All Things Are Connected. . . To Housing
An interesting angle in the New York Times on the nexus between the housing shortage in California and the impact of the recent Wine Country fires, which has left many who lost their homes with few options for temporary shelter owing to a lack of available rentals. Insult to injury on a near-tragic scale.
As the Times article describes,
California already had a housing crisis long before the fires started. With strict environmental rules and local politics that can discourage new housing development, the state’s pace of new construction has fallen far short of the state’s population growth.
In the five-year period ending in 2014, California added 544,000 households, but only 467,000 housing units, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, and the deficit is only expected to grow over the next decade. Napa and Sonoma Counties, where the fires did some of the most extensive damage, are among the furthest behind, building less than half the number of units in recent years that the state reckons were needed to keep up with the population.
Napa and Sonoma present a kind of worst-of-both-worlds scenario, according to Issi Romem, chief economist at BuildZoom, a San Francisco company that helps homeowners find contractors.
Those two counties are close enough to San Francisco and Silicon Valley that they have been affected by the heavy demand and soaring prices that have made housing unaffordable for many people in the Bay Area’s dense urban job centers, Mr. Romem said. At the same time, they are far enough away from cities that residents are still fiercely protective of their rural atmosphere and ethos, and they often resist development.
“Rebuilding is going to be tough unless some kind of streamlining is made,” he said.
Unaffordable cities. Rural areas resistant to growth. Wildfire refugees desperate for a place to rent. A warming planet made more volatile by air pollution from traffic jams and long commutes for those who have to drive to qualify.
Everything’s connected to everything else in a place called home.
Also from William Shutkin: Affordability is the New Sustainability and Prologue
