California’s affordability crisis isn’t some mysterious problem that economists can’t solve. The real issue is pretty straightforward: we’ve made it unnecessarily expensive and time-consuming to build new homes. And if we actually want to fix this mess, we need to get serious about streamlining construction and reducing the costs that make housing impossible to afford.

The numbers tell the story. Your parents’ generation could buy modest homes on working-class salaries, a letter carrier and a teacher could afford to raise three kids in a house they owned. Today? That same house would be completely out of reach for people doing those same jobs. We’re not talking about luxury homes here. We’re talking about basic shelter that used to represent economic security and a pathway to building wealth.

The real culprit is that we’ve piled on excessive fees, created bureaucratic nightmares, and allowed frivolous lawsuits to derail housing projects. City fees alone can eat up 20 percent of construction costs. When you combine that with lengthy approval processes and the uncertainty created by legal challenges, you end up with a system where it’s actually cheaper and faster to just not build.

San Jose’s already proven this works. By cutting permitting times and slashing those sky-high fees, they’ve gotten 2,000 homes that were previously approved but stalled to actually break ground. Another 2,000 are coming this year. The math was simple: reduce artificial barriers, and the market responds. One study found that just a 25 percent reduction in approval time could boost housing production by a full third.

But we can do even more. Factory-built housing costs up to 25 percent less and gets constructed 50 percent faster than traditional methods. California once helped solar power become affordable by supporting market innovation and scaling. We need to do the exact same thing with housing. The state should use tax credits and funding to incentivize factory-built housing while creating high-wage manufacturing jobs in the process.

This isn’t about throwing money at the problem or imposing regulations. It’s about removing the obstacles we’ve created and letting innovation and market forces do what they do best. Young Californians shouldn’t be resigned to paying rent forever just to live in the state they grew up in. Families shouldn’t have to choose between staying in California and achieving homeownership.

The solutions exist. We know what works. What’s missing is the political will to actually implement these changes at scale. If we fix the housing crisis, we unlock opportunity for an entire generation and give California a fighting chance at being a place where working people can still build a future.