Flutterby™! : Sonoma Housing Demand

Housing shortages and supply and demand are something that I've been thinking about and discussing with various folks before the recent Sonoma Fires destroyed thousands of homes in an area with < 1% vacancy. Now I'm seeing a whole lot of complaints about rents going up and price gouging, and...

On the one hand I see that we have a lot of displaced people who need housing. On the other hand, we have a local political scene that has created suburban sprawl that we can't afford to maintain, and a reluctance to allow the density that'd both give us affordable housing and maintainable infrastructure.

I have to say that if I were a landlord thinking rationally about incomes, and had vacancies right now, I'd undertake some maintenance and upgrades. Keep those buildings off the market for a month or three until the complaining about price gouging wore off and the higher rents were the new normal. Yeah, it's heartless, but it's rational behavior.

So if we want to fix the housing crisis in Sonoma County, we need a two-pronged approach: First, acknowledge that, yes, we have a set of (artificially) limited resources, and that prices on those resources are going to go up until we do something about the root causes.

Second, let's address the root causes: let's start talking about high density multi-story buildings that are walkable distances from urban cores. Let's build attractive housing that doesn't require the expense of an automobile. Let's get some good condos and apartments fast-tracked and up so that we have the housing stock to support the demand.