In our recent report California’s High Housing Costs: Causes and Consequences, we examine how much more expensive housing is in California compared to the rest of the country and discuss the major factors driving the state’s high housing costs. The most important driver of California’s high housing costs is that too little housing is built in the state’s coastal metros to accommodate all those who wish to live there. We also provide estimates of how much additional housing each of California’s major metros needed to build during the past three decades to prevent home prices from rising faster than the rest of the country. Finally, we look at the consequences of California’s high housing costs for Californians. Specifically, Californians spend more of their income on housing, are less likely to own a home, are more likely to live in crowded housing, and commute longer.
This post provides metro specific summaries of our analyses from California’s High Housing Costs. Use the links below to find the summary for a particular metro. We use the U.S. census definition of metropolitan areas. Census metros are comprised of counties (or, in some cases, a single county) that share similar socio-economic characteristics and surround a common urban core. Where a recognized metropolitan division exists (for example, the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metropolitan area can be split into the San Francisco and Oakland metropolitan divisions), we report information on each metropolitan division.