Over the course of the past 70 years, California cities have grown outward to create multiple new urban centers across a metropolitan landscape. Modern planners in Silicon Valley, however, can’t control this model of growth, so they have limited growth across the board, causing housing prices to skyrocket. These policies negatively impact lower-income residents—in both urban and suburban areas—the most. Joel Kotkin examines the debris in City Journal. 

If meeting the aspirations of the middle and working classes mattered to California’s ruling class, the state’s planners would encourage development. In the past, California policy permitted housing construction in areas with lower land costs. These policies managed to meet demand by creating new communities in what was then considered the hinterland, such as Lakewood, Irvine, Valencia, and Foster City. But in recent decades, state planners have increasingly sought to force an urban mode dominated by a dense central core and mass transit—essentially rejecting the polycentric urban form that today characterizes the vast majority of most American cities. 

Even in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with by far California’s strongest central business districts, approximately 70 percent of employment is dispersed outside the inner urban areas.

Read the whole thing here.

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