From Policy To Permits, Here’s How We Unlock Affordable Housing

We brought together both academic and research-oriented people who are investigating the root causes of the problems with affordable housing, with people who are actual practitioners of the craft, people who are advocates for affordable housing in the public sector, and actual builders who are building and developing these kinds of sites.

Wendell is a demographer who publishes the annual study called the Demographia Study of Housing Affordability, which looks at the affordability of housing in every metro in the world. And he lays the table out for us with the facts regarding how unaffordable housing is here in California.

And you can see this uh chart that goes back to the beginning in 1850 and how California led for a long time. Now, the point is, though, things are really bad, really, really bad. Um you realize, and and you know, the the popular press doesn't pick this up. There's been a lot more uh publicity in recent years about the domestic out-migration. That is, people who live in California who move elsewhere in the country. And since uh 2000, that number is 4 million.

4 million people moved out of California net, more than

moved in. That's larger than the city of Los Angeles. In 1969, the we we have we use a price to income ratio in evaluating housing affordability. The price to income ratio is the median house price in a market like the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which includes Orange County, or the San Jose or the Sacramento, et cetera. The median multiple is the median household price divided by the median household income.

It was under three in every major uh uh metropolitan area in the United States, except for New York and Honolulu, and those two, it was a little more than that in 1969. Now, among the large markets in California, the markets with more than a million, markets as small as, say, Fresno, uh, it's about eight. And it gets up to 12 when you get to San Jose. Unbelievable. Um, and and so uh this is a real problem.

And and and what has happened, and the one thing that hasn't been mentioned yet, is the role of policies that try to discourage peripheral development. California planners and the California government at this point is adamantly opposed to allowing the market to develop housing on the core, on the edge of the per the uh the urban area. And indeed, the market produced housing in this state until about 1980, with it sort of beginning to fall apart in the 70s, um, through the market.

And what is needed is to begin to roll back the market distortions to allow the market to take care of it because you can't afford the price that you're going, you cannot give median income households housing under the current situation because it's just too expensive. Um let me see here. The and in any event, what you see on this chart, the the black line is the median multiple or that price to income ratio I mentioned rising from three in 1970 to up to as high as 10 in one year.

Uh the dotted red line is other um major metropolitan areas in the United States that have a housing affordability, but you can see it's not as bad as California. And the other, the green, is about the how the half of housing markets in the United States, where it's not that that good, but is still doing considerably better. Now, what's happened though since that time, or over the period, how did uh how did this happen?

Well, it doesn't cost much more to build a house in San Francisco than it does in Dallas or Atlanta. It does cost a little bit different, but not that much. The big difference, however, is in the land. And when you go drawing lines around cities, as they've done in Houston, I'm not in Houston, in uh in Tokyo and in uh um in in other cities around the world and in the United States, including California, you end up forcing prices to go higher.

And we know that, you know, when when the when OPEC decides they're going to limit how much oil they give us. And you see that that issue just in California house um uh gasoline prices as well. So the basic point here is in the good old days, 1969 in California, and

today in half of the country, the cost of the land element in when you buy a house was about 15%, and about 85% was the construction cost. Now, government data shows that in the San Francisco Bay Area, the cost of the land is about 70%, and in Southern California, 65%. That is a big deal, and that is the principal reason, in my view, that the problem is so bad.

And by the way, um, California state government, despite having trunk done what has been characterized as hundreds of bills, I'm not sure if that's quite true. Um the fact is none of them have addressed this problem, and that's going to be a problem, I think, in the long run. Now, the thing about it beyond that is that a lot of people would like you to believe that just demand, you know, it's just everybody wants to live here, you know, which is why, of course, four million people moved out.

Um the basic point is if you look at cost of living and uh and the cost of uh goods and services, what we find using government data is 88% of the difference between normal cost of living in this country and California's and the cost of living in these markets that really seriously re-regulate um peripheral demand or peripheral um production, 88% has to do with housing. Now, to conclude, there are some solutions, but it's not difficult. It's not easy.

You're looking at a situation that is going to take a long time to fix. But you must begin, if you're going to solve the problem, moving the housing market back into the market and away from subsidy. You will never subsidize this sufficient to make a big difference.

And using the most recent LA Jewish population study, uh, calculated that uh Jews make up something like 40% or more of the white population in the city of Los Angeles. So the white population declined, the Jewish population states did. And it would have grown except for housing costs. We get to if we have time, I can talk about that later.

Uh so what I'm gonna do uh is to demonstrate the dramatic impact of housing costs on Jewish Los Angeles by comparing synagogue membership between two surveys of LA Jews, 1997 and 2021. So, first of all, why synagogues? Um synagogue is the American, is the American Jewish institution that touches the lives of the greatest number of American Jews. And I've done all kinds of research on this.

This is when a Jew moves to a new community, usually the first place they contact is the synagogue, because everybody knows what synagogues are. They're in what we used to call the Elophages. Um American Jews, unlike American Christians, formerly belong to synagogues and pay annual membership dues. Uh, only Mormons uh have a similar economic arrangement between their adherents and their religious institutions.

So I'm gonna look at just one subgroup of Los Angeles Jews, and that is inmarried couples with children. So that means uh one Jew married to another Jew, including people who converted to Judaism, and they have at least one child in the household. Between zero and eighteen, I guess one month and eighteen. I choose inmarried couples with children because they have the highest rates of synagogue membership.

So if anyone in a community is going to join a synagogue, it will be an in-married couple of children because since the post-war suburbanization, that's really been the focus of synagogues with serving families with children. Um in the 1997 study, 64% of inmarried couples with children belong to a synagogue in Los Angeles. In 2021, that rate was cut almost in half. Today, only 36% of the inmarried couples with children belong to a synagogue. So it pretty much looks like uh housing costs.

But we have further evidence for that. Um, one of the questions in the study uh asked uh uh during the past year, in what ways, if any, did your financial situation limit your participation in Jewish life? So going back to in-married couples with children, the primary market for synagogue membership, 29% of in-married couples with children said they did not enroll their children in Jewish

education or camp or other activities because of financial costs. Now, it's not like those activities are exorbitantly expensive, at least they haven't gone up relative to whatever they cost 20 years ago. It's just that the families have much less um expendable income. A quarter of them said that they required financial assistance to enroll children in Jewish education camp or other activities. So, what did this mean practically for Los Angeles Jews?

It means that Jewish children are not going to Hebrew school, means that they're not going to Jewish camp. Um, and there's a large body of research uh that shows that these experiences in the formative years uh have a huge impact later on in their adult life as Jews. We experienced this at first hand in my own synagogue, which I'm on the board of directors. Over that same 20 years, our synagogue membership declined by 40%. We have the same rabbi, everyone likes him.

Um I think services have gotten better. Um, we ended up selling our separate religious school building to a developer who will be putting up, of course, luxury housing because we couldn't afford the upkeep of the building, and there just weren't enough kids to justify having almost an entire city block for a religious school. So I'm just gonna conclude by saying in Los Angeles we have literally mortgaged our Jewish future to housing costs.

But I recognize that there are people who they want a 10,000 square foot lot or they want a 20,000 square foot lot for a price that is more in line with their income. And so the inland empire may be the best choice for them. Um I think what it really comes down to is the people who already live there, the people who already have their housing, the people who got in in the 70s or 80s or 90s or even the very early 2000s, do not want their communities to change.

They are very resistant uh to any new people joining their community. Um, there's a belief that zoning is a contract, and when you bought your house, nothing around you was allowed to change. And it has disenfranchised everybody under 40. If you live in California and you do not come from an immigrant family where your parents are immigrants and there's a high pattern of multi-generational households, white folks don't live that way. So, I mean, that's just how it is, right?

I mean, I spoke in this room not even two weeks ago to the young professionals group of the CEO Leadership Council of Launch County. And every single one of those young people was either the child of an immigrant who lives here and still lives at home, or someone that was recruited by some of the major high-tech employers, Edwards Life Sciences, uh, I think Pacific Insurance was one of them. There's a whole consortium of

companies that have come together to try to hold on to their young people. And I really think the ones they're going to be able to hold on to are the ones who have families who are already homeowners for any duration of time. And the people who've come here from another place to start their career, if they are able to find housing within their budget in a place that they want to live.

And I don't think we can say that the millennials are a monolith that they all want to live in urban places and, you know, be serial or perpetual renters, right? I think they, that generation, like any generation, I think there's diversity in what people want. Um, if they can find something in Orange County or nearby where they can afford to stay and build their own families here, I think they will.

I think there are definitely people who are, you know, they're either from here or they move here and they think, wow, this is such a great place to live. I don't want to leave. Um, but if we are not, if you know, if we're gonna have an Orange County that makes room for everybody, we have to allow more housing to be built. And we have tons of opportunity. We have so much underperforming commercial space, right?

And if we can get Harry and Harriet, homeowner, away from the podium at the city council meeting and put forward uh the younger generations of people who want to live here, I think that that change is possible. But when your elected officials are only hearing from Harry and Harriet, homeowner, uh, it makes it really hard for them to make the right decision for the future of their city. Um, I think that's that's kind of where I land with it. So I guess my last point would be a call to action.

If you are a young person in this audience, if you have young adult children and you don't want them to have to move to Texas, pay attention to your planning commission, pay attention to your city council. And when a development comes up for public comment, go tell the elected officials that you want to see new opportunities for development. It doesn't mean that your child is going to be the one that lives there. Maybe your child decides they do want to live in the inland empire or Kansas.

You know, I don't know. But to create that opportunity, it has to get personal. And we have to get to the microphone to give the elected officials who are not necessarily inclined in that direction, although we do have some cities that have that, um, some city councils that have that, give give those elected officials a political cover to vote in the way that is going to create that opportunity for homeownership for the next generation. That's what I think.

They're not sitting here with us, and we're not even having that conversation with them. So, what um I'm afraid of and what I have seen is moved from Mexico City, grew up in the most dense area you can imagine, not looking for density ever again. Um that's why I think Elizabeth and I have been working in the field together for a long, long time. And we do believe in the ability to build communities at the local level that reflect the community that wants to be what it wants to be.

But California is no longer giving us the opportunity to have civic engagement that really creates um character in communities. Everything's starting to look like a cookie cutter. When you go to Mexico City, my hometown, it's looking very much like downtown Santana. It's looking very much like Kingston's Toronto. And so what I'm seeing is working in Orange County, I started my career because I wanted to help people uh reach the American dream with the cornerstone of home ownership.

Um, I went to school for it, graduated, worked for an affordable housing nonprofit here, Naval Works Orange County for about a decade. When I started working for Naval Works, it was a uh foreclosure crisis. We were helping hundreds of thousands of families to save their homes. Um it didn't get better though. And and that's what I have seen that Naval Works at this time, after 10, 15 years, is no longer able to really create home ownership at big quantities.

Like it is it's a rare, it's it's a celebration. When in in the past, I we used to have uh payment assistance that used to work. We used to have programs that could unlock home ownership for families. Homeownership for Hispanics, Hispanics being one of the largest, if not going to be the largest population, is minimum in California. And that is setting up the country for a lot of people who are not participating in the American dream.

And so what I'm what I'm fearful of is that we as citizens, specifically the 40 and below, we are losing the ability to dream. And that is not translating at the coding with civic engagement. That's what I'm feeling. And that's what I'm I can testify now that Mabelworks, that you know, here in Orange County, is now doing ADUs.

Is it commendable? Absolutely, because we're trying to look for a solution. Is it going to get us out of the house in trouble?

And people are not talking to each other, in there's no cohesiveness among us because, in my opinion, we have stopped dreaming. My other point I wanted to make very quick is we have the opportunity to start thinking of Southern California as a larger region, being the um the now the residents of two counties that are very much dependent on each other.

Um what I have seen is that there's an opportunity for developers and um businesses to think of the England Empire as a place where they can open offices and they can bring, kind of shift that paradigm of like the homes kind of follow the jobs. There's a lot of opportunity and a lot of Wendels said we're in the four or five um rather than ten. So there's still for the young people here in Southern California who are looking for homeownership uh opportunities like I did.

Um I bought my house in Orange, I'm sorry, in um Eastville in the English Empire about nine years ago. I lived in Orange County, but had to make that very difficult decision as a single mom. I needed to invest my money, and just Orange County would not give me that opportunity. So I apply in the Long Empire and I discovered a beautiful new world that is not very well articulated, but is a lot of opportunities still happening.

So I think that it's not just like we mentioned before, this is so complex that there are other levers that we can move that can make a change in how we see housing and how we develop housing. And then lastly, is solutions are not, in my opinion, going to come from a national person that's gonna get up and say, Oh, you know what, how's Elizabeth doing today in Santa Ana, California? There's nobody in Sacramento getting up and asking themselves, how's Carla doing the England Empire?

And what I have seen is that the relationship between Sacramento, the those that make policy and the locals is extremely important. The investments that are not going to the English Empire are because they don't know the people in the England Empire.

And when you get to have close relationships with Sacramento and they understand your potential, they understand your opportunity, that's where I think we can start thinking of the region as an actual region rather than two or three or four different counties divided when we all are sharing the same issue. So I guess my call to action is to pay attention to the inland.

That's where we're seeing the growth, where we're seeing the affordability, and why there's a big feature for the 40 and now we changed our focus a little bit for our next several speakers.

Um, other than concrete and type 5 wood, uh everything else does come from China. So we went back to China and we started beating that up as much as we can. And really, our final solution is modular. Um, traditional building is just too expensive. Modular is quick, rapid implementation, so we're not stuck around for a year and a half to two and a half years. Financing costs, uh, the environment, human error, um,

also labor shortages. You know, he was talking about four million people have left. Uh, of those four million people are skilled labor contractors, great builders, uh, moving to other places like Texas where they see a better opportunity, cheaper land. Um, and so for us, the only thing we really could fix is our vertical construction costs. And so we have purchased a factory um that's already done about 200,000 units as far as the tiny homes.

And so we've upgraded everything, and we have two versions, an affordable version, um, which we're producing at about $75 per square foot, our vertical construction and our higher-end market rate, which is at about $100 per square foot. Um, the difference there is higher ceiling, so more steel and larger windows.

Um, those numbers start escalating rapidly uh due to foundation increase. Um, so concrete has skyrocketed. And so for your foundations, when you go higher, they got to be deeper. Um, everybody's pretty much on the same page in site work and horizontal costs. There has been some innovation in concrete pouring, but not enough. Um, also, you know, you'll be stuck out there building for a long time, you know, a year and a half, two and a half years. Um, and you're paying a financing charge.

This is money you're just spending until you can get to rent stabilization or to even sell your units. So we need something that can be, you know, assembled in a day.

Now, what is it we do? We want to provide. I'm gonna take that back. We're not providing anything, we are responding to a need and a demand that I'm not gonna use the word average people because these this is the vast majority of people in the world have always wanted. And this conversation we're having today is not abnormal. This is actually a normal conversation for about 4,000 years. The notion that an individual would have the right to own property is the rarest thing that you can imagine.

I've been in this business 42 years. When I began, the median age of a homeowner was 31 years old. Today it's 57 years old. The median age today of a first-time home buyer is 41 years old. That's the most distressing, pathetic thing I've ever heard. What is a solution? It is quite simple. Homeownership. I don't know how many people actually spend much time listening to an elected official run on, I want to increase home ownership in this country.

I've actually heard over the last 25 years many people running for local, state, federal office saying, I want home ownership to decline. I want some other committee to determine who's gonna live where, why they're gonna live there. Most of them don't care about the solution. It's called what a city manager 25 years ago told me. He said to me, I'll leave his name out. He's retired. I don't need to insult them. I did, I did in person, but I'm not gonna do it today.

He said, Joel, you've told me what it is your business is. Now let me tell you about the business of city government. We're running on sales tax revenue, and every single thing you just uh cost us money, and I have no interest in it. This is the norm. And um, we have an opportunity to solve it. And and and the people at this table here actually are solving it. Um, but we're not doing it for the credit. But I guess I'll tell you one reason

why I keep doing it. I don't have any hair left to pull out. But one reason I keep doing it, it is only about 25% of the people in this country that can afford to buy a home. My market's 75% of the country. So it's a pretty good market.

And part of the reason it's so high is because of creeping regulations that when uh you look at what you know, fire code says, with what structural code says, with what plumbing code says, and zoning code, and you layer them, and the number of actual buildings that can be built to satisfy all of those codes simultaneously is a number that's been dropping rapidly over the years. And this is one of the reasons why our communities increasingly look homogeneous.

Why you can go to Texas and see basically the same product you see in California. It's because the intersection of all those codes has a tighter and tighter uh solution set. Um, it's also one of the things that makes converting office buildings to housing and other forms of adaptive reuse difficult, is that our codes have gotten much more uh much more specific and much stricter without any countervailing forces. And the real-world solutions have gotten fewer and fewer and fewer.

So, because that is really a fundamental problem, it's ironic that a lot of our advocacy at the state and at local levels to date has focused on what we call entitlements. And entitlements, for those who are not familiar with this, um that's that's planning approval for what it is you're doing. It could be a zoning approval, it could be a subdivision map, it could be a variety of things.

And if you're a developer and you're lucky enough to have land that is entitled, that doesn't mean anything except when you show up at the city to get a building permit, you go straight to the counter where they give you the building permit. If you don't have entitlements and you show up and you ask for a building permit, they say, well, first go get a zoning approval.

And so uh because so much state action and local action is focused on making it easier to get entitlements or providing um uh pre-negotiated solutions for some of the conflicts that arise when people ask for entitlements, like for example, density bonus law, where if you build a certain percentage of affordable housing, you can build extra market rate housing, things like that. Those are all fine, but they don't make it easier to build.

They don't lower the cost of construction, they don't create demand where there isn't demand. The government's job is to allow the good guys to win in a free market competition. If there's not sufficient regulation, quite often it becomes a cesspool. And so we need to play with good refs on the field. Otherwise, the bad guys are gonna win. And so for good guys like us to actually compete, we need the government to provide that market.

You actually bought the product as a kit, and then you would hire a framer, and you'd hire a plumber, and you would hire a riffler, and they would build what was a one-bedroom house on a lot that was 25 by 100, and the cost was $39.95. Now I was very compelled to build and very compelled to own. And that's true today as well. I love building, and I love having people buy our homes. And across the last 40 years, our home has our company has specialized for first-time buyers.

And the builders that we dealt with were those that were very well known here in Orange County, Bill Lyon, uh Jim Peters, uh the Baldwins, all privates. Okay, we had one group called Kaufman and Broad, and that was a public home builder, now called KB. Because of the change in the dynamics and the change in uh the availability of land, we do what Steve commented about is we do a lot of research as to

where can we find property that we can build that can be affordable for the first-time buyer. Now, let's define first-time buyer in the inland empire. By the way, I really enjoyed Elizabeth and um uh Carla's information about the Inland Empire. That's all that's where we build. I'd love to build an orange. I grew up in Orange, uh, I'd love to build more in Orange County.

We we must build in the England Empire because, again, the first-time buyer, the target price of our product is between $550,000 and $625,000. We don't pay over 10% for the land. I heard something earlier today about the land being 70% of the cost of the house. We pay 7% to 10%. My direct costs, okay, are $89 a foot.

And by the way, I might I was told this by someone years ago, Roger, if you pay faster, they'll build faster. That's a simple concept. We pay very fast. But the only way we can deliver the product is to be able to buy the land right and entitle it, which we completely do ourselves. We don't buy entitled land. We go, it's a wholesale approach, different, time consuming, and we deliver somewhere between 100 and 150 houses a year. Now, I'm very happy with that.

And that's a very good delivery for us. Uh, and we continue to do that, and we have a very deep pipeline. However, it is expanding, okay, and it's expanding, it's expanding from Riverside to Moreno Valley to San Yocino to Beaumont, and probably go into Coachella, and then you're going to go to the high desert. The reason you would go there is only because the jobs. You have to have the jobs. We talked about one word jobs.

If you, if somebody has to commute for an hour, it's going to be very difficult for them to buy your house. So I'm very encouraged in the next few years, even though the geography will be expanded, and in my opinion, there will be job creation in the Coachella Valley and in the high desert. Now, I'm talking about job creation, AI, big plants will come in, and employees will employ those people living in the high desert and the low desert.

So I'm very optimistic about Southern California, inland empire. Not that there aren't other locations. I built Montana and so forth, and it cost me twice as much to build Montana. But you know how I had one inspection? One single inspection in Montana. We have 17 here locally. So I'm not uh I'm an optimist. Okay. But it's taken a lot of years to get this figured out. And I have a very, very strong team that's very good at what they do.

And I would be happy to pass that on to any person that's is interested in learning more about this business. And I really appreciate your comments about the inland empire because that really is where home builders like myself, particularly private, can build. You know, that's that's a very good market for us.

So here we have property, we have willingness, we have a need, and we have an obstacle. And knowing how California works, I don't think it's gonna look good for the homeless population to be able to move into there, nor do I personally believe that's the right solution either for the communities. How do we cover that in the past?

We're using their land to serve that population. If you are in Orange County and you are interested in being on the yes side of this, peopleforhousing.org is up my website. We in the, I mean you were speaking

to the fact that, you know, you think there's a a a market for the turnover. I was, there are four hearings that I'm going to two last week, one this week and one the next week. Three of the four of them are tearing down old office that is 40% or more vacant and building townhomes. The three-story townhome with Tuck under parking is the first-time home buyer product for Orange County.

If you're interested in this, if you're interested in being an advocate, subscribe to my my list I will send you an email when there's a project in your community that you can advocate for because Harry and Harry aren't going anywhere.

One example is in downtown Rivers and I'm gonna if I get a chance I want to highlight some of these really great things that are happening in the empire where there was a um a home that's available to individuals who have AIDS who are um past um uh substance abusers and they're getting back on track and it was built inside of a neighborhood that everybody thought it was going to get shut down and what what the executive director of that organization did was he knocked on every single door of

that community and started bringing the homeowners into the planning of what that was going to look like in their neighborhood making them feel part of that solution as well and there was compromise there were some uh you know how many people you're going to have here what type of security we're going to have and the campus today looks beautiful is it working perfectly absolutely not but it is working and it is working and it got built because there was no uh there was nobody at the Palladium

that was saying no what they were saying is let's fix the things that don't work but it exists today so I would say that maybe Harry and what was that Harry and Harriet Harry and Harriet um is more about a civic conversation rather than us versus them because once you start talking to them about their children I'm sorry about that last man but most of us uh want to grow up with our our grandchildren get to see them be part of our lives um but the civic conversation is getting very difficult

between generations and that is detrimental to uh to building together so I would say that we need to expand the civic uh discourse to involve the people that are going to end up with this project because the one thing I have noticed is that they don't find out until it's getting done. And having that that surprise for many homeowners is it it goes against what they want.

So if you engage them at an earlier time um making out every time you might have a a better outcome in the future so I'll just add that all that outreach costs money.

And if that development doesn't go forward because Harry and Harriet are successful in derailing it that cost gets rolled into the cost of a next successful project. And those are the homeowners that are going to make for that so I don't disagree. I think conversation is really important. It's so expensive I don't think we can make that you know a regular practice.

But perhaps you know the political capital in the Buffy and Bucky neighborhood will be enough that they should spend the $30,000 a month times you know 24 months that it takes to do this entitlement process. It may be worth it. Are they going to be doing that in the low-income neighborhoods of Santa Ana I don't think so I have a question.

in Westwood so we're actually working with uh New Direction Vets and Hope the Mitchell so those are the guys that did the tiny homes there.

everyone gets frustrated with it.

businesses and the homeowners it works out quite well they all exist today there's some of the best to a community that is an important part of a community a lot of it is roll your sleeves up show up and make some sense and just to add one two quick points on this um there's a great book that came out several years back by a guy Craig Colburn who's a professor at the University of Washington called Homelessness is a housing problem.

And chapter by chapter it addresses all of the things that people say cause homelessness mental illness, drug addiction et cetera, et cetera and he goes issue by issue tearing those arguments apart. He said if mental illness or if drug addiction were the cause of homelessness then West Virginia which is the highest drug addiction rates in the country would have the worst homeless problem and they actually barely any homelessness.

If it were simply poverty that caused homelessness then Louisiana would have the most homeless and it doesn't really have that problem. And his point is clear that if we just build a lot of housing we're gonna reduce homelessness. So there's there's a tendency to want to build housing for the homeless as a solution and we should do that. We must do that. But at the same time building housing for everybody is by far the best prevention.

In the you you take San Bernardino and Riverside counties combined they have a land area similar to that of Austria and it's not terribly full. I mean I realize there's real urbanization west of of uh of Beaumont and so on but the fact is there's plenty of room to build and that's where we need to be building this where prices are are best and so on.

And the sad thing about it is that you know you you go to Victorville, we're looking at uh uh situations where housing is costing unbelievable amounts of money largely because we're overregulating the periphery so I just want to make sure that we're thinking along those lines all told this was a terrific event we got a lot of information on the table a lot of different perspectives on what is required in order to be able to really make a dent in the housing crisis that we're facing here in

California.