California Developers Want to ‘Turbocharge’ Building After Los Angeles Fires
Amidst the efforts to rebuild homes destroyed by the fires that have plagued Southern California for over seven days (still burning as of January 16), change must be “turbocharged” as the government level, according to Los Angeles-based real estate adviser Carl Muhlstein, chairman of Muhlstein CRE and a former longtime JLL executive.
Muhlstein called for changes in California’s famously strict building regulations to be fast-tracked to make sure those who have lost their homes to the fires don’t find themselves in a housing shortage in an interview with commercial real estate news website Costar.
According to the latest estimates (January 15), more than 10,000 homes have been destroyed by the fires still burning through Southern California, and thousands more are currently considered under threat.
According to Newsweek, There aren’t enough houses for sale in California for everyone who wants to buy, and those that are on the market are often unaffordable to the average consumer.
While the entire nation has suffered from a lack of inventory since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, California’s complex zoning restrictions and lengthy permit approval processes are often blamed by experts as the main cause behind the state’s chronic shortage of homes.
Lawmakers in the Golden State have passed more than 100 laws affecting planning, zoning, permitting processes, and building since 2017, as reported by Washington-based nonprofit Brookings, to alleviate the housing shortage in Southern California. Even so, reforms have failed to make a dent in the state’s production problems.
Photo credit: AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill (License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)
