California’s
Housing Crisis Worsens in 2007

A recently released report shows that California's housing affordability crisis continued to worsen in the third quarter of 2007, prompting one housing trade association to urge state and local officials to make a new year's resolution for 2008 to improve the ability of California families to buy a home.

"Once again, it's been documented that California communities are the least affordable in the nation," said Wes Keusder, 2007 chairman of the California Building Industry Association. "This is directly due to more than 30 years' worth of actions by state and local governments that have limited housing production and made new homes, condominiums, and apartments ever-more expensive to build.

"There’s simply no reason why 89% of the families in Indianapolis can afford to buy the median-priced home there while less than 3% of the families in Los Angeles can do so. There's no reason why California's homeownership rate is the second-lowest in the nation." The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index, which analyzes affordability for 161 metro areas across the nation, found that California's 24 metro areas were at the bottom of the list. The respected national survey of housing affordability, which analyzes what percentage of homes for sale in a metro area are affordable to households earning the local median income, found that 18 of the 20 least-affordable housing markets were located in California, including the bottom nine. In the state's most affordable metro area — Butte County — only 25% of area households could afford to buy the median-priced home.