California’s housing crisis is dire. Lawmakers just delayed solving it again.
Note: This was published in Spring 2019. Later on, the bill discussed in the article — SB50 — was killed and substantially pared down reforms also failed to pass in September 2020. More recently, the tide has turned a bit and a number of significant bills have passed — but their collective impact is still probably less than the impact of passing this bill would have been, and housing costs and homelessness have continued to rise in the meantime.
I recently went to a friend’s going away party.
He was leaving California for Texas.
I asked him why.
“I’d like to own my own place, and there’s no place I can afford to do that close to opportunity in California.”
He’s the type of person every state or city should want: small business owner, educated, African-American.
He’s not alone — more Americans have left California than moved here over the last decade. Texas is the #1 destination.
California always pats its back for being progressive and having a growing economy. So why are so many people leaving?
Why is our poverty rate higher in *every demographic* than Texas’s?
Our #1 issue is housing.
It affects nearly all of us in different ways.
For many of us, higher rents mean hundreds of dollars more every month go out of our pockets’ and into our landlords for providing the same roof that costs way less other places.
Some of us drive for hours to get to our jobs.
Some wind up homeless or living in cars.
Families struggle to fit in tiny spaces, and their kids move away when they graduate.
The root cause is agreed on by experts, newspapers, and pretty much everyone who understands the issue.
There’s just not enough housing.
It’s estimated that there’s 3.5 million fewer homes than are needed to meet demand in California.
With a population of 40 million, we rank 49th in housing per capita.
The state says we’ll need to build 180,000 units a year to keep up with demand. We’ve been building 80,000.
In the 60s, when the population was 15 million, we built over 250,000 every year.
Why?
Why don’t we see cranes over Weho, Santa Monica, or North Hollywood when an apartment building there would rent in weeks?
Because people aren’t allowed to build.
Zoning laws restrict many areas to single family homes or underused commercial space where there could be denser housing.
A major bill, SB50, was proposed to change this. It would have allowed multistory buildings near transit stops statewide — to finally make public transit practical in places like LA, where major subway lines are often surrounded by blocks of sprawling single family homes and strip malls. There were also quotas for affordable housing.
It wouldn’t have just helped abate the housing crisis — it would have reduced carbon emissions and created tons of working class construction jobs. A real local Green New Deal.
It had the buy-in of construction unions, environmental groups, the mayors of cities like San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento; it was endorsed by the LA Times and New York Times.
It passed its first two votes near-unanimously…and then, yesterday, it was surprisingly blocked until 2020 in a committee without a public vote or explanation.
Where does this opposition come from?
The primary reason is single family homeowners that just don’t want things to change.
Many single family home-zoned areas were done that way decades ago to keep people out based on income — that way, minorities and poor people couldn’t afford to move in.
Decades later, whether the intent is the same, they are still doing exactly that.
Most of the opposition I see now takes a few forms:
1. People insist that neighborhoods need “local control” over housing. If this worked, we would not have a decades-long housing shortage. The problem is that local control translates to a small number of homeowners who have time to be active in local politics elevating their concerns (like fear of traffic or “neighborhood character”) over much larger statewide concerns (like housing affordability, homelessness, climate change).
2. On the other end some progressives fixate on rent control as the only solution. I support some rent control measures, but it was heavily defeated even in the 2018 “blue wave” election — and while rent control can help people already in homes, it is a band-aid that can’t increase the housing supply. If we want to continue to allow people to immigrate to California, we have to build places for them to live. If we want people to be able to move closer to where they work to reduce carbon emissions, we have to build new places for them to live. The best time to do this was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
3. NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”-ism). Saying they want housing, just not in this or that particular place; SF recently vetoed a building for casting a shadow over a public park one hour a year. We are never going to curb the shortage if we try to spoon out a few units here and there, let alone block any building that casts a shadow. We need structural reform.
4. Reflexively vilifying developers. It’s incredible to me how successfully people make developer a 4-letter word, while turning a blind eye to the homeowners in Beverly Hills who have seen the value of their homes skyrocket as a reward for keeping people out of it. Most of us live in buildings built by developers. When the state tries to build housing it both takes years longer and still encounters neighborhood pushback (see LA’s homeless housing bills and opposition to shelters where they propose them) because it runs into all the same local control issues — if not more so. If you are waiting until capitalism ends to address the housing crisis, you’re taking an unrealistic ideological stand that working families are paying for every month.
Every time we kick the can down the road on housing, millions of people continue paying ever-higher rents, thousands more continue leaving California or are unable to move here, and untold numbers drive instead of taking public transit.
Something needs to change — or nothing will.
