EDITORIAL: Will soaring California housing costs lead policymakers to embrace common sense?

In these tumultuous times, it might feel like reason and common sense have completely disappeared. But then it miraculously appears — and from California, of all places.

For more than a decade, the Wall Street Journal reports, environmental lawyer Marco Gonzalez sued real-estate developers in California over housing proposals that he felt would have damaged wetlands and hillsides. Mr. Gonzalez was successful, winning numerous cases that blocked “scores of units from being built.”

Now, however, Mr. Gonzalez has switched sides. The Journal notes he is now focusing his efforts on fighting cities and neighborhood groups in Southern California that are reluctant to embrace new building permits.

Just how bad is California’s housing crunch?

Between 1980 and 2000 the rate of new housing construction in the state’s coastal metro areas “fell to roughly half of that of the typical U.S. metro area,” according to the Journal.

During that two-decade stretch, the state built about 90,000 fewer units each year than were needed to keep home prices in line with the rest of the county. Today, California ranks 49th in the number of housing units per capita. Not surprisingly, the shortage has driven up prices.

Also not surprisingly, the state’s hostile regulatory and business climate has been a major contributor to the problem. In addition, California’s anti-development bent extends to a legal system that makes it easy for NIMBY’s to challenge in court any potential new construction.

Mr. Gonzalez told the Journal he switched sides because he saw the current situation as “untenable,” adding he now understands that too many people believe “their job is to stop the evolution of our community.”

In the face of soaring costs, other pro-housing activists are fighting back against the many anti-development campaigns across the state, the Journal reports. They’re filing lawsuits, attending public hearings and organizing in support of more construction.

“It shouldn’t be such an onerous task to build housing when we have a housing crisis,” Mark Vallianatos, a former urban planner who founded Abundant Housing LA and now pushes for increased development, told the newspaper.

Without an effort to ease burdens on homebuilders, “It’s hard to imagine how all of California doesn’t become like New York City and San Francisco, where you have very rich people and poor people and nothing in between,” a USC real estate economist told The New York Times in 2014.

But common sense finally seems to be permeating the debate. It’s simple: If you don’t let anybody build housing, prices will skyrocket. The solution is to build more housing.