Oh, California. Your heart's in the right place, no doubt. Maybe.
This is very on-brand either way:
Demand for California's new downpayment assistance program overwhelmed the system and depleted its $300 million budget in less than 12 days, with applications put on pause effective April 7, according to the housing finance agency.
Twelve days.
Now, you, a normal person, might look at those numbers and think: "Wow, this program is pretty obviously a failure. No way it could possibly have enough resources, ever, to do much for homeowners in California."
Ahh, but my friend, you're not thinking like a Democrat:
"It is incredible and inspiring to see that the launch of the California Dream for All program has already been so successful," Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) said in a statement April 14. "The fact that it has helped more than 2,400 first-time homebuyers with their down payments in its first two weeks is terrific.
Did she say 2,400?
For reference: California has about 40,000,000 residents. That's forty million. So "2,400 first-time homebuyers" comes out to about 0.006% of state residents.
That's six thousandths of one percent.
Yep, still six thousandths of one percent!
Even worse, most of that tiny number were WHITE AND ASIAN PEOPLE!
The humanity!
Somehow, that's not what I think woke California was going for!
Let's do some math:
- The program sunk $300,000,000 into 2,400 downpayments. That's about $125,000 per house.
- Let's assume that the state has a target assistance rate of, oh, we can be exceptionally pessimistic here and say one percent of all residents, or about 400,000 people.
- To pull that off they'd need to spend about 166 times as much on the program as they already have. Crunching the numbers on that figure, the state would need...
$49,800,000,000.
Or, rather, just about 50 billion dollars.
(The state is horribly in debt as it stands.)
