Mapping the extraordinary cost of homes in California

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The most extreme case of this vast difference in the ability to afford housing may be that of 1950 Cowper Street in Palo Alto, which recently was bought by Google executive Ruth Porat for the sum of $30 million. That’s right, $30 million. For a three-bedroom house of 5,000 square feet. Contrast this with the massive displacement of ordinary working-class people and the diminishing if not evaporated chances of owning a home for what used to be called “the middle-class family.”

Regardless of these realities, most San Francisco progressives chose to stick with their familiar stance of opposing new development, positioning themselves as defenders of the city’s physical character. Instead of forming a pro-growth coalition with business and labor, most of the San Francisco Left made an enduring alliance with home-owning NIMBYs. It became one of the peculiar features of San Francisco that exclusionary housing politics got labeled “progressive.” … Over the years, these anti-development sentiments were translated into restrictive zoning, the most cumbersome planning and building approval process in the country, and all kinds of laws and rules that make it uniquely difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to add housing in San Francisco.

Source: geocurrents.info