Opinion: California’s big housing dilemma
By Dan Walters, Sacramento Bee
It’s time once again for some fun with numbers, in this case the data on California’s serious – and worsening – housing crisis.
Dan Walters
Since 2010, the state’s population has risen by 1.8 million to 39 million human beings who live – most of them, anyway – in 14 million units of housing of all types.
That translates into an average of 2.78 persons per dwelling, implying that since 2010, we’ve needed about 650,000 new units to keep pace with population growth, or about 130,000 a year.
However, the Great Recession clobbered housing construction, which fell to as low as 44,000 units in 2010 and has averaged only 70,000 a year during the decade so far, half the demand.