I'd love to see a rigorous analysis of this too. I suspect it's true, but I'm reticent to push the statement without seeing someone show the work on it. It's also unclear to me that insufficient housing is the problem - California's population declined, but housing got more expensive. Why?
I live in a blue state, for example: New Mexico. It’s easier here to build housing than in most parts of Texas. I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean in this analysis, but I suspect the analysis excludes places like New Mexico as not actually being real parts of the United States.
Interesting! I know I've seen big issues building housing here in California. When I moved to San Luis Obispo in 2016, I moved into a new development, and it was the first new one in the city in a decade. After we got there they've added thousands of new homes, though (though prices rose rapidly). +
But like, I can't say if that was a San Luis Obispo thing or a Cali thing. I *think* a large issue with home prices in places like LA is simply density/transportation. Everyone wants to live close to the city but there's only so much housing there. But there's cheap housing in Bakersfield/Fresno. +
So there's a bunch of new housing far east of LA, in the "Inland Empire", and generally housing prices fall the farther away from the city you are. Add geological complexity (hills/mountains, rivers, etc), and LA, SF, Portland, Seattle have pretty much developed every acre of land available. +
Knocking down low density housing and building high density seems very necessary. But then there's the issue of real estate investors buying up many of those developed properties, and that doesn't help things either.