Will state housing law become permanent?
In 2017, California lawmakers passed one of the state's most controversial and consequential housing laws, but they included an expiration date — 2025 — to see how things panned out.
Sen. Scott Wiener, the San Francisco Democrat who authored the bill, is pleased with the results so far. Monday, he introduced a bill to make the law a permanent fixture — with a slight tweak that could kick off another union-on-union spat in the state Capitol.
Modeled in part on a civil rights law from Massachusetts, Wiener's five-year-old law presented an ultimatum for local governments hostile to new development: Either start permitting enough new homes to meet the state's housing goals — or start fast-tracking new apartments, so long as they meet a set of basic qualifications.
There's been a lot of fast-tracking since the law passed.
According to data compiled by researchers at UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation, developers have used the law to speed up approval for nearly 12,000 new units. While that's a lot of new homes, it's far short of the 2.5 million that Gov. Gavin Newsom has pledged to bring on line by the end of his gubernatorial tenure.
Flanked by union carpenters, Wiener unveiled his new Senate Bill 423 at the site of a supportive housing complex in San Francisco that supporters of the law cite as a Senate Bill 35 success story.
• Wiener: “It's very simple. You meet all the rules…you get your permit without a hyper-politicized, chaotic process that could take years and lead to litigation.”
The prominent inclusion of the California Conference of Carpenters was no coincidence. The bill would require any developer who wants to use the law to pay their workers union-level wages. But it shaves off a requirement that a certain share of the workforce actually be union members.
That distinction was the cause of a split in organized labor last year: The carpenters successfully backed a bill making it easier to convert old strip malls into apartments with the mere
wage requirement, but the Construction and Building Trades Council pushed another with the hiring requirement.
In other housing news:
• A San Francisco bargain? In a region almost synonymous with eye-popping expensive real estate, home prices across the Bay Area are now going for less than their asking price for the first time since 2012, according to the housing brokerage firm Redfin. The L.A. market seems to be seeing a similar, if slightly smaller, reversal.
• L.A. mayor orders site tally: In her third executive order on homelessness since being sworn in, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass asked her staff to put together a list of unused and city-owned properties that could be used to build housing for homeless Angelenos.
• Bonta warns Huntington Beach: This evening, the planning commission in Huntington Beach, the beachside Orange County 'burb with a lengthy history of bucking state housing law, is considering a change to its zoning code that would ban the use of the “builder's remedy.” That's the untested state law that could let developers build whatever they want wherever they want in cities that don't have state-compliant housing plans. In a letter Monday, Attorney General Rob Bonta warned the city not to even think about it: “The Attorney General urges you to reconsider your position in accordance with state law and stands ready to take action to enforce California's housing laws if necessary.”