Stop California’s housing scofflaws
Amid record-setting wildfires, an upsurge in COVID cases and a gubernatorial recall election, severe restrictions on homebuilding in California’s cities continue to cause major housing shortages and unaffordable costs. After a brief price drop during COVID, median rents and home sale prices are again on the rise, putting home ownership further out of most households’ reach and exacerbating the nation’s worst homelessness crisis.
And yet meaningful housing solutions are emerging. Gavin Newsom’s recent signing of a spate of new bills to legalize more dense housing has made headlines. But another less-discussed plan is also afloat.
Every eight years, California cities are required by state law to create long-term plans for accommodating more housing. In these plans, or “housing elements,” cities must set a strategy for meeting a housing growth target, pare back restrictions that discourage homebuilding, and actively reverse patterns of racial segregation. This year, cities across Southern California must finalize housing elements that encourage 1.3 million more homes by 2029. Next year, Bay Area cities must complete their plans to allow 440,000 more homes by 2031.
These housing elements, paired with the new state laws that legalize duplexes and fast-track modest zoning reforms, have the potential to lower housing costs, decrease homelessness, expand economic opportunity, and reduce segregation in our communities. Unfortunately, city governments in Southern California are currently making a mockery of this process, in flagrant defiance of state law. If they’re not stopped, NIMBY city governments in the Bay Area, like Palo Alto and Atherton, will almost certainly follow suit.
SoCal cities like Pasadena have started a vicious tug-of-war with the state by submitting draft housing plans that don’t meet the state’s requirements. These cities, often high-income enclaves with influential homeowner groups and few renters, are using sleight-of-hand tactics to superficially comply with the law, while doing little to allow more housing in practice.
Effectively, they are treating state housing law as optional.
Over the past 8 months, we’ve reviewed 22 cities’ draft housing plans and discovered numerous bad-faith practices. If South Pasadena’s housing element is to be believed, for instance, utility easements just big enough to hold a telephone pole, vacant parcels of railroad track, and City Hall itself will soon host dense housing development.
Under Beverly Hills’ fantastical plan, the historic Saban Theater and Neiman Marcus’ flagship department store will somehow disappear to make way for modest apartment buildings.
San Diego, meanwhile, listed an active cemetery among its housing growth sites, suggesting that the city will literally allow more homes over their dead bodies.
These tricks are meant to convince the state that cities can achieve enough housing growth without allowing denser housing in more places. But it’s all a mirage — and an embarrassingly obvious one intended to maintain the status quo.
Fortunately, a growing number of cities are bucking their old slowgrowth policies and creating draft housing elements that genuinely promote strong, equitable development. Los Angeles’ housing element includes a sophisticated economic model that demonstrates how the city will only achieve 10% of its housing growth target in a “business as usual” scenario without policy reform. The city has committed to rezoning for 220,000 more homes, particularly in high-resource areas that have accommodated little new housing in recent decades. Sacramento and Berkeley are also encouraging modest housing growth without changing the appearance of low-density residential neighborhoods.
But these positive stories are still outliers. And it will take state action to rein in scofflaw cities.
The job currently falls to the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) to make recalcitrant cities adopt reasonable plans. HCD has generally done a hard job well: earlier this summer, the agency critiqued poor drafts from Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Redondo Beach, signaling that it will withhold final approval without major improvements.
But HCD has also sent mixed messages. When San Diego submitted a laughably bad housing element in September 2020, HCD refused to certify the plan and demanded significant amendments. However, just this week, HCD approved San Diego’s updated housing element, even though the city failed to make the fixes that the agency had initially demanded.
When push comes to shove, HCD will need more political support to hold cities accountable. This means that Gov. Newsom must join the tug-ofwar on the side of housing reformers. As a gubernatorial candidate in 2018, Newsom set a goal of creating 3.5 million homes by 2025. But homebuilding has actually declined under Newsom’s watch. He’ll need to fight to achieve his signature campaign promise. Going toe-to-toe with out-of-touch NIMBYs would show that sorely needed determination.
California’s tug-of-war over housing has to end. Every city should do its part to make the Golden State more affordable and welcoming to all. If they refuse to do that, then at a bare minimum, they need to follow the law.