Anti-sprawl extremism makes CA even less affordable
CA AB30's Vehicle Travel Traveleted (VMT) fee will make housing in CA more expensive and hit low income residents the hardest. Reihan Salam reviews Jennifer Hernandez' City Journal article on the perverse effects of pro-infill strategies.
AB 130 is a law that has attracted very little attention but that will have huge consequences. In short, the law creates a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) mitigation fee — potentially $1,350/month added to the cost of new homes outside transit corridors, falling hardest on exactly the market-rate suburban projects most likely to be affordable to ordinary families. Just to be clear, a mitigation fee this high is designed to kill affordable sprawl.
California progressives understand that their state faces an acute housing shortage. That is good. But they seem to believe that California can meet housing demand while building only transit-adjacent urban infill that meets stringent affordability requirements — housing that is immaculately green, equitable, etc. As Hernandez observes, however, high-density urban infill is just about the most expensive housing you can build. Land costs, regulatory complexity, and construction costs in California's transit corridors routinely push rents above $3,000/month — before any new fees.
I don't doubt that some number of working- and middle-class California families would love to live in these apartments, but they'll have a hard time affording them without large subsidies and, importantly, they'll have an even harder time commuting to service jobs or jobs in logistics, warehousing, light manufacturing, etc., outside of urban cores. The housing shortage is a mass-market problem. It requires mass-market solutions: homes that pencil out at prices ordinary families can afford, in the suburban and exurban areas where blue-collar jobs and land are (relatively) abundant. Unless I’m missing something, this is just unbelievably perverse.
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