Sorry, but if the cost of living is very high in an area, the major way you are going to get people to work there is if you offer a higher wage unless there is some other factor that would make people work there. So the question would be why is the cost of living so high in California and one of the reasons I pointed out was they extreme Taxes, fees, levies, etc put on building a house by the local and state governments in California. And if you don't think that is a large factor in the high cost of living in California I don't know what to tell you.
My undergraduate degree is in Economics, so I am not stupid about it. I will grant I used a simplification of "1 Factor" in the reason for higher salaries in California, but I assumed you didn't want to read a 20 page dissertation on why salaries in general are high in California and would accept they fact the the cost of housing is a factor in it.
If you want (nevermind I don't want) we could get into a whole discussion of causation vs Correlation
Land is expensive in parts of CA for obvious reasons. I'm sure an acre lot in SF would be pricey because of that demand thing.
SF also has a lot of codes preventing a developed from tearing down four story buildings and putting up a 60 story condo tower.
As you move further out into the hinterlands, land gets cheaper, obviously, I suspect that is true in general.
The point I was trying to make, and the point I
think @bayareabadger is that the cost of living in California did not
become high due to government, but that government is certainly a factor.
The cost of living is high in California because a bunch of people want to live here. And the cost is particularly high in places where "new construction" isn't a driver of cost, it's *much* more due to simple supply and demand of a market overwhelmingly dominated by existing housing stock rather than new builds.
Most of the Bay Area is like this. The good jobs are mostly on the peninsula. People don't want to have to fight traffic from Morgan Hill or Livermore to get to their cushy job in Palo Alto, so housing is ridiculously expensive there. It's not new builds; it's existing.
Where I live (Mission Viejo, Orange County), most of the housing was built in the 70's. The house I rent is a 1200 sf 3bdr/2ba house desperately in need of a nearly total remodel to be anything approaching modern and desirable, and it would likely sell for over $600K. I could hop over to Lake Elsinore and get a 4 bdr >2500 sf relatively new house for under $500K. But I don't want to because Lake Elsinore is hot af, and sucks, and there's no way my wife would battle traffic to get to her job in Newport Beach every day.
There are things that government does to cause housing problems, as Cincy points out... One of the key is restricting high-density housing and restricting where things can be built. That reduces possible housing stock and drives up demand relative to supply. Although what you'll find is that the people who live in those areas--NOT the government--are the ones pushing so hard against high-density housing. Because they don't want poor(er) people to move into their community. It's NIMBY attitudes that restrict housing supply more than government decree.
Another thing is general taxation and other things affecting cost of living. In CA, for example, property taxes are relatively low as a percentage, but given the cost of housing they can still be high in absolute terms. CA sales tax is high. CA income tax is high. CA environmental regulations (and state gas excise taxes) ensure that gasoline is more expensive here than almost anywhere else in the US. But if this is the case, we're talking about maybe a few percent addition to cost of living, MUCH lower than housing.
But I think the permit fees / etc that you bring up are probably a lower portion of the reason that housing is so expensive, because the places where those exist are the places where housing is ALREADY expensive and usually where the bulk of the housing stock is existing and not new construction.
Housing is expensive here because people want to live here. Government makes it worse, because they can get away with it,
because people want to live here.
