California has serious infrastructure problems, and extremely high land costs. That pretty much limits new construction.
High land costs don’t limit construction. As far as infrastructure goes new development pays for itself and then some through a larger tax base
In all of the metro areas the freeway system runs beyond capacity.
Sounds like California needs better mass transit then. Cities in California are not at all dense, they are just this massive suburban sprawl. For example San Francisco is probably the densest city in CA but it is substantially less dense than Queens, a borough that’s often thought of as almost suburban.
This is not a difficult problem to solve, haha. Most major cities on the planet have done so
In summer the power grid is subject to rolling blackouts because of demand, and outright shutdown when it's windy. The one universal fact we all have to deal with is that no one wants to pay for upgrades. My guess is that the pandemic is going to leave the state teetering on the brink of insolvency.
Interestingly enough in California the same NIMBYism that prevents sensible housing development often prevents new power plant construction and makes it a lot more expensive when it does happen.
As far as not burying your power lines, duh. San Diego learned that lesson, sounds like the rest of the state needs to.
The only bright spot for California is that there appears to be more people leaving than coming here. Though we've lost a few major industry's along with those folks leaving.
California has net population growth, for which you should be very thankful. It does have net emigration though, primarily because of the housing crisis caused by insane, restrictive housing policy.
Regardless, if you think net population loss would lead to a better quality of life you are sorely, sorely mistaken. If you think otherwise, can you point me to a single, solitary city or state seeing population decline that appears happy and prosperous to you?
What this really boils down to is that incumbent property owners profit from keeping housing artificially scarce and they want to keep doing this because not only do they not bear any costs for this, they profit! When it looked like they might need to pay SOME of the misery they were inflicting on others they did things like pass prop 13.