California’s housing shortage has been at crisis level for decades. Three years ago, its Department of Housing and Community Development said the state must plan for 2.5 million new homes in the eight-year cycle between 2026 and 2034 — more than double the total of the previous eight years. Further, the report said, at least a million of those homes “must meet the needs of lower income households.”
That’s a tall ask in the current climate, in which President Donald Trump’s actions have only exacerbated some of the problems: tariffs on core building components such as iron and steel, threats to immigrant workers that have thinned the construction industry’s labor force, and policy-driven inflation that has made the Federal Reserve wary of lowering interest rates, thus keeping the cost of borrowing money high.
