California has a housing crisis — that much we all know — but we should not grow paralyzed by the idea that it’s politically or substantively insurmountable. Paris has turned around a comparable situation with remarkable speed.
Though the French capital and its suburbs house less than one-third the population of California, the region produced more new homes last year than the entire Golden State.
To do so, French officials did not rely on magic tricks that are unavailable to California policymakers. My research has shown that the Paris region’s housing policies could be adopted stateside.
There are two problems at play in California’s housing market, and though they’re interrelated, they have different consequences and require multiple solutions.
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