Latinos are California’s best hope for sane housing market

Californians rank housing as their biggest concern — and Sacramento politicians seem determined to  keep it that way.

To be sure, there are much-hyped new bills meant to speed up new construction — but they favor high-density around transit stops while imposing taxes on homes in places where people have to drive to get around.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who bought a new $9 million house in 2024, claims to be taking bold steps to address the state’s miserable housing crisis, but with laughably poor results.

California’s current housing policy often assumes the household of the future prefers a dense, urban, transit-oriented, car-light lifestyle, a preference held by only about 20% of buyers nationally. 

Newsom also made sure to exempt wealthy blue areas like Marin and Santa Barbara, areas known for their opposition to almost all development.

As for the rest of us, our preferences don’t matter much.

The vast majority of Californians, particularly families, don’t want to live in rabbit warrens, with little space and no yard. A recent Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) survey found that 70% of Californians prefer single family residences. And the vast majority, according to a poll by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, oppose legislation, written by Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, that would ban single-family zoning in much of the state.  

A new report out this week from Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy spells out the result of the policy disconnect. The big losers are minorities and young people, the supposed base of today’s progressives.

The state’s African American home ownership rate is 35.5% — well below the national rate of 44% — and the state’s Latino homeownership rate is ranked 41st nationwide.

For adults under 35, California’s homeownership rate is near 24%, compared with roughly 38% nationally. 

The reason is obvious: A California household in 2025 needed an annual income above $213,000 to afford a median price home, notes Chapman’s Karla Lopez Del Rio.

Today only 18% of Californians can afford a home at the median price. That’s compared to 37 percent nationally and 40% in Texas. A generation ago, a California home cost roughly four times a family’s annual income; today the statewide ratio is above eight, and in the coastal metros it runs past 10. 

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It’s not like there’s no land for development. Only 5% of the land is urbanized, with lots of room to accommodate new, and more affordable, housing. 

But California’s ruling class has squandered this advantage by blocking growth in the periphery. This is a contrast with other states, notably Texas, where market-oriented policies have generated prodigious growth in both single-family and multifamily housing.

The state needs roughly 180,000 to 312,000 housing units annually, of all types — sale and rental, single-family and multifamily — but recent production has been closer to 100,000 units per year. 

We used to be able to keep up. In 1986, California permitted more than 300,000 units in a state with  roughly 12 million fewer people than today. Since 2010, residential permits have dropped by a third. California’s housing stock rose by just 7.9% over this period, lower than the national increase (10.3%) and well below housing growth in Arizona (13.8%), Nevada (14.7%), Texas (24%) and Florida (16.2%). 

The inability to buy a new home partly drives the state’s ongoing exodus, which is why it is so difficult to attract newcomers, the traditional fuel for California’s economy. Today, 71% of Californians believe their children will be financially worse off than them, and 38% say they have considered leaving the state. 

At least, those who leave the state certainly aren’t losing out financially. They save roughly $672 per month on housing and, are 48% more likely to become homeowners within seven years than comparable households who stay. 

Nor are renters beneficiaries of California’s housing policies. Restrictions on where and what to build raise the cost of construction, largely through land prices that rise with restrictions on development.

A California apartment costs roughly $430,000 to build, against about $150,000 in Texas. The market for such housing, at least in Los Angeles, is not exactly a hot one.

Some of the blame here could be assigned to various factors like interest rates or construction costs. But other states manage to overcome those same challenges. 

What will it take to reverse course? The greens, the inner-city developers, and the planning elites won’t do it, since they all benefit from the system.

The pressure to change will have to come from the bottom up, with a leading role played by Latinos, who — by wide margins — prefer single-family homes, according to a recent University of Texas survey.  

The building trades, with a heavily Latino membership, could also be possible backers of reform. 

If we wish to restore the California dream that once brought so many of us here, big changes are needed — along with a political shift toward common sense.

Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute of the University of Texas at Austin.