I personally remember the Prop 13 days; heard about the situation from afar when I was growing up in Michigan. California housing prices suddenly went berserk in the early to mid 70’s, and soon retired little old ladies were being forced out of their houses *that were paid off* because the taxes were skyrocketing on them, and they couldn’t cover them with their fixed incomes. Prop 13 was a desperate reaction to this situation. CA was practically rising up in riots over the assessments and Prop 13 staved that off.
So I’m still wondering, what changed in the mid-70’s in California? Did some building code change that suddenly made it more expensive to build new houses? Did the flat land run out? (One difference is that land here is hilly to mountainous, while the aforementioned cheap areas like Texas, Michigan, etc have flat, flat land as far as the eye can see).
AN, of course it is true that if builders would build a lot of normal-sized, affordable houses, then a lot more normal-income people could afford to buy them. But the latest building boom was all hyper-priced McMansions. I wonder if next generation a lot of those monstrosities are going to get knocked down and replaced with duplexes.
I don’t care about living in La Jolla or some ritzy neighborhood, I just want to live in a decent, quiet, middle-class bedroom community like I grew up in. Solid, 3-BR houses in low crime areas. Seems like such neighborhoods are rare here– it’s either skeevy gangbanger areas or hyper-sized hyper-priced houses. And what blows my mind is that even the dwellings in the “skeevy” areas cost as much as really nice homes in the cheaper parts of the country.
We seem to be all chewing around the edges of this question and it is that for some reason, there is a shortage of supply of dwellings here. Whether it’s building regs, county fees and taxes, lack of easy flat land, or what I don’t know. But there aren’t a surplus of houses like in Texas and the Midwest and so the sellers can charge high prices for them. And this has been the case since the mid-70’s and wasn’t the case before then.
