You know, I just read something from CalMatters Housing that really puts into perspective what we're dealing with across California, and honestly, it's pretty sobering when you step back and look at the full picture.
So here's what's happening. The state has asked every city and county to plan for roughly two and a half million new homes by the end of the decade. That's the state's way of trying to address population growth and that decades-long shortage of affordable housing that we all know about. But when regulators checked in recently to see how everyone's doing halfway through this planning cycle, the results were disappointing to say the least. According to CalMatters, with the exception of just five small jurisdictions in the state, nobody is really on pace to hit their targets. We're talking about getting mostly D's and F's if this were a report card.
The numbers get especially rough when you look at affordable housing specifically. Less than one-third of cities and counties are even on track to permit enough market-rate units, but it gets worse for lower-income housing. Only about six percent of jurisdictions are moving fast enough to hit their targets for housing that's affordable to people earning less than half the local median income. The five places actually hitting all their targets? Four are small unincorporated county areas in rural parts of the state, and the fifth is Placerville, a town with just eleven thousand people.
What's interesting here is that this gap between planning and actual construction isn't new. According to the reporting, even during California's biggest building booms back in the nineteen-sixties and eighties, we never built as many homes annually as the state is now asking for. Today we're putting up just over one hundred thousand homes a year, while the state's asking for more than three hundred thousand. CalMatters notes there's real disagreement about why this is happening. Some folks in the development world say cities need to be friendlier to housing through zoning and permitting, while city officials say they can't force developers to build. The state points to recent laws that have tried to streamline approvals and reduce red tape.
A big piece of the puzzle that often gets overlooked is money. Building affordable housing almost always requires public subsidies or investors willing to take losses, and according to CalMatters, California's had a real drought of public funding after a state bond from a few years ago dried up. There's hope for a new bond in November that could help replenish that funding. The toughest housing to build right now might actually be what I call the middle market, the housing for people earning average incomes. It doesn't typically qualify for affordable housing subsidies, but rents people in that income range can afford usually don't work for developers looking to turn a profit.
What I'm seeing here locally in the Bay Area and out in the East Bay communities like Fremont is that this statewide challenge hits us especially hard. We've got some of the most constrained land, some of the highest construction costs, and some of the most expensive place-to-build conditions in the entire state. When jurisdictions across California are struggling to hit these targets, and we're competing for the same developers and the same capital, it means our residents are going to keep facing real affordability challenges for a while. The planning is in place, but the actual construction pipeline is going to take time to ramp up, and that affects everyone trying to buy or sell right now.
