WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT STUDIES? Impossibly high home price are ‘feudalizing’ California as unaffordable housing markets pose existential threat to middle class, study says.

The housing crisis represents an obstacle to upward mobility, and the Golden State risks suffering from especially acute stratification, according to the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability report, which was produced by Chapman University in California and the Frontier Center for Public Policy in Canada.

“High housing prices, relative to incomes, are having a distinctly feudalizing impact on our home state of California, where the primary victims are young people, minorities, and immigrants,” wrote Chapman’s Joel Kotkin. “Restrictive housing policies may be packaged as progressive, but in social terms their impact could be better characterized as regressive.”

The report points to “urban containment policies” that are meant to limit sprawl and increase density. Those have resulted in higher land prices, which have translated to dramatically higher home prices, it explained.

The trend toward increasing density was geared toward reducing reliance on cars and freeways, improving gridlock, and making neighborhoods more walkable. But the report said while such policies were well intentioned, they resulted in land prices being eight to 20 times higher in urban containment boundaries than outside of them.

Considering that Sacramento has been waging war on the middle class on multiple fronts for a couple of decades or so and with easily predictable results, how can anyone claim “such policies were well-intentioned?”