How the Pandemic Made Addressing California's Housing Shortage More Difficult

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KQED

News Commentary, News, Politics

4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 6 April 2021

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

During the pandemic, California home buyers gobbled up single-family homes in exurbs and suburbs while low-income earners struggled to make rent. The median home price in California rose roughly 20 percent during the past year to about $700,000, according to the California Association of Realtors. At the same time, rents plummeted in many of the state’s biggest cities — especially in high-end luxury towers. But those drops do little to help millions of renters in California barely managing to keep roofs over their heads. Part of the problem is that, based on some estimates, California faces a shortage of roughly 3 million homes. We examine how these trends could make California’s long-time housing shortage worse and what policies are on the horizon to address the problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:48.2	From KQED, Public Radio in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim.
1:00.0	Coming up on forum, California homebuyers have gobbled up single-family homes in excerpts and suburbs, while renters who've lost work struggled to make their monthly payments.
1:09.0	Though 2020's mini-exodus from cities saw rents fall, those drops did nothing to help millions
1:15.1	of renters who lost income.
1:17.2	Meantime, the movement away from San Francisco and Los Angeles to places like Sacramento,
1:21.7	Fresno, and Riverside are making it hard for first-time home buyers to enter the market.
1:27.0	We look at how these trends are affecting California's housing affordability challenges and
1:31.8	appetite for building denser urban housing.
1:34.7	Join us. This is Forum. I'm Nina Kim. There's been no mass exodus from California driven by remote work, as some predicted. Rather, Californians moved around the state, from cities to suburbs and exurbs that were considered affordable, but now that's
2:02.6	changing. The median home price in California has risen up to 20% in the past year to about
2:07.6	$700,000, according to the California Association of Realtors. For more, we're joined first
2:12.9	by Igor Popoff, chief economist at Apartment List. Igor Popov, thanks so much for joining us.
	...

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