Keynote: California’s housing squeeze is reshaping who can stay — local action urged

Joel Kotkin, an urbanist who teaches at Chapman University, opened the Salinas Regional Housing Summit with a wide-ranging diagnosis of why housing has become the central economic and demographic challenge for California.

"Housing costs is destroying the aspirations of younger people," Kotkin said, arguing that rising prices and restrictive land and permitting regimes have produced a net outflow of Californians and a decline in homeownership among younger cohorts. He cited long-term shifts in jobs and housing demand — including more growth in suburbs and smaller cities — and said those patterns present opportunities for places like Salinas if costs can be controlled.

Kotkin reviewed national and state trends: he said California's per-capita attraction rate has fallen, home prices in large coastal metros have risen far faster than wages, and homeownership among younger residents is much lower than the national norm. He warned that state-level mandates alone will not undo the problem: "I don't think it's going to be turned around by the state government because it is hopelessly brain dead," he said, calling instead for local strategies.

On policy responses, Kotkin emphasized two immediate local levers: permitting and job creation. He said cities must permit more units of the kinds people actually want (single-family and townhouses in many markets), and also work to retain and attract employers that generate higher wage jobs locally. He recommended that jurisdictions consider manufactured housing, more permissive zoning for buildable land and decisive infrastructure investments to make development feasible.

During a robust audience Q&A, Kotkin declined simple prescriptions from Sacramento and argued that communities must tailor approaches to local preferences and markets. On the role of wages, he said higher pay is important but that wages and housing supply must advance together: "Sometimes if you increase the wages, sometimes you have a negative effect" because employers automate or relocate, he cautioned.

Kotkin's remarks set the tone for subsequent panels: several speakers and developers later returned to his themes — the weight of permitting, litigation and infrastructure costs on project economics, and the need for local partnerships that link housing supply, workforce development and municipal policy.

The summit continued with panel discussions on CEQA and land-use barriers, a developer roundtable that described a multi-decade pipeline of projects, and a solutions session focused on employer-sponsored and modular housing.