California Trails the Nation’s Housing Creation Pace

California continued to trail the nation’s pace of creating new housing, which is not helping alleviate California’s housing shortage crisis. The Los Angeles Daily News writes,

Yes, Southern California’s new housing in 2016 approximates the combined additions in Alabama, New Jersey and Wisconsin. But the 0.53 percent increase last year — yes, better than 0.41 percent average annual rate in the previous five years — again trails the U.S. pace.

Southern California did slightly better than statewide patterns last year. Southern California was able to add 73,300 units last year, however, the statewide housing-creation pace in California was beat out by 28 other states. Orange County was the only county in Southern California to top last year’s national housing creation pace with 9,200 units added last year. If Southern California alone was able to keep up with the national pace over the past six years, about 22,000 additional housing units would be available. To put things into perspective, the 22,000 housing units over six years would have been slightly less than what Texas was able to add last year.

California needs to surpass the national pace of creating new housing to make more of an impact on the housing shortage crisis.

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