The Median LA Home Will Soon Cost More Than $1 Million

By June 30, the median home listed in the Los Angeles metro area reached $975,333, up 30% from five years prior, and housing experts say it won’t be long before that figure tops $1 million. California has been home to some of the nation’s fastest rising home prices over the last several years, with cities like San Jose, Santa Maria, Santa Cruz, Salinas, and San Francisco already surpassing the million-dollar mark, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In fact, the top 10 major metropolitan areas in America for median listing price in June were all located in California, and along with home prices, rents are also reaching staggering new heights. Increasing the state’s housing stock is one of many proposed solutions to bring down prices and present a more viable path to homeownership, but according to Michael Lens, a professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA, faster home building alone won’t be enough.

Lens pinpointed several steps the state is taking to increase the housing stock, but said that it won’t be enough.

His proposed solutions included “getting rid of single-family zoning and upzoning those neighborhoods,” removing “onerous parking requirements” and scrapping rules on minimum setbacks and floor to area ratio.

Altogether, the state should fix “a lot of boring zoning things that together make the cost of building more housing more expensive or put blanket bans on certain housing types,” Lens said.

“We are not on a fast track to building the kind of housing necessary.”

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