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A colloquium on population trends hosted by a metropolitan planning organization is not necessarily the place you’d expect to hear a new metaphor. But, this is Los Angeles, and we’re pretty creative. And we’ve had quite a while to come up with ways to discuss our twin trends of rising population and stagnant housing production.

It was USC demographer Dowell Myers who noted, in keeping with our region’s coastal orientation, that “you need enough shells for the hermit crabs to crawl into.” In Myers’s world, the shells are homes: rental apartments, condos, single-unit homes, whatever. The hermit crabs: well, they’re us. It’s just easier to be sympathetic if we think about cute sea creatures rather than sinful, wasteful, aesthetically objectionable human beings.

Myers is the region’s foremost demographer. So, he, of all people, knows how many shells we’ll need, and why we need them. The number, as all planners know, is daunting; the reasons are more interesting than you might think.

The Southern California Association of Governments convenes its annual Demographics Summit to help its member jurisdictions understand the trends they are facing. This year’s summit had an overwhelming, and overwhelmingly compelling, thesis: the state’s population is stagnating. For the first time pretty much since 1848. The reasons center partly on out-migration, of largely middle-income folks who seek lower costs of living in places like Nevada and Texas; that trend is complemented by lack of in-migration, caused largely by California’s prohibitive housing costs. Arguably, the stronger force lies in a trend commonly ascribed to developed countries but that is, in fact, sweeping the majority of the globe: plummeting birth rates.

In Southern California, as in many countries, the fertility rate has dropped well below replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. At the generational scale, these numbers will result in population decline.

Now, you don’t need a half-day conference to decide that the population will decline, starting around 2042. There’s much more to it than that. In fact, a whole lot is going to happen in Southern California, and, likely, statewide until widespread population loss really takes hold.

Spoiler alert: housing-constrained regions cannot simply wait for demographic destiny to kick in.

Myers described two major drivers of demand for new housing.

The first is the fact that the SCAG region, like others statewide, has a shortage of housing relative to the population it already has and to the preferences of the people who live there. A disproportionate number of SCAG constituents are cohabitating, with parents or flatmates, against their preferences. They would like to form their own households, and they are willing and able to pay reasonably, but they cannot. They are trapped by low housing production and, consequently, high housing prices. Myers noted that, whereas most places in the United States are permitting new homes at greater than pre-recession rates, California is doing so at half its pre-recession rates.

Myers refers to these as “invisible households,” or, if you prefer, shell-less hermit crabs. He explained that doubling up is not an ethnic preference or a “California thing.” It is a reluctant response to economic and geographic realities, caused by California jurisdictions’ overwhelming hesitancy to welcome new housing. As University of Newcastle (UK) demographer Rachel Franklin said at the SCAG workshop: “It’s a policy failure of people want to move or migrate but don’t feel like they can.” (She said the same for having kids: many forces contribute to those falling birthrates, but scarcity of housing is a big one.)

The second factor is the converse of the first. Whereas many young people who are living in their childhood bedrooms want nothing more than a front door and an address all their own, the people of their parents’ generation want square feet — lots of them. Empty nesters either age in place, living in homes that might previously have included kids, or they simply crave (and can afford) a lot more space than the average 20-something is willing to tolerate. So, said Myers, “As population gets older, you need more housing to accommodate the same number of people.” (Notably, this also means that single-family neighborhoods with lots of empty nesters are less dense than they used to be and, therefore, ideal for ADUs and duplexes.)  

Put those two factors together and that’s why the region needs to build more housing even if the total population is destined to go nowhere for the foreseeable future.

So, we need more housing. That’s not exactly news. But, there’s more to it than that.

Franklin attended the conference without any particular interest or investment in California but plenty of experience in a place that is already shrinking: Europe. Her observations of European depopulation have given her a head-start to think about what to do. Her general response: don’t panic!

Her main point is that cities and even regions have no control over macro-scale demographic trends. What they can control are their own built environments. “If we focus on quality and well-being,” she said, “the other stuff will work itself out.” What that means is that the people who already live in a given jurisdiction deserve high-quality housing options. And, if those options exist in surplus, then places that are depopulating might actually attract new residents. In other words, Franklin envisions a race to the top rather than our current race to the bottom.

Franklin's point is that we should stop arguing about growth. Stop arguing about whether we want more neighbors or not more neighbors and instead make our cities better. Let's get past the petty arguments and work towards quality of life.

Franklin grounds her policy arguments in an ethical principle: no one should be stuck someplace they don’t want to be, and everyone should be able to move to a place where they want to be. In other words, mobility equals morality. If cities build enough housing and create places that are nice enough, the ability to move around and the number of places that people want to live will expand. At that point, precise numbers like fertility rates become subordinate to the everyday reality of streetscapes, doors, and bedrooms. (On that count, Franklin might disagree with California’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation process and the painstaking, if thankless, work that metropolitan planning organizations like SCAG do to make sure that nearly all of its jurisdictions are at least mildly annoyed at their allocations.)

How do we make this hopeful vision happen?

If we believe Myers, then we have to recognize that the demand for new housing, especially dense housing for young adults, and better places already exists. If we focus on Franklin, the economics are murkier. Creating better cities and better housing absent high demand from wealthy people seems impossible.

But, this is California we’re talking about. The policy barriers to housing production are so high and so entrenched, we can still change the economic calculations in many places with the stroke a pen. For instance, just as Los Angeles’s Measure U helped reduce the city’s zoned capacity by 6 million people—made famous in Dr. Greg Morrow’s graph—new policies could reinstate a significant amount of that capacity instantly. Small fixes like single-stair reform and loosening of other fire codes could help too. And developers are still figuring out all the ways they can use recently passed housing laws.

But, what if that just invites development of “luxury housing”? Franklin would say, so what? If we make the city nicer by adding new housing and we don’t subtract existing housing, then it’s a win-win — for humans and hermit crabs alike.