This is how California works; privilege old residents over the new. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it is very clearly what California voters want.

This is how California works; privilege old residents over the new. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it is very clearly what California voters want. The idea is that we have these massive boom/bust cycles (that seem to trend upwards) and we want to ensure that those who are already here benefit from the boom times, even at the cost of making things rather harder for the newcomers. The interesting thing is that... a lot of the older service people I've talked to, barbers, uber drivers, etc... own homes around here that they bought when it was cheap. because of these rules, sure, they can't eat out everyday, but they can continue to live around here, should they so choose, on very small wages. I think that our rent control and our prop 13 and other favoring of existing residents does in part subsidize our service industry; in some ways, I think it's why services around here just aren't as expensive as you would expect, when you consider how much more expensive rent is here (and programers are here) vs. the rest of the country. I personally think that the economy would be better overall if we just built a lot and then raised the costs of the output of locally produced services in line with rent, e.g. raised service wages in line with programmer wages. But, I do think it's important to understand the majority California view.