Straining to do anything about housing
Much like California’s housing production, the Legislature’s will to do anything about it is approaching zero. The legislative session’s most ambitious and controversial housing bills, SB9 and SB10, have made progress in recent days, which is a credit to the activists and legislators championing them against staunch opposition.
Even if these bills become law, however, the victory will have been so incremental and hard-won as to raise questions about the state’s capacity to address the housing shortage fueling its outsize poverty and homelessness. If they fail, it will be a dire omen indeed.
The state Assembly this week barely passed SB10, by state Sen. Scott Wiener, who calls it his “light touch” prodensity legislation. It’s no understatement: Unlike the San Francisco Democrat’s previous proposals to broadly legalize multifamily housing near public transit and job centers, reviled by anti-housing local officials from San Francisco to Beverly Hills, this legislation merely gives city and county governments the option of allowing small apartment buildings.
Twenty-three legislators still failed to vote either way on the measure, and the Assembly’s Democratic supermajority needed an assist from Republicans to get it passed. That put the bill on the brink of final approval by the Senate and a trip to the governor’s desk. But it also showed how many state and local politicians are so afraid of their most vocal and virulently antigrowth constituents that they don’t even want cities to be able to allow more housing, belying long insistence that local control was the issue.
Despite being backed by Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, SB9 faces stiffer political headwinds for having the audacity to confront a California totem: singlefamily zoning. It does so in the most modest way imaginable, generally allowing single-family lots to be divided into up to two duplexes, and Atkins weakened it further in recent days with more requirements and exceptions. Last month, UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation estimated that the bill would probably enable more housing on only 1.5% of the state’s legion single-family properties.
The League of California Cities nevertheless registered its strenuous objection on the premise that the bill “threatens local governments’ ability to plan for the type of affordable housing needed in their communities.” Planning for housing is, after all, a favorite pursuit of those who are loath to see it built.