Why Can’t California Do Anything?
22nd June 2025
I would have phrased that “do anything right”, but that’s me.
California, it turns out, is a ridiculous place, run by ridiculous people, with ridiculous regulations. Or, as the folks at Rand put it, “The average market-rate apartment in California is roughly two and a half times the cost of a similar apartment constructed in Texas on a square-foot basis—and regional differences within California, where costs in the San Francisco Bay Area are roughly 50 percent higher than costs in San Diego.” Additionally, “[t]he time to bring a project to completion in California is more than 22 months longer than the average time required in Texas.” According to Rand, the culprit for these grotesque disparities is, to no one’s surprise, the differences in regulatory burdens between Texas and California and between various jurisdictions within the (allegedly) Golden State.
They call it the Golden State because they keep pissing in their own soup.