Affordable housing bills bottled up

Encouraging housing to be built in place of abandoned big box stores and strip malls. Making it easier to build student housing near community colleges. Establishing an authority in Los Angeles to finance affordable housing.

These proposals all promise to ease California’s ever-worsening housing crisis by adding or preserving the already scarce supply.

But these bills also appear to be dead in the water.

They missed a key July 14 deadline to be heard in a policy committee in the state Assembly before lawmakers went on a monthlong summer recess until mid-August. It’s still possible to revive the measures before the session ends in mid-September, but doing so would require a rules waiver — and political willpower.

So if lawmakers have stated time and again that easing the state’s housing affordability crisis is their top priority, and these are some of the solutions, what’s the holdup?

As often happens in the Legislature, it’s impossible to say for certain, and key players remain tight-lipped. But several observers of the housing debate noted a significant similarity among the bills: They all require that a portion of the workforce that builds the housing be graduates of mostly union-run apprenticeship programs.

That union labor requirement has proven to be a deal-breaker or deal-maker for several housing bills already: The provision made it into bills and allowed them to survive so far. Or it was excluded and resulted in strong opposition and a bill’s demise, including one last year to build affordable housing in church parking lots, and another retail-tohousing conversion effort similar to the bill now in limbo.

The requirement is a source of tension between the powerful State Building and Construction Trades Council — which represents more than 450,000 California construction workers and wants more jobs for its members — and affordable housing developers, who are hoping to build many of the proposed projects.

“This question of good jobs versus affordable housing is a false question,” said Lola Smallwood Cuevas, a project director at the UCLA Labor Center. “It’s a question that has been living for 15 years that cannot afford to live on.”

Negotiations between the two groups hit a wall in January; CalMatters reported in June that developers hoped legislative leaders would help break the stalemate.

Instead, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, a Lakewood Democrat, is standing up to the Trade Council’s hard-nosed approach by holding up the bills, according to several lawmakers and legislative staffers, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.

Two of the bills in limbo are in the housing package proposed by Senate leader Toni Atkins, a San Diego Democrat: Senate Bill 6 to allow housing in commercial zones and SB 330 to create workforce and student housing in community college districts. Several other bills in the Senate package also include the union language, including SB 7, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law to expedite environmental review on larger projects, including affordable housing.

Two other high-profile bills in the Atkins package — SB 9 to allow duplexes and lot splits in areas zoned for single-family homes and SB 10 to let cities authorize more dense housing development near transit — aren’t affected by the labor provision because they only cover smaller projects.

Sources said that talks are ongoing between Rendon, Atkins and the Building and Trades Council, known as “the Trades.”

Both Rendon and Atkins declined to comment for this story. Trades spokesperson Erin Lehane said she knew nothing about a conflict with leadership over the labor language, and her group had not been part of any discussions.

“I’ve really no idea,” Lehane said. “Nobody’s told me that there’s any issues with these bills.”

But the holdup could be about more than just policy. Several sources said the Trades got sideways with Rendon when they funded attack ads in 2018 against Assemblymember Cristina Garcia, a Bell Gardens Democrat with whom they had also sparred over energy policy. The Trades, along with affiliated local unions, has given more than $90 million to state candidates and campaigns since 2015

Bill Wong, a senior political adviser to Rendon, however, warned against reading too much into the missed deadline. He said contentious bills typically make it unscathed through the chamber where they were introduced, while the more difficult policy debates take place in the other house before they get to the governor’s desk.

“It’s the nature of negotiations,” he said. “We’ve got approximately four to six weeks left in session. You know, if I’m the Trades, I want to get the best deal I can, which means, if I cut a deal today, and my members are saying, ‘Well you