If California Won’t Build Housing on Land, Why Not “Seasteading”?

The Life Aquatic Isn't Just a Fantasy in the Golden State

The devastating housing shortage in California keeps getting worse. Housing prices won’t stop rising. Why can’t we solve the problem?

Perhaps it’s because all of the proposed solutions—more construction, sprawling construction, denser construction, granny flats, affordable housing mandates, new forms of financing and exemptions from regulation—are built on the same flawed premise: that housing must exist solely on land.

And on land, California’s high costs, environmental regulation, restrictive planning, anti-density NIMBYs, anti-growth local governments, and Prop 13’s protections for older homeowners, taken together, form a giant kludge that stops needed housing from …