Real Estate

A new UCLA study concludes that California’s system of local housing quotas has a “fundamental flaw” that needs correction. For more than a half-century, California has been trying to nudge county and city governments into generating enough new housing to handle an ever-increasing demand.

California housing costs were astronomical before COVID-19. Now, they’re just wild. The median price of a home sold last month reached $811,000, up more than 20% from just a year ago.

As millions of renters stare down the end of California’s eviction moratorium — and stories of the thousands of evictions that have taken place despite the moratorium are learned — we can clearly see the short- and long-term effects of the pandemic on Californians. It has crystallized just how many Californians decide whether they can pay rent or buy groceries, despite living in the wealthiest state in the country.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has sold his Marin County home in the enclave of Kentfield, CA, for $5,895,000. The politician and his wife, the actor and filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, placed the remodeled midcentury modern mansion on the market after Newsom took office. His family has since moved to the Sacramento area.

Long Beach’s California Heights neighborhood, the city’s largest historical district, was baptized in oil. The area just north of Signal Hill was once grazing land for Jotham Bixby’s livestock on his family’s Bixby Ranch, later named Rancho Los Cerritos. When oil was discovered on Signal Hill in 1921, Jotham Bixby’s Land Company subdivided the tract and offered individual sites for sale, strongly suggesting that you’d become a wealthy landowner once oil was struck in the lowlands, mere blocks away from the oil-rich hill.