The fee and availability of housing stay among the many most urgent considerations for Californians navigating financial uncertainty. But some Golden State cities are channeling vitality right into a coverage experiment that dangers making the housing affordability disaster worse.
In Santa Ana, metropolis officers lately authorised an ordinance to ban using rent-pricing algorithms — software program that analyzes knowledge utilized by property managers to know the market and client preferences. Politicians parroted unfounded claims of price-fixing and claimed to be defending renters.
Beneath the measure, landlords can be prohibited from utilizing software program instruments that assist suggest rental charges acceptable for market situations. The ordinance handed regardless of warnings from critics that it’s predicated on a misunderstanding of what these instruments really do and will invite litigation.
Current metropolis ordinances in San Francisco, San Diego and elsewhere focusing on pricing software program replicate a pattern of blaming know-how for top lease, regardless that each state and federal guardrails exist already that govern knowledge use and forestall pricing coordination.
At finest, blaming know-how that helps property managers deflects from the actual challenge. The issue is an acute scarcity of housing.
Historical past and financial proof are abundantly clear — when provide lags behind demand, costs rise. Wish to decrease costs as an alternative? Then enhance provide: Construct extra housing.
Sure, the housing market is giant, dynamic and complicated. However one basic actuality is inescapable: Onerous ranges of laws in California have been an ongoing impediment to the housing provide that Californians want.
Usually, politicians’ push to pile on much more laws, like focusing on software program or pursuing lease management, is finished within the title of selling reasonably priced housing and defending renters and others with decrease incomes.
However apparently, any new housing that’s constructed helps all renters, even these with decrease incomes. For instance, analysis reveals that even higher-income households transferring into new luxurious residences frees up items that turn out to be extra reasonably priced for lower-income customers — an impact recognized to economists as filtering.
Actual-world examples throughout the state underscore the purpose. Rents in Los Angeles have lastly begun to average following the addition of greater than 15,000 new residence items in 2025.
Evaluate this with San Francisco, the place rents proceed climbing because of a persistent undersupply of housing. San Francisco pursued the identical path as Santa Ana by outlawing pricing software program instruments in 2024, however rents didn’t go down and, in truth, have risen as a result of the town has but to embrace pro-construction reforms.
Specialists writing for the Michigan Journal of Economics clarify that the U.S. housing scarcity has continued to make houses more and more unaffordable for a lot of Individuals, notably low-income renters. They spotlight that restrictive zoning is essentially responsible for underproduction relative to job development and concur that lease management is counterproductive because it discourages the addition of provide, even with sturdy demand.
These common sense ideas are compelling sufficient that they garner assist throughout the ideological spectrum.
Economist Edward Glaeser of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute supplied testimony to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and City Affairs final yr explaining the detrimental results throughout the nation of the massive underproduction of houses in contrast with even 20 years in the past. Glaeser cited knowledge exhibiting that, throughout the nation, areas with extra housing laws have a lot greater costs.
And lately the left-leaning Heart for American Progress put forth a proposal to chop crimson tape that impedes housing development, emphasizing that their suggestions are “constructed on the truth that we can not make headway on housing affordability over the long term with out critically scaling up residence constructing on the similar time.” The headline on the middle’s web page for the plan reads: “Construct, child, construct.”
Having a roof over your head is a basic human want and is a basis for monetary stability and upward mobility. Outlawing generally used enterprise instruments in pursuit of catchy headlines may make politicians really feel higher, however it’s not an actual repair for California’s housing affordability disaster.
Policymakers up and down California ought to acknowledge that rising provide to match demand is by far the best option to deliver down housing prices. Californians deserve insurance policies grounded in financial actuality — and on the subject of housing, which means constructing extra.
Mario H. Lopez is the president of the Hispanic Management Fund, a public coverage advocacy group that promotes liberty, alternative and prosperity for all.
