Austin, December 2049

Today, state officials held a massive parade and public barbecue to celebrate official federal confirmation that Texas is America’s greatest and most important state.

The occasion: The U.S. Census Bureau released estimates showing that the ever-growing Lone Star State, with more than 40.3 million people, had surpassed stagnant California, stuck at just under 40 million people for 30 years.

As Texans boasted about their new status—“We are the greatest civilization of the greatest country on earth,” declared 79-year-old U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, now in his seventh term—Golden State leaders issued well-practiced denials.

“Population isn’t a true measure of greatness,” protested California Gov. Meghan Markle. “California is still the land of the grandest dreams, of the most embarrassing celebrities, of $10 million two-bedroom starter homes.”

But most longtime observers of the Golden State shrugged at Texas’ triumph.

Some noted that, as early as 2023, estimates from demographers predicted that Texas would surpass California in population by 2050.

In retrospect, 2023 was also the year it became obvious that California would willingly cede national leadership to Texas, signaling its surrender with a total lack of response to a startling and historic drop in population.

California’s population had always grown, often dramatically, ever since statehood. And when California passed New York to become the most populous state in November 1962, the moment launched an era in which the Golden State was seen as the nation’s leader in culture, economy, and policymaking.

That era started to end in the COVID-19 pandemic. From July 2020 to July 2022, it lost more than half a million people. Many pinned the cause on COVID deaths, and Californians leaving the state. But deaths and departures were part of the population decline.

The real problem was the lack of new Californians. The birth rate fell to a level that made old Europe look fertile. Immigration plummeted too, in part because of cruel and restrictionist federal immigration policies. And Americans all but stopped moving to California, with its rampant homelessness and expensive housing. How could they afford to?

In a saner time, such a rapid reversal of population in a state synonymous with arrival and growth—“California, Here I Come”—would have been considered a crisis. State and local governments would have come forward with new programs to encourage births, to keep existing Californians in the state, and to attract new ones. Budget surpluses could have been devoted to big new tax bonuses for starting families, to loan forgiveness for California university graduates who settled in the state after graduation, and to massive new affordable housing and infrastructure projects.

But 2023 was a very peculiar and unsettled time. People were depressed and anxious. Society was divided and in conflict. The public conversation, diminished by the decline of independent media, offered few visions of the future. Instead, the state and the country were consumed by loud and angry debates about racial and gender identity, and how to reinterpret the past.

So, Californians never seized on population decline as a reason to remake and rebuild the state.

And they never did the democratic math and recognized that losing population would mean losing power and influence.

Instead, Californians used population decline as an excuse not to do new and hard things.

This denial was most prominent on housing. Communities countered state pressure to build more housing by arguing that housing wouldn’t be necessary because there would be fewer people. This was a cynical bit of illogic—there couldn’t be more Californians without more housing—and it ignored the hard fact that California’s housing stock was the oldest in the West (and as old as housing stock in much of the Rust Belt).

But it worked. Media amplified the argument. State courts began embracing an argument that people themselves were pollution under the state’s main environmental law. And housing production, which had dropped by nearly half between the early 2000s and the early 2020s, continued its fall. The housing shortage became permanent, freezing California’s population at 40 million.

A similar dynamic froze California in other ways. With the population of children declining rapidly, school districts shut down schools and programs, instead of expanding educational offerings and building new schools to draw more kids. The state’s university systems, consumed by culture war and workplace conduct controversies, did too little to counter declines in enrollment. California’s powerful environmental groups and labor unions kept fighting efforts to build new, climate-resilient infrastructure in water, energy, and transportation.

The message sent by California to the rest of the world was clear: If we don’t build it, you won’t come.

And you didn’t.

In truth, today’s news on state populations was just the latest in a long series of declines. The Texas economy became bigger than California’s in 2040, which was not much of a surprise. Texas had been the nation’s leader in exports and renewable energy since early in the 21st century. For a couple of generations, Texas invested a higher percentage of its budget in education, and delivered better student outcomes, than California.

Meanwhile, the Digital Age ended the primacy of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The entertainment and technology sectors could operate anywhere and no longer required headquarters in California, or anywhere else.

California’s slide down the economic rankings came quickly. In 2023, California’s governor liked to brag about the state becoming the world’s fourth largest economy. The state is down to 14th place today, and dropping.

Which leaves us with questions. If California had focused more on growth and the future back in the 2020s, could it have remained bigger and richer than Texas? Or could the state at least have forestalled its decline?

Maybe. But we’ll never know, because California never really tried.

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Homeless people.

Google all you want: You’ll find a lot of surveys about what housed people in L.A. think about unhoused people. You’ll find endless columns on what experts opine. But until recently, you’d be hard-pressed to find studies asking the people actually experiencing homelessness what they think should be done about the crisis.

Two recent surveys do just that—finally.

With a rise in homeless encampments, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, policy makers have implemented at-times scattershot efforts to combat the problem, with costs projected in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But such plans, said one researcher, were “formulated with no clear evidence on the housing needs and preferences of unsheltered people, information that’s critical to understanding the feasibility of these policies.”

The two new studies seek to bridge the gap between the well-intentioned plans and what unhoused people themselves say they actually need.

In both cases, homeless people overwhelmingly told researchers their first priority is—get ready for it—housing.

That seems like a no-brainer, but in fact is big news that should combat pervasive myths that suggest homeless people prefer to live in encampments, that it’s preferable to wait for more permanent housing, or that even if taxpayers funded shelters, homeless people wouldn’t agree to go there.

A recently released RAND Corporation survey, conducted from September 2021 to January 2022, interviewed 216 homeless men and women living in Venice, Hollywood, downtown, and at the Veterans Affairs complex near Brentwood. It reported that 90% expressed interest in finding housing, but that bureaucratic delays (41% of the unhoused never received follow-ups to housing applications) and inappropriate shelter offerings present serious obstacles.

The RAND finding that the overwhelming percentage of homeless people want to be sheltered tracks with another just-released study, conducted in February 2022, by the Santa Monica-based A-Mark Foundation, which I joined as CEO in June.

A-Mark teamed up with UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs to send graduate student researchers to L.A.’s Skid Row, where they asked 100 unhoused men and women living there what they would do about homelessness if they were mayor of Los Angeles.

Researchers asked unhoused people to list their top five priorities from a menu of options, which included healthcare, necessities, resources, sanitation/safety, and housing. Overwhelmingly, 92% of respondents chose securing temporary or permanent shelter as their first priority if they were, hypothetically, mayor of L.A., and as their answer to the follow-up question: “What kinds of things would you do in the short run?”

The fact that housing rated so highly in both the RAND and A-Mark studies punctures the myth that homeless people prefer homelessness. This directive should prod policy makers and activists toward immediate, if temporary, housing solutions. Because these studies make it clear: If you build it correctly, they will come.

I want to emphasize my use of the word “correctly” here, because that is where a lot of the misconceptions around the need to prioritize housing for people who are homeless takes root.

The RAND and A-Mark surveys offered helpful data to help policymakers understand what kinds of temporary shelter work, and how best to organize the bureaucracy around them.

In two focus groups that were part of the A-Mark Foundation survey, women said they avoided shelters that broke up families. Just 14% of the shelter units in Los Angeles serve families, according to a 2018 LAHSA count.

“The kids got to go with the mom,” one woman said, “and the dads got to go somewhere else, and then they can’t be together.”

Lack of security at shelters and concern over sexual violence were also named as top concerns. Men said curfews that made shelters feel like prison and prohibitions against dogs kept them away.

“If shelters or transitional housing require sharing rooms, have curfews and other rules, or reduce people’s sense of self-determination,” the RAND researchers echoed, “our research suggests these won’t be an effective approach to reducing street homelessness.”

On the bureaucratic side, the RAND study cited inherent problems with a multi-step system that requires caseworkers to enroll homeless people for housing, then go find them when housing becomes available. Encampment sweeps and the very nature of homelessness make that a challenge, and caseworker burnout itself is high. The result? The RAND survey reported that 75% of respondents had been continuously homeless for over a year, and 50% had been homeless for three years.

The RAND study also found that the majority of homeless people resided in Los Angeles County before ending up at their current location, and 75% reported residing in California—two data points that contradict the common notion that L.A.’s unhoused all come from somewhere else.

As the RAND and A-Mark studies revealed, despite concerns and circumstances that kept people away from shelters, they still wanted housing. “Walking around with pepper spray,” one unhoused man told the A-Mark team, “that’s my life.”

Said another unhoused man about what his approach would be if he were mayor: “Some people have given up hope, we have to give them hope.”

The RAND researchers acknowledged that Angelenos are tired of encampments and eager for solutions, but observed that “it will do no good to respond to this political imperative with policies that are ineffective.”

The voices of L.A.’s unhoused speak through this new research, and suggest productive paths forward. They point to the need for more shelters, especially those that take families, like Upward Bound in Santa Monica, and more private “tiny home” shelters with pet areas, like the Arroyo Seco Tiny Home Village in Highland Park.

We need to collect more research from people undergoing homelessness to learn what kinds of temporary shelter they would be most likely to successfully move into, and then transition out of into more permanent homes.

But we needn’t wait for more research to absorb the central lesson of these studies. The voices of our unhoused neighbors are clear: If a magic wand could be waved over the City of Angels, giving them mayoral power, the first thing they would do is provide shelter.

It’s a message our next actual mayor needs to hear.

The post What Do Unhoused People Want Most? Ask Them appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Skyrocketing home prices and their impact on affordability are often cited as reasons for net domestic migration out of California. In the early 1960s around 250,000 Americans moved to California each year. In 2020 close to the same number left. Is this the beginning of a mass exodus from the Golden State or a more temporary phenomenon?

The answer lies in the relative price of housing.

To understand the economic forces at work, let’s consider an example far less emotionally fraught than housing. With Hawai‘i open again, I am thinking about heading to Maui to consume, among other delicacies, iconic shave ice. Should I choose the rainbow or the coconut flavor?

If the price is the same for each, I choose the one I like best (coconut). I’ll even pay a little more for it. But at some price the difference between the cost of the two will tip the scales to rainbow. If too many people prefer coconut, the vendor will make it more expensive, relative to rainbow, to prevent running out of syrup.

Shave ice is much cheaper than housing. But the same economic forces—involving relative prices—are at work in the shave ice and housing markets. We must better understand relative prices if we want to understand California’s housing challenges and for how long they might contribute to the reduction in California’s population due to out-migration.

There are two kinds of prices we consider when making a home purchase: absolute and relative. The absolute price is the out-of-pocket cost, and it limits the set of homes a buyer can consider. For example, your budget might make a $70 million Malibu beach house out of reach, but would not exclude all potential homes.

Among the homes whose absolute prices you can afford, you will then have a choice, and this is where the relative price of homes becomes important. You might consider a number of factors beyond price, including location, schools, and other amenities. In the end, you will weigh those factors against their relative cost: the price of one home on your list versus another. (The New York Times runs an occasional feature that deftly illustrates this process, following a home purchaser considering three different homes within their budget.) This kind of comparison takes place whether you’re choosing between two homes within one city—say, Los Angeles—or whether you’re choosing between two homes in different cities—say, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

Relative prices tell some of the story of California migration. Starting in the 1880s, developers here lured buyers from the East with advertisements offering affordable land with a healthy climate and, according to one brochure, the absence of “cyclones and blizzards”—sparking a land boom and, in 1886, the first of a series of speculative bubbles. It was the beginning of the more than 120 years of California land and homes commanding a premium over similar homes in the East. Of course, it was not only California’s salubrious weather that brought immigrants from other states. Employment in Hollywood, in aerospace, in tech, and in agriculture and the like were, and remain today, powerful attractors.

Migration of large numbers of people into and out of the state, of course, impacted housing demand. Over time this migration has been more heavily into the state and in the absence of more rapid home building, has pushed prices up. And as the relative price of housing soared, the less attractive California became for those contemplating a move. From World War II to the late 1980s, when California homes were priced not too much higher relative to homes elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of Americans moved to the Golden State each year. In 2020, 240,000 Californians went the other direction.

Some who left cited job opportunities or the pace of life in growing cities such as Phoenix and Austin. But the cost of housing was also given as a reason. Often leavers would say, “I can purchase a home there and not in L.A. or San Francisco,” or “I get so much more for my housing dollar outside of the state.” In other words, relative prices pushed people away. If the price of homes in Phoenix compared to Los Angeles is low enough, it will drive migration to Phoenix. And then, over time, that shift in demand ought to increase Phoenix home prices relative to Los Angeles home prices just as the migration to California pushed relative home prices up here. When the California premium becomes small enough, home price migration should cease.

To examine the impact of migration on relative home prices, let’s consider Austin, Dallas, Las Vegas, Seattle, Miami, Phoenix, and Boise—all cities where Californians are moving.

The standard measure of home price affordability uses median prices. However, the median home sold—that is, the one where half the homes sold were more expensive and half less expensive—changes from year to year depending on which homes are sold. Here, to smooth out that variability, our starting point will be a single base year median home for these cities. This analysis uses the year 1990 as a base year. The results are not sensitive to the choice of year. Looking at pairs of cities—one in California, the other elsewhere—we can compute the ratio of the California city’s home price to the competing city’s home price to create a measure of the relative price between the two cities.

For example, in 1990, the median price of a home in Los Angeles was about three times the median price of a home in Austin ($213,000 versus $70,000). Between then and now, Los Angeles home prices increased by 333% and in Austin they increased by 534%, dropping L.A.’s relative price ratio of 3 to 1 down to 1.66 to 1. Houses are still cheaper in Austin, but relatively less so. 

During the last ten years, home prices increased in Boise by 294%, in Las Vegas by 232%, in Phoenix by 204%, in Austin by 169%, and in Seattle by 166%. Each of these increases is greater than the price increases of 148% in San Francisco, 138% in Los Angeles and 105% in Orange County. And the median home prices in Boise, Austin and Miami are now not too different from Sacramento and Riverside. The relative price of these California cities has fallen, and their relative affordability has increased.

It is still the case that you can sell a home in California and buy a larger home in one of these other cities, but it will be a smaller or a less well-appointed home than the same transaction would have brought a decade ago. The change in the relative price should make it less attractive to move out of California for reasons of housing affordability.

These six cities are properly characterized as up-and-coming; they were relatively small until people began pouring in. Austin’s population grew by nearly 30% over the last decade and Phoenix’s by 18%. What about the evolution of relative home prices when we compare California to cities that were more mature in 1990, such as Dallas and Atlanta? In both of these cases, Los Angeles’ relative price over the last decade has remained more or less constant—and net migration has slowed to a trickle. Between 2014 and 2018, just 6,000 fewer Texans moved from Dallas to L.A. than Angelenos moved to Dallas. And from 2011 to 2015 the net migration from L.A. to Atlanta slowed to 391. The relative price appears to have settled into an equilibrium that has not induced significant migration one way or the other.

Clearly, changes in job opportunities, amenities, government regulations or the lack thereof, and local lifestyles can upset this equilibrium. And they frequently do. But the point is that relative prices matter.

As cities grow and mature, the relative cost of housing stabilizes to reflect the relative attractiveness of the cities. And the one-way migration process induced by housing affordability comes to an end—in very much the same way as a price differential between shave ice flavors pushes one to choose rainbow over coconut. What we are seeing is not the end of the California dream with a mass exodus to points east, but rather simple supply and demand at work, adjusting to relative price differentials.

So, while California housing may be becoming less affordable, it is becoming relatively more affordable.

The post California Housing Is Becoming More Affordable—Relatively, Anyway appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We’d been invited to ask ourselves this question as we walked the streets in the dead of night, canvassing for strangers. I thought I knew the city well, but it appears vastly different when you’re looking for a place to bed down for the night.

Behind the hedges in front of a quaint apartment building? Too dark and secluded, vulnerable to robbery or rape. Could I rest on the front porch of that bungalow? Too risky: I might be mistaken for a burglar. 

A grassy median on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea was looking pretty attractive as a night’s lodging. This wasn’t what I had expected, nor what I had anticipated. But, then, neither was the foot.

It was an uncommonly chilly January night in 2018 when I encountered a bare foot protruding from a sleeping bag, on the sidewalk outside one of my favorite watering holes. “Do they have to camp out in front of our neighborhood wine bar?” I muttered to myself, sidestepping the offending appendage. “Can’t they go back home where they came from?”

With the arrival of friends and convivial beverages, the troubling thoughts melted away. But later, sinking into a warm bath, I tried to imagine whom that foot belonged to. I couldn’t picture anyone specifically, just a vague notion of a generic homeless person.

Cue the late night Googling of topics related to the homeless in Los Angeles. “Why are there so many …” “who are the …” and “what can one person do about the …?” And soon, I learned that in order to allocate resources, provide services, and receive some of that precious Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) federal funding, Los Angeles County is required to perform regular counts to determine the number of people sleeping unsheltered. In a county that spans over 4,000 square miles, the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority (LAHSA), responsible for administrating the Greater Los Angeles Point-in-Time (P.I.T.) Homeless Count, as it’s called, relies on citizen-volunteers. Counting takes place at night, when folks are less mobile, lessening the chance of marking down an unhoused person twice. Notoriously self-absorbed Angelenos did this? That seemed hard to believe.

A week later I became one of 200 locals assembled at the Hollywood City Hall, a small fraction of the 8,000 county residents who took part in the annual count that year.  Our number included gym rats, hipsters beaming with ecstatic idealism, middle-aged women wearing Roe v. Wade 45-year commemorative pins, and elder activists sporting well-worn AmeriCorps T-shirts.

And me. With all the largess of a visiting dignitary, I turned to the person next to me and introduced myself. “Yeah, I know who you are,” she replied. Oh, a fan, I assumed, when she added, “I’m a development executive at Imagine, you pitched to me once.” Unsuccessfully, she might have added (but didn’t), instead, introducing me to a klatch of similarly accomplished entertainment executives, veteran counters, who’d seamlessly blended into the crowd.

We were treated to snacks, a training video, and a round of reassuring Q&As conducted by the LAHSA representatives. The P.I.T. was strictly a visual count, carried out on foot. We weren’t to engage with our unhoused neighbors and—not to worry, not to worry—we wouldn’t be sent into areas where we might feel less than secure, like encampments.  “Treat everyone you encounter as if you’re visiting friends in their living rooms after a long, hard day,” instructed then-city councilmember David Ryu.

We were issued flashlights, neon orange vests, and official-looking clipboards, and in an act of faith that defies social convention, we hopped into vehicles driven by our fellow volunteers. Soon, I was one of four local moms in a minivan, snaking our way through Hollywood. Our survey tract included Gardner Street, only a handful of blocks from where I had lived when I first arrived here to pursue an acting career, in 1989.

Back then, the area was a warm landing spot for both families and people like me, just starting out. I’d easily slid into restaurant work to afford the $750 monthly rent for a small but comfortable studio, where I remained until the acting work steadied. The neighborhood appeared a lot less accessible and welcoming with rents now topping $2,500.

If I were sleeping outside … where would I be?

Trudging in and out of alleyways, we peeked behind trash bins and piles of construction materials, peered into dense foliage, and surveyed the odd outdoor alcove, but the majority of our unhoused neighbors were out in the open. Now it seemed foolish not to have understood the advantage of a well-lit spot. It was midnight when we tallied our last soul, but wait, what about that late model sedan parked in front of a hacienda style duplex? The interior of the car was obscured by a set of sunshades, which might indicate that it was being used as a shelter, but it was otherwise a twin of my own car. No, actually, it seemed better maintained than my car. We didn’t count it.

Courtesy of INSAN Foundation/INSAN for Humanity.

Before we departed, I asked my counting buddy what she would do if things spiraled down for her. “I guess I’d go back home,” she answered, citing a strong support network in another state. “What about you?”

My first decade in Los Angeles was experienced through Joan Didion’s lens. Numbed by the sprawl, the freeway traffic drained my will to live. It was convenient to characterize residents as show business cyphers. Like many transplants, I’d stubbornly resisted the city’s charms and when asked, repeated a standard refrain, “I’m only here to work in the entertainment industry. Then, I’m outta here.”

Thirty-two years later, I reside in Jonathan Gold’s Los Angeles, calculating driving routes that take me past the mini-malls that house the city’s best purveyors of spicy phos and tacos dorados de camarón. Despite the inevitable vagaries of a career in the arts, I hadn’t left. Instead, I forged deep ties and raised a child in a warm and engaged community that’s become my primary support system. Who had committed some of the most egregious acts of careerism I’d witnessed in Tinseltown? Me.

Maybe it was the city-issued safety vest and authority conferred by carrying a clipboard, but I felt a swell of affection, and a weight of responsibility, as it dawned: There was no longer a “back home” for me.

Since that night four years ago, some things have changed and some have remained the same. There’s been a 12.7 percent increase in homelessness in Los Angeles County and a 14.2 percent increase in the city of Los Angeles. Everywhere, there’s palpable frustration with elected officials and government agencies, as the pandemic has sent more people into the streets and housing prices just keep skyrocketing.

But I no longer wonder who they are, and why they don’t go “back home.” I know now that 70 percent of those experiencing homelessness have lived in the county for at least a decade, and two-thirds of unsheltered Angelenos became homeless while living here.

With average rents in my once-affordable old stomping grounds now topping $2,500, putting together a deposit, first, and last months’ rent, has become an insurmountable hurtle for many of us as gig work has made dependable wages harder to come by.

I’m also pretty certain that I made a misjudgment about that car.

That January night at the P.I.T. led me to volunteer in a Host Home program sponsored locally by Safe Place for Youth and open my house to a young couple experiencing homelessness. Prior to their month-long stay under my roof, my houseguests had been living in their car, which was much cleaner than my own reliably dusty ride.

Like many Angelenos, I remain frustrated with my powerlessness to effect change and with the lack of progress in solving the region’s housing crisis. But I can no longer pretend a transactional and transient relationship with my adopted hometown and the people who live here, including the unhoused. The annual P.I.T. was furloughed in 2020, and postponed this January. But it will take place again on February 22–24. I’ll be there, walking the streets in the dead of night, but I no longer think of the people I’m looking for as strangers—just neighbors I haven’t met yet.

The post Where Would I Sleep on the Streets of Los Angeles? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Then move.

Any place within California will do, though it would be great if you could relocate to a city or county near yours. Or, even better, stay in your own neighborhood and make the leap to a different apartment or house nearby.

Why am I asking you to go through the hassle of boxing and unboxing, and the emotional challenges of leaving one place for another? Because moving serves both private and public purposes. It often improves your circumstances—finding a place that better fits your needs, or helping you take advantage of a job or educational opportunity. And a state full of people in better circumstances is a better state.

California needs you to move now because our state, which once prided itself on perpetual motion, is stuck in neutral. Californians have never been less mobile than they are right now. In the near term, our increasing tendency to stay in place means our housing market is gridlocked, with too few vacancies. In the long term, our stasis may leave us in a disadvantaged position as our climate, our economies, and our demographics shift.

Our current lack of mobility is a failure of both government and culture. As a matter of policy, California actually discourages moving.

Californians and their representatives have long clung to a tax system based on Proposition 13, which discourages owners of homes and businesses from selling by keeping their taxes relatively lower the longer they hold onto their properties. Meanwhile, state and local governments decry an exodus of people and jobs—and in response, routinely waste millions in subsidies to rich California enterprises, including Hollywood production companies and Silicon Valley start-ups.

But the premise is all wrong. As the indispensable Orange County Register columnist Jonathan Lansner tirelessly points out, we Californians have the lowest outflow rate of residents of any American state—which means a lower percentage of population moves out than anywhere else. California’s real problem is that it’s the worst state at attracting new residents.

You might say our democracy has become a stay-ocracy, with our leaders relentlessly devoted to keeping people right where they are.

California progressives often oppose actual progress because of their desire to help Californians stay where they are. Housing and community activists routinely protest against badly needed new housing because it might replace existing residents. Momentum is building across the state for new rent controls or anti-eviction policies that privilege existing renters over those still looking for places to live. And then there’s the latest extension of let-them-stay logic: some Californians argue that shutting down dangerous homeless encampments, and coaxing camp residents into more stable housing, constitutes a “war on the poor.”

California’s many protections for existing residents may be well-intentioned, but they come at a high price, and not just in property tax discounts to elderly homeowners. California’s tendency to address its problems by keeping people in their existing housing actually makes the housing shortage worse.

Why? Because fewer people moving creates gridlock, according to a recent paper from USC scholars.

Mobility, and the vacancies created when people move, are essential to a functional housing market. Each move creates a chain of vacancies, which allows other people to move and find housing. For example, an older person who moves to a retirement community puts their house up for sale, which people who had been renters buy, leaving their previous apartment open for another renter—and so on.

This churn is far more important to mobility than new construction. The USC study estimates that over the course of a year, turnover of existing housing stock supplies more than 14 times as many vacancies, with the opportunity for a move, as those derived from new construction.

Vacancies are at a premium in California and across the country. Back in 1985, one in five families moved each year. But now fewer than one in 10 do. And over the past decade, mobility has slowed to a crawl at the local level—meaning that far fewer people move within their own neighborhood or city.

There are many reasons why people are staying put. Housing construction came to a standstill during the Great Recession, creating a shortage just as large numbers of young adult Millennials entered the housing market. With more people chasing fewer homes, vacancies plunged and have stayed low, while rents and home prices keep rising. Those people who want to move often can’t find anything affordable, or anything at all—so they just don’t move.

One obvious answer to this predicament is to build much more housing, which the state is starting to encourage. But it will take many years to make up for the shortage. In the meantime, California should stop subsidizing people to remain in their homes and instead devote more energy and money to making it possible for more Californians to move.

That means ending the tax discounts and other subsidies that keep older people in homes that they no longer need. (It also means building more housing for seniors who are departing their home.) Let’s take the state’s surplus funds and money saved from ending Prop 13 protections, and use it to help more people move from renters to buyers, with low-interest loans and down payment assistance. Let’s also subsidize both the rent and moving costs of lower-income people so they have more housing options.

Such subsidies should be exclusively for current Californians. (If someone moves in from out of state, they don’t create a vacancy chain here). Subsidies should also be more generous for people moving within their own city and county, because such local moves produce longer vacancy chains.

Creating a system that encourages more Californians to move could have benefits far beyond today’s housing needs.

In his new book, Move: The Forces Uprooting Us, the international relations expert and FutureMap director Parag Khanna foresees a future where moves aren’t a choice but a necessity. Khanna argues that, as climate change, political upheaval, economic crises and technological disruptions challenge existing communities and structures, we all may need to move to more livable places. That will require governments to have “collective resettlement strategies” for the world population.

“We can no longer afford to be passive observers of how human geography unfolds,” writes Khanna, adding that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be stuck in place anymore. After all, “a staggering share of our personal and professional lives hinges on mobility. Society only functions normally if we can move. Once you stop pedaling a bicycle, it quickly falls over. Our civilization is that bicycle.”

The post Let’s Pay Californians to Move appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The rumor that you, the mayor of my adopted hometown, Los Angeles, will be President Biden’s next ambassador to my native country, India, is picking up steam. And so I wanted to be the first person to give you the lay of the land in Delhi, where I grew up and have close family members and childhood friends. I last visited Delhi in fall 2019, and my mother is currently in Dehradun (a bit less than 250 kilometers or 150 miles northeast) while the horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic unfold around her. Los Angeles has been among the cities hardest hit by the pandemic, not just with the high death toll among lower income communities but also vaccine inequities. A similar scene is playing out in Delhi right now.

But the Delhi I want to transport you to is the city you would encounter if you were to rewind to a time before this reality-altering pandemic. Just like Los Angeles, Delhi is a vast, vibrant, cosmopolitan place groaning under the weight of aging infrastructure and jolted by frequent tremors. Picture this: a city roughly similar in geographic size to Los Angeles, but with almost five times the number of people. If you include the neighboring regions that make up Delhi state, the population is larger than the entire state of California.

You and I, Mr. Mayor, are roughly the same age—I’m 15 months your junior—though you probably had a more promising beginning to your life. I was birthed unresponsive by nurses who didn’t want to revive me, my parents’ third daughter. My feisty mother snatched me from the jaws of death and raised me to be a bit of a daredevil. It’s those youthful adventures that I want to share as you consider the possibility of taking your own daughter to Delhi.

I envy you and your family moving there, though 21st-century Delhi can confound Americans, even as it offers compelling lessons for American cities.

Take transportation. You’ll find that many buses heading to Delhi University are designated “Ladies Special,” so you’re not going to be able to board those. You will be attacked with safety pins and umbrellas if you try. The Delhi Metro, too, has entire cars just for ladies, which are an olfactory haven in the long, sweaty summer months. You haven’t been able to truly move the needle on ridership on the L.A. Metro. The excuse that Southern California is too car-centric and sprawling for transit is a poor one, as Delhi will teach you: The city has cars, auto rickshaws, buses, and a Metro… all of which are crowded to capacity.

You will see that what L.A. lacks are the connectors from neighborhoods to public transportation hubs that make Delhi’s options more used by its populace. While the Marines guarding you may dissuade this, you should try some of them. Go to the local market in a “scootie,” a compact three-wheeled rickshaw meant to seat two but routinely carrying an entire family, all bouncing along happily. For longer rides, try a bus, and if it’s too crowded, just hang onto the ladder that connects to the rear bumper. You save a couple of bucks if the conductor can’t grab you and demand that you pay for a ticket. Though if the Delhi Police spot you, be prepared to make a running jump.

Whatever transportation options you choose, you should take advantage of all the food choices that Delhi offers its people. I’m sure you will receive many elegant dinner invitations from Delhi’s power brokers. I went to university with many of them (riding the aforementioned Ladies Specials), and you can be assured of impeccable manners, guest lists full of Rhodes Scholars like yourself, lavish meals catering to every dietary need (including veganism), and live music to boot.

Samosas from Old Famous Jalebi Wala. Photo by Moira Shourie.

Had you gone to Delhi in the early ’90s, I might have been the crooner softly singing jazz standards in the corner (much to the horror of my friends’ parents). After such engagements, my band would usually head to local restaurants: Chicken Inn on Pandara Road for a non-veg platter, Sagar in Defence Colony Market for dosas, or to Old Famous Jalebi Wala in Chandni Chowk for samosas and jalebis.

When you need a break from endless meetings, head on out to Bhimsain’s Bengali Sweet House. It’s pretty close to the embassy and perfect for an afternoon cup of chai with chaat and panipuri—a dish once made even tastier by the owner, who sat in lotus pose with his right foot protruding so that he could punch a hole in the round pastry with his interestingly long big toe nail. For fast food, don’t bother with any of the American chains like McDonald’s or KFC; opt for the many street food stalls called dhabas or reydiwalas. They serve their food in packets made from old newspapers and plates fashioned from dry leaves, with tea filling earthen cups that you just smash to pieces when you’re done. It’s the original recycling—no loading the dishwasher required!

You also should be aware that Delhi has its own housing problems, though the crisis there is very different than L.A.’s.

You’ll be among the fortunate to have a roof over your head. The ambassador’s residence is tucked inside the fortress-like U.S. Embassy on Shanti Path, which means the street of peace. Your neighbors will be your fellow diplomats. Each embassy is a tribute to its culture. The blue dome of the Pakistan embassy, the regal emblem of the British High Commission, the Soviet-style architecture of the Russian embassy, the sandstone arches of the Saudi embassy… all now sadly hidden behind impenetrable walls and electrified fences.

This was the vista I passed in the 1980s en route to the Delhi School of Music, where my parents dragged me and my sisters to piano lessons. You, a concert pianist, will find the school to be a treasure trove of lovingly well-maintained concert grands to bang away on. My older sisters were pretty good pianists, but I remember the director, Hosi Palamkote, shaking his head at my disappointed mother, “She should stick to singing.” That was good advice. Sticking to singing got me into the prestigious St. Stephen’s College, where the principal, Dr. Varghese, remembers to this day my rendition of “O Holy Night” at the Christmas Mass, to which the U.S. ambassador is often invited.

Multi-family apartments in Old Delhi. Photo by Moira Shourie.

But let’s get real—this is not how 99.9 percent of Delhi, or India, or California, for that matter, lives. Delhi’s big solution to housing is public. A large section of the middle class resides in apartments built by the DDA (Delhi Development Authority), allotted to them via an opaque method that no supercomputer can comprehend. After my parents retired from their teaching jobs, we were able to rent one of these boxy, poorly ventilated units thanks to the extra income from my singing gigs and my sister’s job at the British High Commission on Shanti Path. When I took a job in Mumbai, my parents moved to Noida, a vast development built on the old Yamuna River bed. This was a huge upgrade, but got off to a bumpy start with a power outage that took local authorities three years to restore.

Yes, you will see a heartbreaking level of poverty, but there is a huge difference between the street dwellers you will encounter in Delhi and the homeless population of Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, by and large, the unhoused are individuals struggling to navigate the systems of an unequal society plagued by decades of racist housing policies. Delhi’s homeless, by contrast, are mostly entire families, including grandparents and infants, who have traveled to the big city in the hopes of earning a living just to survive. When India started down the path of development and modernization, construction in cities boomed, drawing able-bodied young men from far-flung villages. Entire communities sprung up at construction sites, where you will see the skeletons of high-rise buildings populated with laborers and their children living in tenements. When these buildings are finally completed, the entire community usually moves to the next construction site, but several end up on sidewalks and under flyovers. Many children get access to education through American-supported NGOs and upskill to jobs as drivers, household staff, and shop attendants.

Life on the streets of Delhi is brutal and crushing. My childhood ayah was one such person—her husband was the watchman at the school where my parents worked, and sadly she took her own life by jumping off a building. My parents later adopted another family living on the sidewalk near our home and paid for their youngest son’s education while his mother, Maya, was a cleaner at the school. Sadly, Maya also took her own life by jumping in front of a train. You will pass by these people as you are chauffeured around the city in an armored car, so I wanted you to know some of their stories.

There is more to say about Delhi, and more for you to see. But the tenures of American ambassadors are short. My hope is that you will stay in Delhi long enough to be transformed in unexpected ways. And that if there’s one thing you take away from your time there, it’s the capacity for cities to change themselves, and reckon with problems in unexpected ways.

Delhi, after all, is an ancient place. The walls of the city have risen and been felled at least eight times since 1400 BCE. Los Angeles will also have to adjust and evolve—perhaps faster than it has recently—if it wants to live as long. Perhaps you can bring both ideas and some of Delhi’s enduring and adventurous spirit back to L.A., and tell us all about them, as you ride around town on the ladder attached to the exterior of a Metro bus.

The post Mayor Garcetti, Delhi Is Waiting to Transform You—And the Future of L.A. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The conversation, which streamed on Twitter Live earlier today, explored how Americans’ lack of generosity and empathy for vulnerable citizens has led to a failing public health system, systemic inequalities, and lack of public resources in multicultural communities. Greenlee and Porter broke down the many ways the New Deal’s programs excluded nonwhite Americans from benefits reserved for white people, and the political strategies behind its architecture. They also considered the policies that cut the welfare system in favor of fueling mass incarceration, the attacks on the Affordable Care Act, and the fundamental shift it would take for America to expand the social safety net to include benefits like childcare and paid sick leave.

Drawing attention to the key COVID-19 relief measures set to expire at the end of July, Porter warned of “an immense spike in poverty, deprivation, and destitution” if Congress does not act to renew these measures. “The institutional failures that are produced by this racial hostility are really, really getting in the way of us dealing with this pandemic and getting our society and our economy back on its feet,” he said.

“Quoted” with Eduardo Porter:

The rhetoric around welfare starts revolving around ‘welfare queens’ who are corrupt and undeserving, about single moms who are just taking a check from the government and not taking a job. All that stuff is happening at the same time as this parallel discourse about our streets being under siege, again by people of color mostly. And so the criminal justice system becomes the tool to manage our society. It seems to me like a very, kind of like a crazy conclusion to take—let’s defund the things that improve people’s wellbeing, and fund this thing that locks them away because they’re dangerous.

Watch the full conversation below:

Zócalo Live: How Has Racism Shaped the American Economy? with @portereduardo and @CynthiaGreenlee https://t.co/I5SEZkt9hS

— Zócalo Public Square (@ThePublicSquare) July 21, 2020

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The conversation explored how California communities will fare in a post-COVID economy, particularly how these trends could affect people of different ages and income levels and whether an increase in remote work and restrictions on cultural gatherings and events, will have any long-term effects on the desirability of living in expensive urban areas. They considered the possibilities of repurposing buildings like vacated office buildings and malls, and a potential decline in the recent trend toward high-end, luxury housing. They also discussed how the pandemic’s impact on the economy could create an opportunity for cities to reset and empower communities to reimagine the roles of state and local governments in developing housing for residents. Despite COVID’s dramatic economic effects, Nickelsburg characterized housing affordability as a long-term problem that will take 20-30 years to resolve.

“Quoted” with Jerry Nickelsburg:

The real issue about housing in California is that it is not very affordable for a number of reasons. One, that is frequently pointed out, is the stock of housing has not been increasing at a very rapid rate. And the second is that California is a wonderful place to live. … In April, the second month of this recession, home prices in Los Angeles and San Diego went up. And home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area eased almost imperceptibly. You didn’t get this pullback, and that’s because the demand for housing in California is that great. That means housing affordability in California is a long-term problem. It’s not something that short-term fixes will get us out of.

Watch the full conversation below:

The post Will Anyone Ever Be Able to Afford to Live in California? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That crisis could be our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform the state—if we can ignore the conventional wisdom that this is a time to shelter our ambitions in place.

For Californians, COVID-19 is a crisis of crises. It merges together a collection of failures that most of us consider separately—housing, energy, poverty, prisons, courts, schools, climate, health care, immigration, pensions, taxes and budgets, and governance. COVID has exposed how these disparate crises, for all their complicated pieces, share the same fatal flaw: California’s longstanding inability to invest in the future.

The Golden State loves making big progressive promises, but resists the hard work of delivering on them. So the state has provided health insurance to millions via Obamacare and MediCal, but, as COVID should remind us, has not produced enough medical personnel and facilities to provide effective and timely health care for all. The same California leaders who now urge us to stay at home have presided over massive shortages of homes, and our ubiquitous homelessness.

Our elected officials frequently pose as champions of the poor and of children, even though this state has one of the nation’s highest childhood poverty rates. COVID-19’s economic shutdown will only deepen that. Our schools, which are supposed to close the gap between rich and poor kids, are closed indefinitely by the virus, and the state’s hastily planned shift to online learning is cutting off poor students who don’t have access to technology. The cliché is that kids who are failed by schools end up in prisons or jails, but in California, it’s hard to find space in those places. Correctional facilities are so overcrowded that the state must release prisoners to limit COVID transmission.

California’s crises involve not just facilities but people. COVID exposes our failure to develop our workforce—from the lack of highly trained workers for lab and health jobs to the lack of farmworkers to keep up the food supply, to the lack of utility personnel to keep our electric grid from starting wildfires. If warmer temperatures bring wildfires during the pandemic, it could trigger crippling power shut-offs and crush our overtaxed emergency services. COVID also threatens a deal PG&E made with previous wildfire victims (because the deal was based on PG&E’s now faltering stock). The failure of that deal could damage California’s climate change response, which depends heavily on utility investments in alternative energies.

All of the above crises have been nearly impossible to solve because of the state’s weak systems for budgeting, taxation, and pensions. Now COVID-19 puts those systems under almost unbearable pressures. As COVID creates the need for more government outlays, the byzantine formulas of our dysfunctional budget system will produce spending cuts. Economic collapse is creating massive drops in tax revenues. And the stock market plunge puts our already badly underfunded pension systems at risk of collapse—which could require a bailout we couldn’t afford even before the COVID crisis.

As bad as all this sounds, there is another thing that is even worse: the timid response that California is now planning to this mega-crisis. Look for state and local officials to crawl into a shell and try to weather the storm by spending less.

I am not overstating this. Gov. Gavin Newsom already has junked his ambitious January budget proposal and now plans a “shelter-in-place” budget that could include cuts to schools and health care. Such an approach reflects the tired conventional wisdom in Sacramento: that a crisis is not a good time for big solutions to big problems, and that the wise path in a California crisis is to scale back and limit the damage.

That conventional wisdom is—to use a highly technocratic term—totally nutso.

Cutbacks and frugality now will worsen all our existing problems and crises, and make recovery from COVID that much harder. Indeed, cutting the major California sectors of education and health care will be doubly destructive, weakening the state’s economy in the near-term, while diminishing crucial services for the long term.

How do we know that this frugality will fail us? Because that’s what happened the last two times the conventional wisdom held sway—in the early 2000s tech collapse and energy crisis, and in the Great Recession. In both cases, the state’s conservative response to crisis did lasting damage to the economy, budgets, and vital programs—and to a generation of California children.

In fact, cuts from those last two recessions are responsible in part for the crises we faced even before COVID. Some cuts—notably Gov. Brown’s slashing of mobile hospitals and medical equipment stockpiles—are now making pandemic response harder.

Previous failures of the cower-and-cut strategy, and the massively snowballing COVID crisis, argue powerfully for a new approach: This is the time for California to ramp up spending and services like never before. It’s not enough to address just the current emergency. Instead, let’s seize the moment to tackle all the crises that COVID has turned into one big crisis.

The timing is right. The current state of emergency gives Gov. Newsom extraordinary legal and political flexibility to ignore the state’s myriad rules and regulations and act forcefully. And economic collapse has made public investment much cheaper. Things that seem impossibly expensive in boom times—like building housing and infrastructure, or adding school instruction time—are more affordable now.

So let’s do it all. Make the temporary COVID expansion of health care capacity permanent. Do the same for all the temporary housing we’re now finding for the homeless. Sweep away the California environmental and licensing regulations that limit housing construction and stall business growth. Build previously stalled infrastructure projects. And increase school budgets by 50 percent, as multiple studies have suggested California should do, to close achievement gaps and properly support special education.

If California did all this, we’d actually be the national progressive model we’ve long pretended to be. We’d also demonstrate that we’re too smart and too rich to pursue yet another stupid and miserly response to yet another crisis.

How do you pay for such transformations? In every way possible. Reform the outdated tax system to produce higher revenues and less volatility. Loosen budget formulas to make it easier to move money around. And, yes, cancel our unsustainable pension promises and unfunded retiree health benefits for public workers.

Even higher taxes and retirement clawbacks won’t be enough, of course. Californians will need more from the federal government. And we should get over our debt hang-ups and borrow big sums at today’s low rates. Yes, those bills will eventually come due. But when they do, California—if it uses this moment to advance rather than retreat—should be much stronger in economy and infrastructure and services, and thus much better able to reckon with those debts.

What I’m proposing is a big bet on California’s future. But it’s hardly reckless. Buying low is a proven investment strategy. It’s also the right response to the extraordinary moment we’re living in. Californians have put their lives on hold; millions of us are losing jobs and income, and thousands are dying. Our crises, having converged with corona, are inescapable. Do we really think the lesson of this moment is to further shrink the state’s capacity, fail to reckon with crises, and diminish our future?

Instead, let’s honor today’s sacrifices by advancing, rather than retreating. Let’s put the state on a higher plane. Let’s push all our chips to the table’s center, California, and go all in. Right now.

The post Now Is the Time for California to Think Big, Again appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Most Californians agree that housing is the state’s biggest crisis. But we have nothing resembling a consensus on how best to address it.

Up in Sacramento, our leaders have come up with all manner of housing ideas, but few have attracted broad support or advanced to become reality. And few of us want to be the first to try out a new way of meeting our housing needs. We fear that any new housing idea, put into practice, will disrupt our lives.

What California needs then is a housing laboratory, an experimental setup for new housing concepts. But labs need lab rats. Since no one else will volunteer, I modestly suggest a small but influential subset of Californians as our guinea pigs: the 120 members of the state legislature, leading members of the Newsom administration, and their top staff members.

Who better to represent us in trying out our housing future than our representatives?

Just imagine the possibilities if we required lawmakers and policymakers to live their own ideas, before applying them to the rest of us.

State Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco is certain that Californians need the power to override local zoning to produce taller, denser housing in transit corridors. But it’s hard to know how this will play out. So why not let Sen. Wiener find out by moving his family, his staffers, and the co-sponsors of his housing legislation, SB 50, into the tallest apartment building that can be found along a transit corridor in Sacramento? Of course, we’d need to bar Wiener’s team from driving—giving them the opportunity to wait outside their building for buses that run chronically late, a routine experience for Californians who rely on our underdeveloped transit systems.

We can conduct a similar experiment for legislative supporters of building new housing for the homeless. The state and local governments have budgeted billions to such housing, but how can it be made to work? One way to find out is to have a few lawmakers live in the homeless units themselves.

Of course, very little of this housing has been built. So, to give legislators the full experience, they should sleep in tents on the Capitol grounds until the homeless housing projects the state has funded are actually realized. This might encourage state lawmakers to put real pressure on localities to produce such housing—and fast. And that would make the housing cheaper, since delays of five years for approving housing projects—a typical delay for California—can add more than $150,000 to the cost of a unit.

One possible way to reduce construction costs is to build new, cheaper forms of housing. So let’s push lawmakers into truly new housing models.

Take micro-housing, the super-tiny units being touted across California. One such 160-square-foot can SmartSpace apartment squeezes in a sofa bed and a “smart bench” which can become a table or an extra bed. I, for one, would love to see a Bay Area legislator, State Sen. Jim Beall of San Jose, a leader on housing issues, squeeze into one of those micro-homes. Beall is among many California politicians who propose spending big money to produce very small numbers of conventional affordable units, at relatively high prices. Maybe these pols could get behind more and cheaper housing if they lived in tiny places.

Modular and prefabricated homes, another cheaper alternative, should also be foisted on our legislative guinea pigs. Why not put up a bunch of prefab homes in Capitol Park, for lawmakers and staff? Yes, some will call such homes an eyesore—just as they do wherever they’re proposed elsewhere in California—so let state leaders experience the visual consequences themselves.

The same logic should apply to “granny flats,” or accessory dwelling units, which the state has tried to make easier for homeowners to build. Any lawmakers who own homes should be required to add a granny flat on their property. They’d learn the ways local governments try to stop people from building them, and the high costs of constructing even small places. I’d also make the legislator-homeowners pay their own construction workers the very high prevailing wages—essentially union wages—that they demand of other home builders.

By the same token, all lawmakers who are landlords—at least 25 percent of the members of the legislature, according to CALMatters—should be made to follow rent control regulations. Many Democrats have been pushing rent controls as a way to address the cost of housing, so let them live under such rules. Those lawmakers who are tenants should also gain rent control protections. That might seem like a perk at first, but pretty soon, they’ll share the experiences of those of us who have lived in rent-controlled apartments—landlords who won’t fix anything and do whatever they can to force you out.

Experience is the best teacher, and there may be no better learning experience in housing than having your home taken by the state by eminent domain. I’d suggest that each year—for their own edification—5 percent of the legislature (or six out of the 120 lawmakers) have their home taken by eminent domain. Then they can deal with all the legal headaches and spend many years waiting for compensation.

But why stop with the horror of eminent domain? Major disasters offer a great opportunity for legislators and staffers to move into devastated communities. Why not deed a few abandoned, rubble-filled lots in the town of Paradise to lawmakers and staffers? They could pitch tents and deal firsthand with endless rebuilding delays. They’d only have to stay in the tents until construction is complete. How long would that take?

Learning doesn’t just have to come from destruction. The “Yes in My Backyard” legislators keep calling for massive new building of homes—and Gov. Gavin Newsom wants 3.5 million new homes as part of his housing “Marshall Plan.” I think that’s great, but all that construction can cause headaches, so why not require Newsom and his young family to live wherever housing construction is moving at the fastest pace so they can feel the impacts firsthand?

Now, any grand experiment requires a control group. A number of legislators oppose virtually all efforts to address the crisis. Some of these housing deniers should be forced to move in with parents or relatives—sleeping on sofas, not in spare bedrooms. Others should be required to negotiate at least 50 miles of traffic jams to get to their offices. For example, when State Sen. Anthony Portantino, who blocked this year’s most ambitious housing bill, is working in Sacramento, he should have to stay in either Vacaville or Stockton, and drive himself the 50 miles to the Capitol along busy freeways during rush hour.

Some lawmakers and staffers will want taxpayers to help subsidize their experiences in housing reality. But we should resist such subsidies. Indeed, it should be a requirement that at least half of all lawmakers’ income gets devoted to housing, leaving them poorer when it comes to meeting other needs. That would give them a taste of what life is like for so many Californians, especially the one-in-three renter households who spend at least half their income in rent.

Would feeling the various pains of the housing crisis firsthand really inspire lawmakers to find consensus on housing and take action that makes a difference? I’d hope so. But even it didn’t work, at least those failing to address the crisis would be suffering along with the rest of us.

The post Want More Affordable Homes? Make Politicians Sleep in Their Own Plans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.