San Jose Affordabilty Gap

The supply of land is limited. If you keep all your increasingly valuable land to existing structures, the price of those structures goes insane. Keeping homes affordable means reducing the amount of land per home. San Jose gasped and clutched its pearls, Prop 13 protected homeowners from economic incentives to sell, and now the whole state's housing market is a disaster area. If you want house prices to get sane again, you'll have to build enough rental units that the price-premium for housing makes renting the preferred option, and only those aspiring to build equity through homeownership actually buy houses.

There is a movement afoot to blame income inequality for this, and it undeniably plays a role--when you use price to ration the supply of something (like houses), the people with the most money buy them. And when you artificially constrain your house value assessment via madness like Prop 13, they have zero incentive to ever sell them--a couple of days of AirBnB annually to pay the taxes.