Tracking and analyzing housing production in California: 2018 - 2023
Sam Trachtman, Senior Researcher
The Matrix / Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative
Applications for Spring 2025 are closed for this project.
California has a huge housing shortage, which causes all sorts of problems: homelessness, poverty, lack of opportunity, pollution from long car commutes, etc. California’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) estimates that the state needs to build an additional 2.5 million housing units by 2032 to address shortfalls. For context, the state added just 109,000 housing units in 2023. The shortage stems from decades of under-building caused primarily by stringent land use regulations.
Starting in 2017, the California state government has begun taking the housing shortage much more seriously. Since then, the state government has enacted a number of pieces of legislation aiming to boost housing production. Yet, there is concern among housing advocates that the effects of these policy changes are falling short of expectations due to implementation issues and other problems. In addition, there is still a lot we don’t know.
Descriptive analysis of housing production can give policymakers a better sense of the effects that new policies are generating. It can tell us what sorts of places are building housing, and what places aren’t. It can also give us a better sense of what types of units (e.g. single-family or multi-family) are being built, and where. All of this is useful for lawmakers and advocates considering what sorts of policies are still needed to enhance housing production.
Thankfully, HCD now collects detailed administrative data on housing permitting and construction, with the data series going back to 2018. We aim to leverage these data to produce a rich, descriptive analysis of housing production in California. In addition, we hope to make these data more accessible for advocates and policymakers to use themselves by building a public resource. We are still figuring out exactly how to do that.
Role: This is an exploratory data project, and the student will play a pivotal role, with lots of guidance from the supervisor. You will be expected to develop a deep understanding of HCD’s housing production data. You will be expected to analyze those data in the R programming language, and help the supervisor figure out how to make the analysis into a useful public resource.
Qualifications: Ability to work with data and proficiency coding in R
Curiosity and willingness to learn about housing production policy in California
Hours: 6-8 hrs