California Senate head showed leadership in saving housing bill

Part of effective legislative leadership is knowing when and how to exercise extraordinary power.

State Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, showed a textbook example of how it’s done last week when she rescued from certain death the year’s most important housing bill.

She reached into the Senate Appropriations Committee, where the legislation had been bottled up by its chairman — Sen. Anthony Portantino, D-La Cañada Flintridge, — and extracted the measure herself. Atkins plopped the bill into the Rules Committee, which she chairs, for movement to the Senate floor, where it must be passed by Jan. 31 to remain alive.

If the bill passes the Senate, which now seems likely, it will be fought over in the Assembly.

Senate Bill 50 by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, would spur high-density housing near transit and jobs. The goal is to produce much more housing, faster. But there’s strong opposition.

Some version of SB 50 should be passed, however, because California must wean itself off our ranch-house culture. It’s increasingly unaffordable and unsustainable for the middle class as 40 million people crowd together and grow to 50 million by midcentury.

Housing needs to grow upward, not sideways.

Still, what Atkins did cannot be done every day by a legislative leader. Occasionally when a measure is being strongly pushed by a house leader and is stuck in a committee, the leader will replace the bill’s opponents on the committee with supporters. But that’s rare. Even more rare is going around the committee chairman and pulling the bill from his panel.

Atkins also did it once last year when she yanked a “use of force” bill out of Portantino’s committee. That measure was prompted by the deaths of young African American men in law enforcement shootings.

The final measure narrowed the circumstances in which officers can legally use deadly force.

Atkins regarded that successful experience as a model for how to save the housing bill. She wanted the entire Senate to vote on the measure, not just one committee chairman. Serious negotiations weren’t taking place. So she seized the controversial legislation.

Atkins issued a statement asserting that SB 50 was needed for “building more affordable homes that increase access to jobs, reduce the time people have to spend in their cars and help meet California’s climate change targets.”

Asked about going around the committee chairman, whom she had appointed, Atkins told me: “It’s a thing we seldom, if ever, do.”

SB 50 “is one of our most controversial issues,” she continued. “Some people hate (the bill), some people love it — I get it. … We need to have a critical conversation to figure out how to lower the cost of housing so we can afford to live here.”

Wiener amended the bill in hopes of reducing opposition from cities and counties that object to being dictated to by the state on zoning issues. The changes would give local governments two years to develop their own plans for boosting housing developments be

fore the state mandates took effect.

Portantino called the amendments “more theater than an implementable plan to truly engender broad support.”

Under the bill, lower-density neighborhoods would be forced to allow four- to five-story apartment buildings near rail lines, and fourplexes would be permitted in wealthy areas near job centers

iener has tried for three years to pass such legislation.

Wiener told me, “California is short millions of homes. We rank 49 out of 50 states in homes per capita. In the last 60 years, our population has almost tripled, but housing production has gone down by two-thirds or more. We were producing 300,000 houses a year. Now it’s less than 100,000. It’s stark.”

And the median home price is around $600,000.

Says Dan Dunmoyer, president of the California Building Industry Association: “It’s not uncommon for permits to take 15 years. In the rest of the country it’s less than two. And fees can run up to $150,000 per home. We can build the same homes in Arizona and Nevada for a third of the cost.”

Last year, the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom enacted a bill aimed at speeding up the permitting of new housing developments.

For Wiener’s bill to pass, it will need strong leadership from both Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, DLakewood, and Newsom. Atkins has already exercised her clout, fortunately.