California's Housing Crisis

We all grow up with certain inherited dreams, and in America one of the most persistent is owning a home. From childhood onward, we’re taught that homeownership is synonymous with stability, prosperity, and adulthood — the cornerstone of the middle-class ideal. I absorbed all of that. For years, I imagined buying a place somewhere near where I grew up. The shape of the dream changed as I did: a Malibu glass box, a repurposed industrial loft, a white-picket-fence suburb, even the teenage fantasy of a mansion with an infinity pool. As I got older and more pragmatic, more politically aware, increasingly anti-capitalist — that dream evolved into something rooted in California’s urban fabric: a historic, walkable neighborhood, a space with historic character, a little garden, a home studio, enough room to eventually raise a family.

But that fantasy is dissolving. A basic single-family home in Thousand Oaks, one of the suburbs northwest of Los Angeles, a middle-class neighborhood where I grew up, now averages around $1.1 million. In the walkable, transit-adjacent neighborhoods of Los Angeles where I’d actually want to live, prices easily reach $2 million or more. Even after building a career in tech with what should be exceptional earning power, ownership feels out of reach — and the gap widens every year.

I followed the prescribed path toward middle-class security. I took on student debt for a technical degree. I entered corporate life and worked relentlessly to carve out a career as a software developer. I thought I’d made it when I reached a six-figure salary — something many hardworking people never get. Yet even “exceptional” income is no match for a housing market where costs rise faster than any normal person can keep up, and where even the least desirable areas have been absorbed into the broader squeeze of scarcity.

My personal story becomes political very quickly. California’s housing crisis is not the result of individual shortcomings. It’s the predictable outcome of a system built on private property, artificial scarcity, and speculation. In this article, I want to examine that crisis through a Marxist lens as a way to make sense of the structural forces shaping the lives of millions across this state.

When the System Works Too Well

A Marxist lens generally starts with the fundamental question: who owns the land, who controls it, and who extracts value from it? In California, the answer is very clear: private owners, private developers, and increasingly, private equity.

The crisis looks chaotic from the ground level, but from a structural perspective, it is the system functioning exactly as designed.

By the numbers

To understand the scale:

California needs an estimated 1.3 million additional units just for very-low and extremely-low income households (CalMatters analysis).
Since 1990, California has added 3.6 million housing units while its population grew by 9.4 million (PPIC).
The median California home price in late 2025 is ~$840,200 (Redfin).
More than half of renters in the state pay over 30% of income on housing, a standard measure of being cost-burdened (California Legislative Analyst’s Office).

The Three Engines Driving the Crisis

1. Commodification of Land

In California, land is treated first as an asset class. A parcel of dirt in Santa Monica can appreciate faster than most middle-class incomes. The result is a world where wealthy landowners don’t need to create anything. Simply owning land generates profit.

Economically, this is called rent extraction. Politically, it creates a class whose interests are directly tied to restricting supply. Sociologically, it produces generations locked out of stability.

2. Rent-Seeking Homeowner Politics

Once a house becomes a retirement plan, and often, the primary source of a family’s wealth, homeowners understandably want to protect their assets. And historically, they’ve succeeded.

With tools like minimum lot sizes, single-family zoning, height limits, parking mandates, and endless discretionary review, homeowners can veto nearly any project that might increase supply or diversify who lives near them.

This “NIMBYism” is class behavior: people acting in accordance with their material incentives.

3. Financialization of Shelter

After the 2008 foreclosure wave, firms like Blackstone acquired tens of thousands of California homes. Housing has become an investment vehicle for global capital, with REITs and private equity portfolios treating single-family homes like stocks.

In this world:

a house is a commodity
a neighborhood is a portfolio
a city is a marketplace
a renter is a revenue stream

It’s a system that prioritizes return on investment over the human need for shelter.

The Cultural Illness Beneath It All

California’s housing crisis, like housing crises across the capitalist world, is as deeply cultural as it is economic.

In the United States especially, the post-WWII era cemented homeownership as the central path to security, wealth, retirement, and social legitimacy. A home became more than just a shelter; it became people’s identity, status, and the primary vehicle of intergenerational wealth.

This is the basis of what California increasingly resembles today: a kind of modern feudal land system, where those who bought early — back when affordability still existed — now wield their ownership class as a political weapon. Having secured their place in the hierarchy, they pull the ladder up behind them to preserve the value of what they already have, at the expense of those still seeking it.

And once the home becomes the nest egg, everything follows:

When your house is your retirement plan, you defend it.
When your neighborhood becomes part of your portfolio, you gatekeep it.
When scarcity inflates your equity, scarcity starts to feel like a virtue.

Viewed through this lens, the NIMBY impulse reveals itself as class interest. For many Americans, a house is the only asset separating them from economic insecurity. Protecting that asset aligns them not with their working-class origins but with the logic of capital itself, even when doing so undermines the broader public’s ability to access shelter.

The deeper irony is that this homeowner class — in safeguarding its own wealth — ends up undermining the future of its own children. Each passing decade of manufactured scarcity leaves new generations with fewer choices about how they want to live and, more importantly, where they can live. In trying to preserve their slice of security, they’ve created a landscape where their descendants inherit less freedom, less mobility, and a narrowing horizon of possibility, which is arguably antithetical to their interests.

And for some people, the consequences are far more violent. California’s homelessness crisis is among the worst in the nation, and a growing body of research makes it unmistakably clear that housing availability, and ultimately affordability, is one of the strongest predictors of rising homelessness rates. When someone is pushed into living unhoused, they aren’t simply “struggling” — they are exposed to the elements, cut off from community, and forced into a state of social isolation and vulnerability that represents capitalist alienation at its most extreme. Homelessness sits at the bitter core of our culture’s rot — a society that has learned to tolerate mass suffering as the acceptable price of commodified housing, and to accept human precarity as a natural byproduct of the market rather than a political choice.

The dissonance is clear. A system built around protecting property values and prioritizing the selfish interests of homeowners inevitably collides with the simple moral intuition that housing should be more than a luxury. To us leftists, housing is a human right.

From Marxist Diagnosis to Reformist Solutions

A Marxist analysis can tell us why California’s housing crisis exists: a mode of production built on private land ownership, speculative profit, and class hierarchy will always produce scarcity. It explains the mechanism and the interests involved. But a true Marxist solution — abolishing private land ownership and reorganizing housing around public need — is nowhere on the political horizon in the United States.

What we’re left with, at least for now, are reformist tools: social housing, land trusts, anti-speculation taxes, and regional planning. These do not overturn capitalism or dissolve class power. They are attempts to blunt the system’s sharpest edges, to carve out pockets of stability within a structure that fundamentally resists it.

If this sounds “radical,” it’s only because California has moved so far toward treating land as a commodity that even modest interventions feel like ideological ruptures. What follows, then, is not a Marxist program — it is a revisionist one, informed by Marxist critique but operating within the political and economic realities we have.

California’s Reformers Try to Patch the System

Despite entrenched forces, California has seen a wave of legislative reforms over the past decade aimed at loosening the chokehold.

Key players include State Senator Scott Wiener, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, and organizations like California YIMBY — groups that push market-oriented, zoning-focused policies to expand supply.

Major reforms worth noting

SB 9 (2021)

Allows homeowners to split single-family lots and build duplexes. Impact so far: limited — localities still resist, and uptake is slow.

SB 10 (2021)

Enables higher-density (up to 10 units) near transit and job centers.

ADU Legalization (2016–2023 expansion)

The quiet success story: Accessory Dwelling Units (granny flats, backyard cottages) have exploded, adding tens of thousands of units statewide.

Builder’s Remedy

If a city fails to plan sufficiently for housing, developers can bypass local zoning entirely. This has frightened NIMBY cities into compliance.

AB 2011 & SB 423

Allow fast-tracked affordable and mixed-income housing construction on commercial corridors.

SB 79

Enables multi-story, dense housing (4-9 stories) near high-capacity transit stops in urban transit counties, effectively overriding certain local zoning constraints.

These are meaningful reforms — the “revisionist” approach, tweaking capitalism to be less brutal. But they stop short of challenging the underlying structure: private profit control over land.

What a Leftist Approach Looks Like

Reforms at the state level are necessary, but they are still operating within the boundaries of the existing market logic. A left-wing program must go further. It cannot simply speed up permits or legalize duplexes; it must confront the core premise that shelter should be allocated by price and scarcity. The entire framework of private land ownership — the very structure that treats housing as a commodity — has to be rethought if land is ever to serve the working class rather than extract from it.

1. Massive Public Housing: The Vienna Model

Vienna has become the canonical example of social housing that works. Social housing there is not “public housing” in the American sense — stigmatized, underfunded, and isolated. It is mixed-income, widely distributed, and built to high architectural standards. The city acts as a long-term steward rather than a landlord of last resort, constructing durable buildings, maintaining them rigorously, and keeping them permanently outside the speculative market. This model treats housing as infrastructure, like transit or schools: a public good that stabilizes the entire city, not just its poorest residents.

Key facts

The city owns ~220,000 units and regulates another ~200,000 via limited-profit cooperatives (Wiener Wohnen).
43–60% of all Viennese live in public or cooperative housing.
Rents are often 30–60% lower than comparable market rents.

Most buildings are mixed-income, beautifully designed, and maintained for generations. The funding mechanism is clever: a small citywide income levy funds construction. The result: stability, affordability, integration, and dignity. This is what decommodification looks like when it succeeds.

2. Community Land Trusts (CLTs)

Community Land Trusts are one of the clearest real-world examples of decommodification in action. They flip the script: instead of individuals or investors owning land, a nonprofit steward holds the land in perpetuity, while residents own or rent the structures built on top.

The U.S. model began in Burlington, Vermont, where the Burlington Community Land Trust (now the Champlain Housing Trust) manages homes for over 3,000 residents and has kept them affordable across multiple generations. Washington, D.C., Oakland, and Atlanta have built CLTs specifically to prevent displacement in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.

The power of the CLT is in its structure. By permanently removing land from the speculative market, resale prices can never spiral upward, and long-term stability follows. CLTs grow slowly, but they represent one of the few models in the U.S. that fundamentally change the relationship between land, profit, and community control.

3. Regional or State-Level Zoning Control

Local control over land use is often treated as a cornerstone of American democracy, but when it comes to housing, it functions like a form of neo-feudal governance. Tiny homeowner-dominated municipalities can veto apartment construction, transit-oriented development, or even duplexes — decisions that reverberate across entire metropolitan regions.

A leftist approach replaces fragmented fiefdoms with regional or statewide planning, where housing is treated as part of a shared ecosystem rather than a localized commodity.

Real precedents exist:

Oregon effectively abolished exclusive single-family zoning statewide in 2019.
New Zealand passed sweeping national reforms requiring medium-density zoning across its major cities.
Tokyo, with its centralized land-use authority, builds far more housing than any Western city and has maintained stable rents for decades.

The principle is simple: when shelter is a public good, planning must reflect the needs of the public — not the anxieties of a narrow homeowner class. Like all political discussions, it is about where power is concentrated, and who that power serves. Centralizing authority over housing decisions has potential to benefit the broader populace by removing power in decision-making that affects the broader society from wealthy communities acting in their own self interest.

4. Anti-Speculation Tools

If the structural goal is to de-link housing from speculative profit, then policy must directly target the incentives that make speculation attractive.

Cities and nations around the world have already done this:

Vancouver’s vacancy tax reduced empty investment units by over 20% in its first years.
South Korea’s heavy flipping taxes cooled runaway condo speculation in Seoul.
Canada’s foreign-buyer tax sharply curtailed the practice of wealthy investors parking money in empty real estate.
Berlin not only tried to nationalize major corporate landlords, but has strict rules limiting corporate purchases of single-family homes and aggressive rent controls.

California has only begun inching toward these tools — with local vacancy taxes in places like San Francisco and Berkeley — but the state as a whole still treats speculation as a regrettable side effect rather than a primary driver.

A leftist, revisionist program would invert that logic: if speculation fuels unaffordability, then reducing speculative incentives becomes a core pillar of housing policy.

What a Marxist Solution Looks Like

If a Marxist analysis explains why the crisis exists, a Marxist solution would address the root rather than the symptoms. At its core, it would mean abolishing the private ownership of land and reorganizing housing around collective need rather than profit. Housing would become a public utility — like water, power, or education — something planned democratically and allocated according to human necessity.

In practice, this would require large-scale nationalization of land and housing stock, the socialization of mortgages and rents, and the construction of publicly owned, permanently decommodified housing at a scale that dwarfs anything seen in the United States. Land-use decisions would be made collectively, not through homeowner veto power. Rent would reflect maintenance costs rather than market demand. Housing would be produced by public entities or worker cooperatives, not developers extracting profit. And the wealth accumulated through decades of speculative ownership would need to be redistributed, likely through taxation or direct expropriation.

Back to the bitter reality: the majority in the United States still need convincing that housing is a human right. None of these ideas are anywhere near mainstream political reality just yet. It will take some time to warm the masses up to the heavily stigmatized concepts of socialism and Marxism. Even longer to convince those benefiting from this system to relinquish their financial investments for egalitarian benefit.

But articulating them clarifies the distinction: Marxism offers a diagnosis of the underlying structure; reformism offers tools to alleviate the pain without dismantling the structure itself. Understanding the former helps us see the limits of the latter — and the depth of the crisis we are trying to navigate.

What This Means for People My Age

For my generation, no crisis shapes our future more than housing. We plan our careers around rent, our relationships around commutes, and our identities around the shrinking set of places we can afford to exist. For many young people, the realm of possibility is narrowing, and with it, the belief that adulthood will offer autonomy, that hard work will be rewarded, or that we’ll ever own the homes we were raised to aspire to.

We all navigate constraints — physics, biology, money, time. Fewer options aren’t inherently bad; limits can force creativity. When housing becomes scarce, we adapt. Some people pick up extra work or push themselves into higher-paying jobs. Others move back in with their parents after college to save, or leave their hometowns entirely for markets where a stable life feels possible. I’ve watched every one of these strategies play out in the lives of people I care about.

But the tragedy is in the necessity of those choices. It’s the friends who leave not because they want to explore, but because staying became impossible. It’s children scattering away from their parents and support networks just to meet a basic need. It’s young couples who would love to have kids, but can’t reconcile parenthood with the cost of keeping a roof over their heads or providing a quality home for their prospective children. When a society makes housing so scarce that life decisions become forced rather than chosen, the loss is substantial — the erosion of family, community, and the futures we imagined for ourselves.

On a pragmatic level, we have to adapt in order to force change bit by bit. Getting involved politically and backing politicians running on good housing policy is a start. Making conscious trade-offs is also an important consideration. We might have to choose to rent in places that feel alive rather than buy in places that feel dead. We prioritize walkability, community, culture, friendship — use-value over exchange-value — even if it means never owning a home at all. In choosing this, we quietly reject the idea that wealth must be built through exclusion. Political organizing becomes easier when young people concentrate in these places instead of dispersing in quiet defeat.

But no amount of personal adaptation can heal a structural wound. It’s time to stop accepting this reality as inevitable. These outcomes are not accidents of nature; they are the predictable result of decades of deliberate policy choices and the rotten capitalist framework that shaped them. If we want to reject the premise that housing is a commodity, we have to begin by relinquishing our own attachment to property as a vehicle for personal wealth. As long as our vision of stability is tied to capital accumulation through land, we remain bound to the very system that produces the crisis we lament. We cannot treat market capitalism as the end-all-be-all force governing a resource so scarce, so precious, and so fundamental to human life.

California’s crisis poses a simple but profound question: will we continue to organize society around protecting the wealth of those who bought early, or will we decide that stability and a roof over one’s head are things every human being deserves?

The answer will define the livability of this state for decades — and determine whether the future is something we inherit or something we’re shut out of.