California can't support as many people as you wish it could and replacing its SFH suburbs with cramped mixed income efficiency apartments would be an aesthetic, ecological, and socioeconomic disaster.
Most people find European cities more beautiful. SC is an ugly city. Even SF is much more pretty.
> ecological
It’s pretty well established that cities are ecological superior to suburbs.
> socioeconomic
Money extracted from the economy by landlords is money not flowing and being used to spur economic activity. VC firms have lamented that they have to invest in bigger rounds because growing headcount in expensive-rent cities is their greatest expense.
People don't choose to live in cities like Santa Cruz for the architecture. That's kind of missing the point. No one cares what the buildings look like.
Noted VC Peter Thiel reduced his investments in the SF Bay Area because housing got too expensive. Most of the funding just flows to landlords.
You are effectively just proposing an enormous tax (read: price increase) on renters, which seems like the exact opposite of what needs to be achieved. I would support completely repealing prop 13 though.
Demonizing landlords, developers, and property investment firms at best does nothing and at worst actively makes the housing situation worse by further restricting supply. No amount of disincentives to property ownership will solve the core, fundamental problem that _there is not enough housing_. Any solution that doesn't increase supply is no solution at all.
