Sounding a retreat on housing

In a pandemicpostponed effort to pick up the wreckage of the Legislature’s last attempt to grapple with California’s housing shortage, state Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins this week unveiled a package of bills to incrementally boost the supply of homes, insisting, “We’ve pivoted our approach — not our dedication.”

Atkins, DSan Diego — who tried but failed to get her fellow ruling Democrats to pass much more meaningful housing production legislation, SB50, just before the coronavirus sidelined them — deserves credit for being dedicated enough to a difficult problem to persist even as the state is engulfed by another crisis. But her chamber’s “pivot” on housing is pronounced enough to verge on heading in the opposite direction. The package Atkins rolled out Wednesday, with the support of both pro and antihousing senators, amounts to an acknowledgment of dramatically diminished ambitions.

Among its backers was SB50 author Scott Wiener, DSan Francisco, who declared the package to be “a strong step forward” while adding, “To be clear, more work remains in the coming years.”

Sen. Jerry Hill, DSan Mateo, who helped kill Wiener’s bill in January, also signed on, declaring the need for “developments that align with local density, height, setback and environmental standards.” Such local restrictions, however, are the driving force behind California’s housing crisis. While SB50 would have overruled those barriers to legalize apartment buildings near mass transit and job centers, the new package largely defers to the Bay Area and Southern California cities and suburbs that have generally blocked housing and driven it to the exurbs, exacerbating traffic, pollution and wildfires.

One of the new proposals, by Atkins, faintly echoes SB50, which would have ended singlefamily zoning statewide, by streamlining approval of duplexes and subdivisions of urban lots subject to a number of conditions. Wiener’s entry in the package, SB902, would allow local governments to speed approval of multifamily developments of up to 10 units by avoiding the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act, which is often used to block urban and suburban housing. The Senate is also considering proposals to ease and encourage affordable housing construction as well as allow residential development on underused commercial and church property.

None of the proposals seems likely to hurt California’s anemic housing production, and most of them will probably help. So could Gov. Gavin Newsom’s effort to spare most of the state’s housing and homelessness programs from the extensive budget cuts he proposed to deal with the coronavirusinduced downturn. But reforms equal to the magnitude of the crisis look even more remote than they did before.

With more than 150,000 Californians hardpressed to obey Newsom’s shelterinplace order for lack of permanent shelter, forcing officials to scramble for hotel rooms and other ad hoc accommodations, the pandemic has underscored the cruelty of the state’s housing shortage as well as the opportunities the governor and Legislature squandered through their inaction in good times.

While the contagion and its economic consequences could substantially alter the conditions that created the housing shortage, the proposals at hand won’t.