San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Pick housing over union interests
It has become abundantly clear that many local governments in California don’t want to plan for — let alone build — the amount of housing required by state law, and that they will employ just about any tactic to avoid doing their part to help solve the housing crisis.
The state clearly needs as many weapons as possible to win this housing arms race.
One of the most effective laws at overcoming local housing obstructionism thus far has been SB35, authored by Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco. It forces cities that aren’t meeting state-mandated housing production targets to streamline the approval process for certain projects — preventing opponents from filing baseless lawsuits or demanding unnecessary reviews that delay or halt new development.
From 2018 through 2021, developers used SB35 to propose nearly 18,000 units statewide — roughly 75% affordable for very low or low-income households, according to a preliminary analysis UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation shared with the Editorial Board. More than 11,000 of these were approved for streamlining, including more than 3,000 in San Francisco.
And yet SB35 is set to expire on Jan. 1, 2026 — a date that could not be worse. That’s about the time many local governments are required to report to the state their progress on building their share of the 2.5 million homes California has called for by 2030. Many cities are expected to fall short.
Thankfully, Wiener has authored another bill, SB423, which would make permanent an expanded and improved version of SB35.
But its passage depends on Democratic lawmakers strengthening their political backbones.
That’s because the State Building and Construction Trades Council and the California Labor Federation, two of the most influential labor unions in Sacramento, have vowed to vehemently fight the bill — even though a host of other unions, including the
California Conference of Carpenters, have lined up in support.
The result: a looming political bloodbath poised to tear California Democrats apart in 2023.
The main source of contention is two seemingly innocuous phrases: “skilled and trained” and “prevailing wage.” Skilled and trained refers to workers who have graduated from state-approved apprenticeship programs run almost exclusively by unions, which take three or five years to complete. A provision in SB35 — which Wiener has proposed cutting from SB423 — requires certain mixed-income projects to be built by a skilled and trained workforce.
Prevailing wage, on the other hand, is defined in SB35 as a mandate that workers be paid union-level wages, regardless of whether they’ve graduated from an apprenticeship. SB423 would improve that labor standard. On projects with at least 50 units, contractors would also be required to provide health care and hire workers from state-approved apprenticeship programs when possible. The bill also empowers joint labor-management cooperation committees to enforce these standards through private lawsuits instead of relying solely on overwhelmed and understaffed state regulators.
This would mark a significant improvement for California’s 330,000 blue-collar residential construction workers, who are at least 90% nonunion and more than 80% immigrants or people of color, according to an analysis of state and federal data prepared by the NorCal Carpenters Union.
Andrew Meredith, president of the Trades, agreed that building industry workers “are constantly exploited and labor violations and wage theft are rampant.” But, he said, “skilled and trained provisions are the real solution for workers.”
That may be true, but it falls to the Trades to make that case to workers instead of demanding a monopoly on jobs for their members.
Thus far they have been either unable or unwilling to do so.
As of mid-February, about 60,500 workers had active registrations in state-approved construction apprenticeship programs, according to state data. And registration varies wildly across the state: While San Francisco County had 1,109 registered apprentices, Marin County had just 131. State data also shows that fewer than 9,000 workers graduated from union-led construction apprenticeship programs in 2021. Meanwhile, the state Employment Development Department predicted that California would have more than 168,000 construction job openings from 2021 through 2023 to handle the 180,000 new units of housing we need to build each year to keep pace with demand.
“To actually produce the housing that we need, we need to recruit hundreds of thousands of more folks,” said Jay Bradshaw, executive secretarytreasurer of the NorCal Carpenters Union.
Those workers should be well-compensated and protected, but California can’t twiddle its thumbs while the Trades ponder expanding their member base. Rafa Sonnenfeld, policy director for YIMBY Action, said his organization is not aware of a single skilled and trained project that has broken ground under SB35.
SB423’s labor standards are identical to those in AB2011, a law approved last year that aims to accelerate housing development in former strip malls, parking lots and office buildings. The bill was strongly opposed by the Trades and the Labor Federation until lawmakers brokered a lastminute deal to pass it alongside a similar housing bill that included the “skilled and trained” requirement.
Meredith, the president of the Trades, said he doesn’t foresee a similar compromise on SB423. Indeed, both the Trades and Labor Federation have been issuing fearmongering statements about the bill, suggesting it would weaken housing affordability and building safety standards when it would do no such thing.
Democratic Assembly Member Buffy Wicks of Oakland, who authored AB2011 and is a principal co-author of SB423, suggested the Trades’ historic power in Sacramento might not be able to match the might of California’s housing and homelessness crisis.
“People are really frustrated by it,” she said. “And so I think the need to solve the problem is going to outweigh the political challenges of the issue.”
One would indeed hope the choice between housing and uplifting everyday Californians and protecting influential special interests is an easy one for state lawmakers to make.
“The need to solve the (housing) problem is going to outweigh the political challenges of the issue.”
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland