Other states do housing better than California; a new study shows how (2025)

Overwhelmingly Californians rate the intertwined issues of housing supply, living costs and homelessness as the state’s most pressing issues, as a recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California confirms.

The terrible trio, as one might term it, also draws constant verbal acknowledgement from the state’s politicians, from Gov. Gavin Newsom down, and he and legislators have enacted dozens, perhaps hundreds, of measures to address it.

Nevertheless there’s little evidence that their efforts have had material impact. Either the three situations are beyond the capacity of politics to address — a distinct possibility — or the political efforts to date have not been vigorous enough.

Why, one must wonder, is California plagued while residents of other states enjoy lower housing and living costs and experience much lower rates of homelessness? Shouldn’t our political and civic leaders be examining what these other states are doing right, or are they so afflicted with self-righteous hubris that they cannot entertain such a thought?

A new and very detailed study of housing policies in the nation’s 250 largest metropolitan areas confirms that California is an outlier when it comes to increasing housing supply and moderating its costs.

Titled “BUILD HOMES, EXPAND OPPORTUNITY,” the report is a product of the George W. Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University.

“America’s fastest-growing cities offer lessons on how America can address its housing affordability crisis,” the report declares. “Based on our analysis of the 250 largest metropolitan areas and a deep dive into 25 large metros in the Sun Belt and Mountain states, places scoring best for pro-growth housing and land-use policies are mostly large Sun Belt metros from the Carolinas through Texas to Utah.”

The metros doing the best job of meeting their housing demands, the report says, have policies that make it easy for developers to build. That includes allowing higher-density housing in “substantial fractions of every city,” reducing minimum lot sizes, allowing residential construction in commercial areas, reducing or eliminating parking requirements and embracing innovative technologies such as modular construction and 3D printing.

In addition to adopting specific housing policies that spur development, the report continues, metros that are meeting demand also pursue complementary policies, such as having enough educational and medical services, allowing “fine-grained mixing of land uses and human activities in as many places as possible,” allowing “dynamic changes in land use rather than trying to freeze neighborhoods,” and providing amenities such as “walkability, revitalized live-work-play downtowns” and “great parks and trails.”

So, one might ask, which metro areas are hitting all the right buttons and which are not, as determined in the study?

The 25 top pro-housing metros are all either in the Sun Belt — particularly Texas, California’s arch-rival — or in the mountain states such as Utah and Idaho. No. 1 is Charlotte, NC. and No. 2 is Austin, the Texas capital which is becoming a powerful competitor with California’s Silicon Valley.

Not surprisingly, California metros are heavily represented on the list of the nation’s 25 “most restrictive” metros. While Honolulu is the least accommodating, Oxnard is No. 2.

Nine of the 25 are in California. They include, in order after Oxnard, San Jose, San Diego, Riverside-San Bernardino, San Francisco, Sacramento, Bakersfield, Fresno and Stockton.

It would be tempting to dismiss the Bush Institute’s report as biased because it comes from Texas, but it contains a wealth of detail and explains how the data were evaluated.

A better response from California politicians would be to read the report and determine what more California could do to make the state housing-friendly. The state’s current path on housing, other living costs and homelessness is going in the wrong direction.