The Brief

The winds of change blew swiftly and relentlessly into this oceanside city in northern Orange County.

Not long after winning election last November, the new conservative majority of the Huntington Beach city council adopted an ordinance that prevents the rainbow LGBTQ+ flag from flying at city hall during Pride Month.

Then this summer, the council dissolved a human relations committee formed after two notorious hate crimes by white supremacists in the mid-1990s; rewrote a declaration on human dignity to eliminate any reference to hate crimes but recognize “from birth the genetic differences between male and female”; and took away the ability to select who gives the invocation before its meetings from an interfaith council also founded in the wake of those 1990s hate incidents.

Last month, council members passed a ban on government mask and vaccine mandates in a city that has none, then placed measures on the March ballot that would add the flag policy to the city charter and require voter identification at the polls.

Hardly a few weeks pass anymore without another contentious vote pushing the community to the right — and right into some of the country’s fiercest cultural battles. Claiming a mandate from voters, Huntington Beach’s conservative council majority has set out to erase any vestige of progressive governance or “wokeism.”

They’ve been cheered on by constituents including Cari Swan, a local activist who helped organize an unsuccessful recall attempt against five members of the previous city council for passing liberal policies that she considered out of step with Huntington Beach’s values.

“The left kind of brought it on themselves,” Swan said. “They were poking the bear and the bear fought back.”

But now an opposition, growing fearful of just how far and how fast the conservative council may go to reshape their community, has galvanized around their latest move to create a citizen review panel to monitor library books for sexual content.

At a tense meeting last month, public comment dragged on for five hours as hundreds of residents filled the council chambers, frequently shouting at the conservative majority for promoting a book ban. Opponents have since launched a campaign against the March ballot measures, effectively turning the election into a referendum on the council members and their vision for Huntington Beach.

“They have just come in and taken a wrecking ball to the city with all of these things they have passed,” said Carol Daus, a library volunteer who has lived in Huntington Beach for more than three decades. “Now the community is divided. There is no place for the middle.”

How did the political center fall out, even in this swing region of California where the close partisan divide might have once invited moderation instead of conflict?

Welcome to the era of backlash politics.

Lacking power at the state level — where Democrats are so dominant that they can dismiss these cultural concerns without so much as a debate — conservatives are leaning into local governance as a form of protest against liberal California.

Their efforts can also be seen in Shasta County, where far-right activists took control of the government for not doing enough to fight coronavirus pandemic mandates and then got rid of voting machines at the center of election fraud conspiracies, and in school boards across the state, which have been roiled by fights over the rights of LGBTQ+ students.

It tracks with a growing repolarization among California voters. After decades of steady gains in independent registration, the trend has undergone a sharp reversal over the past five years as more voters embrace the Democratic and Republican parties again. Surveys find an increasing number have a favorable view of their own party and an unfavorable view of the opposition.

“It almost feels like you have to overcompensate for some of the damage being done,” said Gracey Van Der Mark, the Huntington Beach council member who proposed the library book review committee. “The more radical they got to the left, the more I felt myself pulling to the right.”

Gracey Van Der Mark, one of the conservative majority on the Huntington Beach City Council, in her City Hall office on Nov. 11, 2023.

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Many residents and former officials in Huntington Beach have watched with shock and horror as the city of nearly 200,000 emerged as a leader in this movement. They emphasize that the community historically leaned conservative, but not overly partisan, and had long been on the same page about maintaining its suburban beach town vibe.

The 2020 presidential election split fairly evenly, with Donald Trump beating Joe Biden by fewer than 4,000 votes. Several Democrats were elected to the nonpartisan city council, which began taking steps that might have once seemed unthinkable, such as flying the rainbow flag for Pride Month for the first time.

The Trump era and the pandemic deeply unsettled the community, however. Huntington Beach was the site of regular protests — in support of Trump and against pandemic restrictions, occasionally violent and sometimes led by white supremacist groups, recalling its history as a magnet for skinheads in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The unsuccessful recall effort two years ago tapped into a sense among many conservative residents that they were losing their community. Local activist Russell Neal said the then-council’s decision to fly the Pride flag exemplified how progressives encourage moral weakness to bring people under control of the government.

“The whole transformation of culture goes together as a cohesive package,” Neal said. “The fundamental form of slavery is slavery to sin and when they’re slaves to sin, presto, they’ll find themselves slaves externally.”

It’s a message that can be heard at meetings of Republican groups around town and at Calvary Chapel of the Harbour, an influential evangelical church overlooking a marina on the northern edge of Huntington Beach. The conservative council candidates campaigned from the stage there last year, with Pastor Joe Pedick telling congregants he was voting for the foursome. One of the intern pastors is running for city council next year.

“We look for those types of leaders” who will “stand up for righteousness,” Pedick said after this past Sunday’s service, where a guest speaker preached to hundreds that Planned Parenthood is the source of all wickedness in modern American culture and that Democrats are demons.

Running as a slate last year, however, the conservatives focused their platform not on cultural issues but on fighting high-density development in the city, including a state requirement to plan for more than 13,000 new units in the next eight years, as well as on reducing homelessness and crime. They swept the four open seats last November, receiving at least 12,000 votes more than their closest competition, and celebrated the results as a mandate, though with lower turnout, each won the support of less than a fifth of Huntington Beach residents.

“Our voters have no more appetite for progressive governance or the wokeism,” said City Attorney Michael Gates, a staunch conservative elected to a third term last November after campaigning with the council candidates.

So opponents are flummoxed by how much the city council focused this year on issues that never came up in the campaign. They have come to see the housing and homelessness message as a bait-and-switch — though to what end, they’re not sure. To simply undo the work of the previous council? To boost future runs for higher office? To create a laboratory of conservative policymaking that could become a playbook for other communities?

“It’s a banana republic down here,” said Dan Kalmick, one of three Democrats on the city council who regularly oppose the conservative majority. “This isn’t Republicanism. This is nihilism.”

The political divisions have consumed city government — sometimes quite literally. The conservative majority chose adjoining offices on the same hallway in city hall, booting the Democrats to the other side of the building.

Council meetings are filled with open hostility and executive staff have fled for neighboring communities. While a potential budget deficit looms, the council majority recently approved a secret $7 million settlement with a political ally who sued the city after the final day of his popular air show was canceled in 2021 due to a massive oil spill.

“That whole philosophy, you would think it would be small government and fiscal prudence because they are Republicans. But they are ones who are Republicans in name only,” said Democratic Councilmember Rhonda Bolton, who slammed the conservative majority for advancing policies such as voter ID and the library book review committee without considering how much they might cost to administer or defend in court. “What I’m seeing is Trump ideology, MAGA ideology, and in that respect, no original ideas.”

The conservative council members say they are responding to concerns raised by constituents during more than 100 town halls they held on the campaign trail.

One of their first major steps, about two months after taking office, was adopting a policy that allows only flags for the United States, California, Orange County, Huntington Beach and the military to fly on city property. Councilmember Pat Burns, who introduced the ordinance, said it was a move to unify the community behind symbols that represent everyone equally. He said he has nothing against LGBTQ+ people, but believes the rainbow flag — the only flag previously approved for display in front of city hall that was not included in the new policy — promotes divisive identity politics that are actually counterproductive to LGBTQ+ acceptance.

“They’re such a small population and why would we recognize anybody special?” Burns said, adding that it would be like him asking for an NRA, white or Christian flag in front of city hall. “We’re all marginalized in some way or victimized in some way, but we don’t get months or parades or whatever.”

Known as the Fab Four to their fans, the council majority, along with Gates, have become rock stars to local Republicans, who hooted and hollered for them at a Veterans Day ceremony on the beach.

Supporters spun off groups like HB Lady Patriots, which aims to bring a patriotic education back into Huntington Beach schools and was active in promoting the library book review proposal. Gates said he hears from officials in other communities who want to replicate their policies, including Fresno County, which recently voted to create a panel to screen children’s books in the libraries.

“We’re willing to be the tip of the spear on this,” Van Der Mark said, attributing everything the council is doing to a philosophy of fighting government overreach. “We want to make Huntington Beach the city that protects your individual liberties and freedoms.”

Gracey Van Der Mark, a Huntington Beach City Councilmember, with a book she says should be banned from children’s sections of the library in Huntington Beach Nov. 11, 2023.

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Van Der Mark’s sunny fourth-floor office at city hall is stacked with books that she finds obscene. Many of them are sex education manuals, borrowed from the Huntington Beach public library and filled with sticky notes to mark offending passages — discussions of masturbation, explanations of fetishes, images of erect penises and gay sex.

She’s particularly perturbed by a picture book called “Grandad’s Pride,” currently on order for the library, which features a drawing of a Pride parade where two men in leather are kissing in the crowd; she equates it with promoting bondage to kids. Van Der Mark also returns again and again to a page in a sex education book that describes how to use lubricant to insert a tampon if it does not fit.

“The lines are so blurred that we don’t even know where to stop and where to start,” she said. “I don’t need to learn how to stick a finger up my vagina with K-Y jelly. We survived without that kind of graphic information. And if you want it, then you go talk to your mom.”

It’s the type of sexual content that her library book review committee, which the city is in the process of establishing, could move to the adult section or prevent the library from acquiring in the first place. Though a challenge process for library books already existed — there were five in the previous five years, including one by Van Der Mark herself — she said more robust steps are necessary to protect young readers from damaging material, even if it appears within the context of an educational or creative work.

“This one page is going to stick in their brain,” she said. “We should have one area that is completely safe for all children.”

Her crusade has mobilized library supporters — the central branch, a concrete marvel with a spiraling atrium, is beloved far beyond Huntington Beach — and First Amendment groups, who sent a letter to the council in October warning that the plan would infringe on free speech. Daus, the library volunteer, worries that the vague language of the ordinance could allow the committee to impose its own morality on the entire community, especially with LGBTQ+ books.

“It’s feeling like a China or a Russia or a Hungary,” Daus said as she toured the children’s room, which has a reading area designed as a pirate ship. The sex education section had only three books on the shelf.

Among the conservative council majority, Van Der Mark seems to especially rankle the opposition. She was a divisive activist even before her election, which she winkingly acknowledges in her office with a framed wall hanging of her entry in the OC Weekly’s Scariest People of 2018 list.

That was the year Van Der Mark got kicked off two school district committees after troubling comments she had made online resurfaced. In 2017, Van Der Mark joined alt-right protestors, including some with ties to white nationalist groups, to crash a racial justice workshop in Santa Monica. Beneath a video of the incident posted by Van Der Mark, she referred to Black attendees at the meeting as “colored people” who were doing the bidding of “elderly Jewish people” there. Her YouTube account also had a playlist of Holocaust denial videos titled “Holocaust hoax?”

The comments have continued to follow Van Der Mark through her rise in local politics. This summer, as the council majority voted to eliminate the human rights committee, Democratic Councilmember Natalie Moser publicly questioned whether Van Der Mark was a Holocaust denier, leading the conservatives to censure Moser.

“She was masking a face of radical extremism and she did it to infiltrate a government institution so she could become legitimized,” said Gina Clayton-Tarvin, a liberal school board trustee who initially appointed Van Der Mark and who finished fifth in last year’s city council election. “It’s a total threat to democracy, because they are acting in ways that are quasi-fascist.”

Van Der Mark said she has never doubted the Holocaust happened; she was unfamiliar with the conspiracy theory, she said, until she spoke with one of the Jewish organizers at the racial justice workshop she crashed, whom she said sent her the hoax videos as an example.

A 49-year-old grandmother and daughter of immigrants from Ecuador and Mexico, Van Der Mark said she was largely apolitical until around 2016, when she was pulled into advocacy against the local sex education curriculum. She acknowledged that, in the early stages of her political awakening, she attended all types of rallies “to find the truth,” not necessarily aware of who she was affiliating with, but she denied harboring any racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic sentiments.

“If I would have known they were there, I might not have gone,” she said. “But I can’t regret going, because had I not gone out in search of the truth, I would not be where I am today.”

As Van Der Mark prepares to take over as mayor next month, critics worry that she will unleash even more extreme policies. Van Der Mark said she has tried to explain herself to opponents but they remain hostile, perhaps because she betrays their idea of what a Latina politician should be.

“I want to be able to offer this little safe haven that I found for my family, for other people,” she said. “The other side is trying to push conservative values out. We’re saying, ‘no, no, no, this is our city.’ We want to keep it. Why do you want to change it? If this is not a good fit for you, there are other cities that may be a good fit.”

Carol Daus outside of the library in Huntington Beach on Nov. 11, 2023.

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Feeling like strangers in a strange land, some liberals in Huntington Beach are considering leaving.

Daus and her husband have started to explore a move to nearby Long Beach or Pasadena, where a daughter lives. An incident in June when a neighbor had their rainbow flag ripped down and torn to shreds unsettled Daus.

“These are the things that just make you go, you know, do you want to live around this? Or would you rather be in a more welcoming, inclusive neighborhood?” she said. “If I wanted to live in Florida, I’d live in Florida.”

The library fight diverted her attention, though, and the housing market is tough, so now she may wait to see what happens with the March election. The campaign to defeat the proposed charter amendments has provided some comfort and motivation. While she’s not ready yet to put a sign in her yard, she is getting bolder. At a kickoff event last Saturday afternoon, where hundreds gathered at the park outside the central library, Daus ran a table soliciting people to write op-eds in the local media.

Attendees picked up lawn signs and postcards from other booths. The three Democrats on the city council spoke, as did former elected officials. Under a canopy, Shirley Dettloff, who helped write the city’s human dignity statement when she served on the council in the 1990s, signed up volunteers.

“We wanted the city to be known as a city that protected people,” Detloff said. “I was just surprised that anyone would take that on as an issue.”

At the end of the event, dozens gathered around a 33-foot-by-24-foot rainbow flag lying in the grass and chanted, “Vote no! Vote no! Vote no!” The homemade flag is a project of Pride at the Pier, an LGBTQ+ community group that formed this spring after Huntington Beach passed its flag ban. In May, demonstrators unfurled the enormous flag over the side of the city’s famed pier in protest.

Attendees pose for a portrait with a giant Pride flag after a Protect Huntington Beach event in Central Park on Nov. 11, 2023. The group formed in opposition to the new conservative majority on the Huntington Beach City Council.

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Kane Durham, one of the group’s founders, said this year has raised difficult questions for LGBTQ+ residents about whether they will continue to be welcome in Huntington Beach. He fears the council might next use the updated human dignity declaration, which states that “sex carries advantages and disadvantages that warrant separation during certain activities (i.e. sports),” to prevent trans athletes from participating in the city’s youth sports programs.

Though he does not live in Huntington Beach, Durham has become a vocal activist on behalf of other transgender and nonbinary people whom he said do not feel safe putting themselves out there publicly. For his efforts, he said he’s been doxxed and subject to online rumors calling him a pedophile.

“Too many Californians are in this blue fantasy bubble. We think that it won’t happen here, even while it is happening here,” Durham said. “There are so many people there who are frogs in a boiling pot of water.”

Months of angry council meetings have hardly swayed the Fab Four off their path. They dismiss their opponents as a vocal minority searching for relevance and reject the notion that their actions have divided the community like they accuse their predecessors of doing.

“If just who shows up to city hall’s a reflection of the city, none of us four would have been elected,” said Tony Strickland, who is finishing up his year in the rotating mayorship. “The voters have the final say.”

That will again be the case in March, the first real test for the council majority of how sustainable backlash politics can be in transforming a community.

Even some allies already seem to have grown weary of what’s happening in Huntington Beach.

Pano Frousiakis, a young Republican activist, ended his own campaign for city council last year and worked to elect his conservative rivals so they could regain control of a community that he had always considered “our little oasis in California.”

Though he’s happy with the overall direction of the council, Frousiakis concedes that “the past few months have been getting a little bit off-track.” He established a political organization this year, the HB Patriots, and is running again for city council in 2024 with a message about getting back to local quality-of-life issues.

“Unfortunately, I feel that our residents get sidelined as a result of that. I feel sidelined as a resident,” he said. “The other issues that are being talked about, that’s why I vote for president.”

Californians will see the minimum wage increase to $16.90 per hour starting Jan. 1. The adjustment — a boost of 40 cents per hour — was calculated in August by the Department of Finance as part of its minimum wage annual review required by state law.

California has been raising its minimum wage over the past decade. Former Gov. Jerry Brown in 2016 signed a watershed law to increase minimum wage from $10.50 per hour to $15 per hour, plus annual adjustments for inflation.

The current rate of $16.50 per hour suggests that a minimum wage worker needs to work 98 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom rental at fair market rent in California, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

California is one of 19 states to raise minimum wages in 2026, according to payroll company ADP. Cities and counties can also set their own minimum wages. This year, over two dozen local jurisdictions have increased local minimum wages. West Hollywood will have a $20.25 minimum wage starting in January — the highest of any California city, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

Voters last November narrowly rejected a ballot measure that would have increased the minimum wage to $18 per hour. But some low-wage workers this year have successfully lobbied for bumps in pay in specific industries.

Under laws Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2023, fast food workers earn a minimum wage wage of $20 an hour and health care workers are on track to make $25 an hour.

That momentum extended to Los Angeles hotel and airport employees. Labor organizers in May secured a city minimum wage increase to $30 per hour for those workers by the 2028 Olympics. Large businesses fought back, arguing that wage hikes will only increase challenges for the tourism industry, which is still struggling to find its footing after the pandemic.

After failing to gather enough signatures for a ballot measure to repeal the new minimum wage, business groups later filed a different measure that could gut millions of dollars of revenue from the city’s general fund.

Following the move, Los Angeles City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson this month introduced a motion to delay the full wage increase from taking effect until 2030, according to reporting from the Los Angeles Times.

Labor leaders rebuked the motion, calling it “repulsive.” 

“You can’t threaten to blow a hole in our budget and then the only way to stop it is on the backs of workers,” said Kurt Petersen, co-president of the union that represents many hotel workers, UNITE HERE Local 11. “That kind of raw extortion and shakedown has no place in our city.”

According to Peterson, a coalition of community organizations and unions are beginning to collect signatures for a ballot measure that would raise the minimum wage to $30 per hour for all workers in Los Angeles.

“The power is everyone together,” said Peterson. “Working people need help and raising wages is the easiest, most straightforward thing to do. Going up 40 cents per hour in 2026 doesn’t move the needle at all.”

Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The Los Angeles Angels have settled with the family of pitcher Tyler Skaggs, who died of an overdose in 2019, as first reported by The Athletic. The terms of the settlement have not been made public.

The 27 year-old pitcher was found dead in a suburban Dallas hotel room shortly before a road game against the Texas Rangers. A toxicology report found a mix of alcohol, fentanyl and oxycodone in his system.

The illegal drugs that led to Skaggs' death were provided by former Angels communications director Eric Kay. Kay has been sentenced to 22 years in federal prison for his role in the death. His trial included testimony from five other Major League Baseball players who said Kay supplied them with oxycodone.

The case playing out in Santa Ana was a civil, wrongful death lawsuit brought by Skaggs’ widow and parents. They argued that the Angels should have known Kay was providing drugs to Skaggs and other players on the team. The family said the franchise should be held responsible because drug dealing was essentially part of Kay’s job, which included acting as a so-called “gopher” for the players and otherwise keeping them happy.

Skaggs' family is seeking close to $100 million in lost earnings, along with compensation for pain and suffering, and punitive damages against the Angels.

In the wake of Skaggs’ death, Major League Baseball began testing players for opioid use and guiding players to treatment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will now have a new name — the "Trump-Kennedy Center." White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the news on social media Thursday, saying that the board of the center voted unanimously for the change, "Because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building."

The website for the center has already been updated to reflect the change, and new signage on the building went up on Friday.

Shortly after the announcement on Thursday, Ohio Democrat Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex-officio member of the board, refuted the claim that it was a unanimous vote. "Each time I tried to speak, I was muted," she said in a video posted to social media. "Participants were not allowed to voice their concern."

When asked about the call, Roma Daravi, vice president of public relations at the Kennedy Center, sent a statement reiterating the vote was unanimous: "The new Trump Kennedy Center reflects the unequivocal bipartisan support for America's cultural center for generations to come."

Other Democrats in Congress who are ex-officio members of the Kennedy Center Board, including Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries issued a statement stating that the president is renaming the institution "without legal authority."

"Federal law established the Center as a memorial to President Kennedy and prohibits changing its name without Congressional action," the statement reads.

Earlier this year, Trump installed himself as the chairman of the center, firing former president Deborah Rutter and ousting the previous board chair David Rubenstein, along with board members appointed by President Biden. He then appointed a new board, including second lady Usha Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Fox News host Laura Ingraham and more.

Trump hinted at the name change earlier this month, when he took questions before becoming the first president to host the Kennedy Center Honors. He deferred to the board when asked directly about changing the name but said "we are saving the Kennedy Center."

The president was mostly hands off with the Kennedy Center during his first term, as most presidents have been. But he's taking a special interest in it in his second term, touring the center and promising to weed out programming he doesn't approve of. His "One Big Beautiful Bill" included $257 million for the building's repairs and maintenance.

Originally, it was called The National Cultural Center. In 1964, two months after President Kennedy was assassinated, President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation authorizing funds to build what would become the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Copyright 2025 NPR

It’s the benchmark of success, a milestone of responsible adulthood, a time-tested way to amass wealth for you and your progeny. Homeownership, we’re told again and again, is a status that every right-thinking person should aspire to — the white-picket-fence-fronted embodiment of the American Dream.

But what if it’s also a little overrated?

For generations it has been taken as a near article of faith across the country that ownership is both the financially and socially superior way to inhabit a home and that public policy makers should always promote it. California legislators and housing advocates spent this past year enacting sweeping policies aimed at making it easier to build housing of all kinds. This coming year, many of them indicate that they plan to focus specifically on providing more plentiful paths to homeownership.

They’ll have their work cut out for them.

The state’s homeownership rate of roughly 55% is second lowest in the nation, above New York, and a full 10 percentage points beneath the national average. Most of that gap, both common sense and researchers at UC Berkeley tell us, isn’t the result of an atypical fondness for the freedoms of renting but comes down to the price tag. The median price of a detached single-family home across in the United States is $426,800. In California, it’s $852,680. In San Francisco it’s well over $1 million.

With borrowing rates still hovering above 6%, those prices translate to estimated monthly mortgage costs between $4,000 to $6,000 or more. Even in all but the toniest neighborhoods of coastal California, that’s far above the cost of renting a typical apartment.

In Orange County, the estimated all-in monthly costs on a home (including taxes, insurance, maintenance and any association fees) is four times the average rent, according to a recent analysis by the commercial real estate firm CBRE. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, the “buying premium” is three times greater than renting. Nationally, it’s twice as much.

Is the extra cost worth it?

Economists and housing finance experts are careful to note that it depends — on a person’s financial circumstances, the particulars of their preferences and the market in which they want to live, how long they plan to occupy a home and, most challenging of all, what the future holds.

But across the country, the gap between renting and owning is “way out of line” with the historic norm, said Laurie Goodman, an economist at the Urban Institute, a liberal-leaning thinktank in Washington D.C.

In 2018, Goodman co-authored a paper on homeownership in the United States, which came to the fairly unambiguous conclusion that most people most of the time would be better off buying a home (assuming they can afford the monthly payments) compared to renting.

“Homeownership is not the universal panacea, but the financial returns on homeownership have been more beneficial than renting for most homeowners and will likely remain so if current patterns continue,” Goodman wrote in a corresponding blog post at the time.

Current patterns did not continue: Today we see dizzying prices and interest rates and flat rents in most places. Homeownership isn’t nearly the financial slam dunk it once was, she said.

Take a market like San Francisco. The average price of an admittedly rare single-family home in the city is $1.38 million, according to Zillow. Depending on the size of a buyer’s downpayment, that would work out to a monthly loan payment of roughly $6,500. The average rent for one is $4,350.

In order for all those extra monthly payments to eventually pay off, the value of the house will need to soar vertiginously into the indefinite future. Or rents, which determine how much a person can save by not buying, will need to shoot up as well. Or the stock market or other possible places a well-heeled renter could park all the extra money they aren’t spending on a mortgage, will need to flatline.

Or a combination of all of the above.

A person buying into that market is assuming a very specific and by no means certain version of the financial future, said Goodman.

Either that, or they’re just “desperate to own in San Francisco because they’re just desperate to own in San Francisco,” she said. “For whatever reason.”

The case for renting forever

For many Californians, this isn’t actually a decision. The number of renters who can buy locally and get away with spending anything less than 40% of their income on monthly homeownership costs are in the single digit percentages in Los Angeles, San Diego, Riverside, Sacramento, San Jose and Ventura, according to the CBRE report. Being a tenant in California is hard enough. More than half of California renters are spending more than 30% of their income on rent as it is.

But for those lucky enough to rent by choice, it’s not necessarily a bad choice to make.

Remember that yawning “buying premium” between the monthly cost of owning and renting? A wealthy tenant is in a position to save and invest the difference. Though homeownership is often touted as the best way to build wealth, it’s not the only way. It might not even be the best way: On average and over long stretches of time, the stock market regularly outperforms median home prices — albeit, without quite so many tax benefits and other boosts that federal and state governments shower upon homeowners.

Rather than pouring every last dollar in disposable income (and then some) into a single depreciating asset that threatens to leak when it rains, parking that money elsewhere also allows a renter the option to diversify.

“I think more people are starting to be interested in renting and saving at the same time, because they've been priced out of owning a home, but they still want to achieve their financial goals and they're looking into those alternatives and getting more savvy about it,” said Redfin economist Daryl Fairweather.

Running the numbers on whether renting and saving is, in fact, the better financial call gets very “murky,” she said. Much of it depends on the future of home prices, local rents, stock prices, interest rates and how long a person plans to stay put. It’s a hugely complex and individual choice and it’s not risk-free. Fairweather touted an online rent-vs-buy calculator produced by the New York Times.

But California’s specific conditions — high prices relative to rents, high maintenance and insurance costs, the relatively large number of tenants protected by rent control policies of one kind or another — the financial argument for renting may be about as good as it's ever been.

The perks of owning property

Even if renting is a better deal on paper, there are plenty of reasons someone might want to buy that have nothing to do with money.

Space is one: For a host of regulatory and financial reasons, the vast majority of rental units are apartments while detached single-family houses are predominantly reserved for owners. Especially for growing families, the option is often either to cram your spouse and kids into an urban apartment or drive out of the city (and possibly out of the state) until you can afford to buy.

Education is another. Rentals are also more likely than owner-occupied units to be in neighborhoods with poorly performing public schools and elevated crime rates.

For some, homeownership also comes with an entirely non-monetary warm and fuzzy factor, whether it’s independence — deciding when and what color to paint your walls, for instance — or a sense of security.

Finally, just because someone can save and invest the extra hundreds or thousands of dollars a month that would have gone to a mortgage payment, that doesn’t mean they will. No one likes making a mortgage payment, but by converting part of your paycheck each month into home equity, it acts as a kind of forced savings plan. It's perpetually tempting not to save.

“It takes more discipline to go against the social trend,” said Fairweather.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.