., Fires Aren’t the Only Threat to the California Dream,” New York Times, November 3, 2017.