VIDEO: The California Dream of Home Ownership
For millions of Californians, the vision of owning their own home is at the heart of the California dream. The sense of stability that comes with owning your home, along with the ability to provide for your family while having a piece of California to call your own, has inspired generations of Californians to achieve the dream of homeownership.
But the housing shortage and affordability crisis has put that dream out of reach for a huge share of hard-working Californians who wonder if they’ll be able to stay in our state for lack of affordable opportunities for home ownership.
The same crisis that is driving homelessness and forcing Californians into poverty and housing security is denying other Californians their shot at this dream. But thankfully, we can begin to solve these problems with pro-housing reforms that would not only increase the supply of homes affordable to middle-income renters, but also give more people a shot at owning their own “starter home.”
California YIMBY’s latest animated, educational video explains the challenges middle-income California families face in pursuing the dream of home ownership. It focuses on how the housing shortage is disproportionately shutting Black and Latino families out of the opportunities that home ownership provides – the ability to stabilize housing costs, while ensuring long-term savings and wealth-building that comes with building equity in a home.
The video ends with a call for Californians across the state to join the YIMBY movement to make it legal to build more middle-income and starter homes in the state’s cities for Californians who seek to achieve the dream of home ownership.
The video focuses on a fictional couple, Darrell and Sonja, who are expecting their first child, and are attending open houses of homes for sale. They both have good jobs with stable incomes, but California’s housing shortage has led to an affordability crisis — which means Darrell and Sonja have to bid against wealthier people for the limited stock of homes available on the market.
California YIMBY is focused on making it legal to build more homes in our cities to increase the supply of starter homes and lower-cost, multi-family housing, in order to end the housing shortage that has pushed home ownership out of reach for so many. As long as it remains illegal to build this type of housing on 75% of our urban land, the dream of home ownership will be out of reach to all but the wealthiest Californians.
The video was a collaborative production of California YIMBY and Ruben DeLuna Creative, a production company based in Austin, Texas. DeLuna’s past creative credits include well-known activist videos like the “Story of Stuff” and other cause-related videos like criminal justice reform, women’s rights, better access to education for girls, and progressive financial reform.