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https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041889/construction-year-homes-usa/

That is a key statistic. That is homes built decade by decade in CA. That's the most pressing issue. Not enough housing.

West Virginia has plenty of issues with opioid addiction, crime, mental health etc but not so much an issue with housing. West Virginia has been losing residents for decades and have plenty of housing vacancies.

CA's economy has done really well in the last decade, lots of new jobs. The demand for housing has skyrocketed and the supply has barely budged.

All the areas with major homeless issues are like this. CA has a huge issue with unsheltered homeless people. It's a very visible problem. Often times there is an inadequate amount of emergency shelters.

The longer people stay on the streets unsheltered the worse their mental health and health outcomes get, if they have an addiction issue it gets worse.

CA has done a lot recently to try and rectify this issue a lot of it smart stuff that will eventually pay off, but until the housing supply issue is dealt with this will be a persistent problem that can only be triaged and not solved.

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Yes. The housing crisis is certainly part of this story. Prices out here are an obscenity.

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Yes prices are part of that equation and it goes even deeper than that.

People where there is not a housing shortage often times have more options as well. Housing shortages mean that even people with section 8 vouchers that qualify for subsidized housing oftentimes cannot use that voucher, because they are unable to find housing that will accept it.

Landlords in an area with a housing shortage can afford to be extremely picky for who they rent to. By law they can't turn people away, but they can create barriers that some people won't be able to meet. Large deposit, high credit check etc. In a housing shortage even without barriers like that someone is going to be left out.

The supply of housing is artificially restricted by local residents who try and stop building, by state laws, zoning and regulations that make it hard to build. Some of those things are well on their way to being fixed in CA, that's the good news. The bad news is that it's about a decade too late and there are still too many barrier to building housing.

Although building affordable housing and mobile home parks helps the situation the most, any type of building helps.

An issue right now for people looking to buy is that a lot of homeowners refinanced during the pandemic when interest rates were low. Interest rates are now high and while that normally would make houses go down in price in effect what has happened is existing owners don't want to sell their homes because they don't want to be locked into a higher interest rate. So the supply of homes available for purchase is actually very low compared to the demand. Hopefully the inflation target of 2% will be reached soon so interest rates can stabilize or go down.

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