Even when a development meets all the planners’ reporting and zoning demands, bureaucrats and politicians in many cities have “ discretionary review ” of proposals, enabling them to reject projects based on vague criteria or no criteria at all. In many places developers need to pay for extensive archeological, paleontological, and biologic reports on their property, written at great cost by academic experts. It’s no surprise that people are leaving.Ĭalifornia has become notorious for its stratospheric housing prices, and nothing has done more to sap the state’s entrepreneurial energy and drain its citizens’ pocketbooks than restrictions on new building, which drive up those prices. Regulations are choking California, transforming a dynamic center of innovation and job creation into a place where pettifogging bureaucrats besiege citizens and entrepreneurs with demands covering even the minutest actions. California is dead last on the Cato Institute’s and the Pacific Research Institute’s state rankings on regulatory burdens. When Mercatus Center researchers ranked the states on the number of separate demands in their regulations, California had by far the most, with almost 400,000 rules. Indeed, few places in the Western world today make it tougher to construct a new house or launch a new business. The main reason: the state makes it increasingly hard for people to do a great many things. Early indications are that it shrank again in 2022. In 20, for the first time in its history, California’s population shrank. Yet that expansive, optimistic era is now over. It grew to become the world’s fifth-largest economy, and its population exploded from 1.5 million in 1900 to about 18 million in 1964, when it became the largest state in the nation, to almost 40 million today. Its latitudinarian attitude toward builders and entrepreneurs made the state a magnet for migrants from around the world.

California was once the powerhouse of American growth and innovation, a place that let people pursue their dreams without inhibition.

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