C.A.R.’s Center for California Real Estate (CCRE) recently convened about 100 participants, including economists, state and local officials, academics, and other housing experts to discuss housing affordability and California’s future. Your job is crucial – you help to keep the dream of homeownership alive with every transaction. However, the lack of affordability means fewer transactions and less home formations among millennials.
C.A.R. CEO Joel Singer and C.A.R. Chief Economist Leslie Appleton-Young set the stage with some sobering statistics at the recent Summit: California ranks 49th in the nation in homeownership rate and last in affordability. If these trends continue, California will become a state where renters are the majority instead of homeowners.
Keynote speaker Carol Galante, faculty director at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, discussed some of the key factors causing the affordability crisis and cited possible solutions. She indicated that job growth and a housing imbalance, population growth and demographic shifts in cities, climate change challenges, and stagnant incomes in the face of rising costs of living were some of the causes. Among solutions, Galante suggested expanding the supply and lowering the cost of housing by streamlining the development approvals process and addressing regulatory barriers to housing production, expanding access by giving renters a tax credit and developing new mortgage products to increase access to homeownership.
Videos from the Summit are available here. Learn more about CCRE here.