[amyfp214]

It's even worse in Cali because of something called proposition 13: essentially rent control for property taxes. So you have not just a powerful NIMBY force, but nobody has any desire to sell. This creates a highly skewed market while the rent:buy ratio serves extremely cheap rent - people are happy to sit on these houses and enjoy dirt cheap taxes. It even used to be a heritable fixed tax / tax control but they stopped that -- people are salty because they inherit a house that their parents easily afforded taxes for with tax control, but suddenly the taxes are a gorillion dollars. Presumably in fact the taxes would be lower were these controls not in place, the newbies are paying the majority of property tax costs