When essentially everyone in the know about the regulatory and other hurdles that prevent more housing being built in California agrees about the solutions, and when the Legislature and other state officials somewhat amazingly push through measures that would create more roofs over more heads, it is profoundly disturbing to see that precious little progress has in fact been made toward the goal.
This editorial board supported every single one of the measures created over the last five years that the nonprofit news site CalMatters reports were key to the solutions that never really materialized: “One California law was supposed to flip defunct strip malls across California into apartment-lined corridors. Another was designed to turn under-used church parking lots into fonts of new affordable housing. A third would, according to supporters and opponents alike, ‘end single-family zoning as we know it.’”
In a study of five state laws passed over the last five years aimed at increasing the housing supply in our state, the estimable organization YIMBY Law reports that they had “limited to no impact on the state’s housing supply.”
First, the only good news, from an analysis by UC Davis professor Chris Elmendorf and UC Santa Barbara professor Clayton Nall: “The ADU boom stands alone. No other form of housing production took off in California during this period.”
In 2023 alone, the state permitted more than 28,000 ADUs — accessory dwelling units, sometimes known as granny flats — and it’s great to see that these innovative backyard ways to house more Californians have been a success after deregulation of formerly onerous rules about single-family neighborhoods was pushed through.
Everything else has been a disappointing disaster.
The bottom line from the Yes in My Backyard folks: “Our analysis of five recent housing production laws finds that their impact has been significantly reduced by local resistance, lack of state enforcement, and unrealistic requirements.”
NIMBYism, it would seem, both at the local governmental level and on the part of neighborhood associations and other groups that theoretically support measures that would reduce rampant homelessness and the high price of housing for so many but still want to maintain the zoning status quo, still runs the game.
“While the hope was that these laws would provide immediate new paths to regulatory relief, they also allow or mandate development requirements that have reduced their effectiveness,” YIMBY Law reported late last month. “Enforcement of these laws is mostly left to local pro-housing activism and private nonprofit housing organizations. While this sector is effective considering its relatively small size, it lacks the capacity and resources it would need to be able to robustly enforce these laws on a statewide scale.”
But the pro-housing group is not giving up, and neither should the rest of us who want to see more housing in California even in the face of resistance from powerful quarters.
Its suggestion for moving forward even in the face of so much cynicism: “The Legislature and executive branch must amend these laws to improve their effectiveness and disincentivize local government noncompliance. The philanthropic community should provide more resources to grassroots pro-housing organizing and private nonprofit enforcement.”
These new measures are known as “clean-up laws” that would prod localities into doing the right thing rather than doing end-arounds that thwart new housing. Cities still try to limit unit sizes and create unreasonable design and subdivision standards rather than allowing duplexes and lot splits in single-family zoned neighborhoods. They also impose job-killing, housing-killing “prevailing wage mandates” that serve unions rather than the vast majority of Californians.
Local politicians need to stop pretending they want to end homelessness when they won’t allow new homes.