Closing the Housing Gap in California
Co-Authors Natalie Mezaki, Emma Rusin, and Sergio O’Dell (LWH Consulting) 
With a focus on the ongoing California Senate race and the upcoming Governor’s race, these “Sensible Solutions” briefs highlight good ideas about key issues and identify political coalitions that could support them. These ideas represent the union of strong policy with good politics.
Housing in the United States has become scarcer and less affordable in recent years. By conservative estimates there is a gap of at least three million and as many as six million homes between what the United States needs to adequately house its residents and what is currently available.
Homes are not being built rapidly enough in areas where people want to live and where the most job opportunities exist, especially around urban areas. New construction has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. High interest rates, compared to recent years, mean that homeowners who have locked in lower mortgage rates are less likely to move. This lowers the inventory available for sale and has driven up prices in and around many urban areas to historic highs. Inflation caused largely by labor costs and the limited supply of materials used in construction has also raised the prices of new homes.
The pandemic’s facilitation of remote work in mostly high-paying professions also displaced this pattern of rapidly appreciating housing costs onto smaller cities and some desirable rural areas.
At the same time, the predominance of restrictive zoning by cities and localities—which has historically limited new development to detached single-family homes on minimum-sized lots and imposed parking space minimums—has limited the ability of developers and planners to build apartments, multi-family units, and other housing that could help relieve this housing gap. By some measures up to three-quarters of the land in urban areas nationwide is covered by exclusionary zoning. [1]
This gap is most severe in and around the major cities where jobs and opportunities are most plentiful. In 2022, for instance, according to a study released by the California Association of Realtors, just seventeen percent of households in Los Angeles County earned enough to purchase the median-priced home, and only 9 percent of Black households and 10 percent of Latino households met that threshold. [2]
Around 6.5 million affordable housing units—with rents below $1000 a month, have disappeared in the past ten years. [3] The affordability gap for renters, more than one-third of Americans—what a reasonable percentage of their income, usually calculated at 30 percent, will purchase relative to what is available—is at an all-time high. Drawing again on Los Angeles data, studies show that almost half of all renter households pay 50 percent or more of their income on rent, and three-quarters pay over 30 percent of their income. [4]
The lack of decent affordable housing contributes greatly to many American social ills, such as segregation by race, disparities in educational achievement, and the growing impact of climate change—as workers pushed further from their jobs conduct longer commutes in older cars and generate more damaging emissions. [5]
California’s Challenge
Though these problems exist nationwide, they are most pressing, and often the most visible, in California. Coastal California, where incomes are among the highest in the country, also features one of the biggest shortages of affordable houses nationwide.
California has been a laggard in building new housing, especially affordable housing. Examples. In 2017, Governor Gavin Newsom touted what he termed a “Marshall Plan” for housing that set a goal of building 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. [6] Though the actual figure is likely to be closer to 1 million units, based on the 120,000 permits issued in 2021, this is a dramatic turnaround from the previous two decades, though far short of what is needed. [7]
In addition to the challenges of exclusionary zoning and local control of land use, Proposition 13 has acted as a drag on new home construction and turnover of existing homes. Since homeowners pay property taxes based on the assessed rate when they purchased their home, with increases limited to 2 percent annually regardless of the underlying price appreciation, they have strong incentives to stay put. And since all commercial properties, including vacant lots, are taxed based on their original assessed price when purchased, there are strong disincentives in the tax code that discourage home building. That most localities fund their budgets through sales taxes rather than property taxes has further encouraged them to seek commercial development rather than residential housing. [8]
Housing has taken center stage in California in the past five years, and particularly in the most recent legislative sessions. Governor Newsom signed a package of some fifty housing-related bills in the recently concluded 2022-23 session, and vetoed many more, mostly on budget-related grounds with the state facing a substantial deficit.
Building on this momentum, we suggest some further practical steps that a new Governor and a new Senator should take, drawing on ideas that are already embodied in law and being advanced in the legislature, and that have a proven track record—though often on a smaller scale—elsewhere.
Many key housing reforms can be brought about through the enforcement of laws already on the books and the infusion of federal money for affordable housing subsidies, not necessarily by passing major new legislation (see chart)
More market-rate housing is needed. So are generous subsidies for affordable housing and the liberalization of rules to allow ADU’s and other innovations, as well as government-subsidized programs for new homebuyers to afford high downpayments. [9] It is not “either/or”. At the lower end of the market in virtually all California metropolitan areas it is difficult or impossible for residents to afford unsubsidized housing under any scenario. And this is true even in many places throughout the U.S. where housing costs are much lower. It is also true that when interest rates and construction costs rise private lenders will not make loans and developers will not break ground without substantial public assistance. The size of this gap means that both market-based housing as well as subsidized housing and social housing— in which subsidized housing is built on publicly-owned land--need to be brought to bear. [10]
Policy Proposals
For CA Governor 2026
Support Existing Laws That Encourage Building, Especially the Construction of Affordable Housing
The Terner Center at Berkeley, which studies housing issues, notes that since 2017 California “has adopted over 100 new laws designed to increase housing production. Most of these laws have been focused on incentivizing local governments to approve more housing and expedite housing approval processes.” [11] While most of the housing that has been created through these measures has been subsidized rather than market-rate units, the overall quantity has been significant.
Perhaps the most significant of these laws has been SB-35, which was first passed over considerable opposition in 2018 and renewed (in revised form as SB 423) earlier this year. [12] It allows multifamily infill projects to go through an expedited review process in towns and other localities that are not meeting their Regional Housing Need Allocation (RHNA) goal for market-rate and affordable housing. This bill itself was years in the making and consolidated and drew upon many existing efforts underway, involving incremental density (ADUs, “mother-in-law” cottages, for instances) and adding density in already built-up corridors near transit hubs.
Most policies don’t arrive full-blown; they evolve over time. They depend for long-term success through persistent implementation and modification rather than necessarily the force of ideas, strong as they may be. SB 35 is an excellent example of this process. It resulted in the approval of 156 projects, comprising 18,000 units, almost all affordable housing and concentrated in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and was modified and amended as AB 423 and passed by the legislature in 2023. It is a good example of looking at what works and what doesn’t and reflecting that not in abandoning the approach but in continuing to implement the plan, with suitable feedback.
Likewise, new policies, or new interpretations of those policies, often build on the beachheads established by earlier legislation. The controversial “builder’s remedy” that has roiled the housing debate—namely that if a jurisdiction is out of compliance with its state-ordered housing plan, developers can build whatever they want wherever they want (though still subject to environmental review) so long as twenty percent of the units are set aside for low-income residents. [13]
The new interpretation is based on the reexamination of a 1990 law promoted by a UC Davis law professor, who himself was drawing on a Massachusetts statute, and taken up by government agencies in the wake of his findings. For the most part this remedy has resulted not in the actual construction of the mammoth proposals for high-rises, for example, but in scaring localities into compliance with their housing plans. (Likewise, the Massachusetts health reform plan that became a model for the Affordable Care Act only saw light because of a provision left over in the law from an otherwise failed 1988 health reform.)
Support Bond Issues on the 2024 Ballot and Related Initiatives
At present the effort to close the housing gap in California has more will than wallet. With the loosening of obstacles to the permitting process the primary roadblock to building housing, and to create sufficient revenue streams to pay both for construction and an adequate return for investors and owners, is sufficient financing.
Taking on more debt in an already constrained environment is always a risk, especially for municipalities and for a state facing an existing $68 billion deficit, but this needs to be balanced against long-term needs like housing and education. Without bond-related financing, much if not most of the housing that is on the drawing board will fall by the wayside, and existing housing that needs upgrading will deteriorate.
The most important of these initiatives will probably appear is a potential entrant on the November 2024 ballot, which would issue $10 billion in state bonds to fund rental housing and homeownership programs for households at different income tiers. [14] A potential $20 billion bond is in the works for the Bay Area, aimed at supporting affordable and low-income housing.
Another key 2024 ballot initiative will ratify a provision passed by the legislature (ACA-1, Aguiar-Curry) that lowered to 55 percent the voter threshold to pass local housing bond and tax issues, similr to that required for school boards. Housing advocates think it will be an important tool for generating local fund that will complement state and federal money, and it is worth getting behind.
Support Policies That Encourage Turning Vacant Office and Commercial Space into Housing
The Covid-19 pandemic encouraged remote and hybrid work and turned vast swathes of urban office space into ghost towns. Though many CEOs in California and elsewhere are encouraging workers to return to the office, with sticks and carrots, the underutilization of office space, especially space that is not built to the highest standard, is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
According to the National Association of Realtors, four of the top twenty cities with the highest office vacancy rate increases between 2019 and 2022 were located in California, and the top two, San Francisco and San Rafael, were in Northern California. [15]
Not all buildings are good candidates for conversion, but in San Francisco, Sacramento, and elsewhere some refitting is underway, more is on the drawing board, and still more could be accomplished through the revision of local ordinances and the implementation of recently-passed legislation. The Office to Housing Conversion Act, which was signed into law in fall 2023, streamlines the review process and minimum parking requirements for conversion projects in return for a percentage of the units being affordable.
The HomeKey program has made subsidies available for converting hotels and motels into housing for the homeless, resulting in almost thirteen thousand units created to date. Though the amount of overall space relative to the housing goals is bound to be modest—about fifteen percent of the total 82,000 units projected by 2030 in San Francisco for instance—it represents a useful tool toward reaching that goal.
Build Social Housing in Locations and At Times That Make Sense
One way that municipalities and other government entities, as diverse as the federal General Services Administration and the Forest Service are tackling the affordable housing gap is by donating land to developers who promise to include a set percentage of affordable housing in their plans, or who construct buildings that are entirely devoted to this goal. [16] These generally remain under private management.
A natural next step is building and managing the properties under the auspices of governments, generally local governments, namely public or social housing. While there is a stigma that remains associated with public housing, government housing offers a niche for continuing construction when the preferred policy of subsidizing private developers to include affordable units in market-rate developments stalls. That has been the case, for instance, in San Jose and Silicon Valley in particular in 2023, thanks to lenders being unwilling to support projects thanks to high interest rates and construction costs that they believe rents will be unable to recoup. [17]
Such social housing programs constitute a substantial portion of the housing in major cities around the world, with Vienna, Austria being the best-known, longest-standing example. [18]
A bill introduced by California state representative Alex Lee to build publicly owned mixed-income housing, modelled on successful legislation in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, was vetoed by Governor Newsom, on the grounds of the cost to the state budget. But if the impasse over building new and principally market-rate housing because of a dearth of lenders persists, this bill and others like it will make a comeback, and deservedly so. [19] Another bill that passed the legislature and received gubernatorial approval, SB 555, requires the state Department of Housing and Community Development to complete a study by 2027 that identifies ways to develop public and cooperative housing; this could be a vehicle toward that end. [20]
Create a State or Regional Appeals Boards to Handle Appeals Over Housing Proposals
Following the Massachusetts model, municipalities that are in arrears with respect to their housing goals, and developers that feel they are being held up unfairly, would appeal to a new state board. Regional planning agencies already exist in California but have little power beyond advisory functions.
Creating a regional board, whether elected or appointed, would add some latitude to the regulatory process while giving potential builders and others a way to stop cities and municipalities and individual homeowners from foot dragging, if that is what is taking place. And it could be the entry point for a more comprehensive regional planning approach, which is beyond political feasibility at the moment but may be necessary to cope with issues such as housing, transportation, and climate change for which potential remedies cut across many jurisdictions. [21] It could even presage the merger of unincorporated areas and small California cities with larger ones (there are over one hundred separate entities that control separate housing districts in the Bay Area alone), a process that has been shown elsewhere to result both in expedited administrative approvals for housing (since bigger jurisdictions tend to have larger and more efficient staffs) and in less red tape.
Modify CEQA to Encourage Responsible Development
The need for more housing clashes with another fundamental goal of California policy, namely the preservation of the natural environment and especially in the state’s coastal areas. Landmark legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), passed under Governor Ronald Reagan, and the creation of the California Coastal Commission—which puts a brake on new construction in desirable coastal areas--enacted in the wake of the Santa Barbara oil spill that befouled the Central coast, enshrined this goal in the state Constitution.
CEQA was originally intended to hold agencies responsible for the environmental impacts associated with Along with Proposition 13, CEQA has become the proverbial “third rail” of California politics, since its popularity and relative ease of application-- any individual who feels affected can sue under the law—mean that it is principally responsible for the multi-year lawsuits that are commonplace in virtually every significant housing development proposal. [22] It is, in the words of UC Davis Law Professor and housing policy expert Chris Elmendorf, a “super-statute,” one that exerts a broad measure on all associated law and to which judges pay deference.
Early in 2023 Governor Newsom championed a broad set of measures aimed at streamlining the CEQA approval process, mainly aimed at infrastructure and water projects. And several significant but important bills related to CEQA emerged from the legislature, one of which removed noise complaints as a possible trigger for a CEQA suit and allowed the building of university housing. This responded to a case at UC Berkeley in which a handful of landowners held up construction of dorms (in a university where fewer than one-third of students can be accommodated in campus housing) for several years. Another, AB 1633, gave developers of urban infill projects additional legal rights against cities that attempt to stall construction projects through insisting on dilatory environmental reviews.
Unconstrained construction is not likely to be the wave of the future in California. Pro-environment constituencies deserve much credit for preserving the state’s wild areas and urban green space. But the challenges to CEQA from within the environmental and environmental law movement reflect the changing focus of the movement away from preservation and toward impact on climate change and social justice. And by consensus most litigation related to CEQA is not primarily concerned with environmental degradation but for use in leverage in obtaining other desired ends, such as unions seeking favorable contracts from developers. CEQA reform with respect to housing needs to go beyond carveouts for special projects for stadiums and nibbling around the edges. [23]
Part of this shift will depend on judicial interpretations of competing laws. The Housing Accountability Act, passed initially in the 1980s but given new teeth in 2017, when the legislature added provisions stating that it “be interpreted and implemented in a manner to afford the fullest possible weight to the interest of, and the approval and provision of, housing” is on a collision course with CEQA despite some pro forma statutory language calling for it not to supersede the environmental law. [24] The incoming Governor should also use executive authority to make entire categories of urban infill areas—vacant and undeveloped properties in clearly defined spaces—either exempt from CEQA or eligible for streamlined approval. This step would free up necessary space for housing development while bypassing what still promises to be legislative gridlock.
Develop a Materials and Labor to Cost Ratio (MLC) Measurement
The suggestions in this brief largely match the pattern of legislation in California with respect to housing in recent years. The focus has been to bring the power of state government to nudge local governments into streamlining and eliminating rules that stymie new construction. Elsewhere in the country development has tended to happen faster because rules about unionized labor are less strict, for instance, permits are easier to obtain or not needed at all, and builders use more prefabricated materials and other shortcuts which, again, tend to be precluded in California. There are good reasons for many of these regulations, including protection against earthquakes, and the tradeoffs in California will be set differently than elsewhere.
High-wage and high-cost outcomes are not inconsistent with what many Californians want from housing markets. But housing costs are not fixed in stone. A very substantial amount even of affordable housing costs are what are known as “soft costs”—namely permitting costs, waiting times to break ground, and defending against lawsuits. Recognizing this, we propose the creation and dissemination of a standard measure, the materials and labor to cost ratio, that will help show how much of a building cost actually derives from inputs as opposed to soft costs in the process. As with the Medical Loss Ratio in health care, which tries to distinguish the actual costs of care relative to insurance premiums, the aim is not to hamstring the provision of goods and services but to provide transparency over costs, with the aim of making better policy decisions over time.
Understanding why it costs so much in California to build a house that is considered affordable—a supply-side rather than a demand-side approach, should be a big part of the public discussion. As with health reform, where value of care and outcomes often take second place to insurance coverage and capacity, thinking about the price of inputs and bringing down those costs is critical.
For CA Senate Candidate 2024
The federal role in helping state, regional, and local affordable housing growth is clearcut, limited, and vital. The Senate helps fund the subsidy programs, mostly managed through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), that make housing more affordable to renters and buyers and more attractive to developers. These include Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC), Housing Choice Vouchers (“Section 8”), which principally serves African-Americans and children, and Community Development Block Grants. [25] Most of these programs have witnessed flat or declining funding over the past decade and federal investments in affordable housing have fallen as much as seventy-five percent in real terms since the Reagan Administration. This trend represents one of the deep roots of the housing crisis. It should be reversed. [26]
Fully Fund and Increase Funding for HUD Renter and New Construction Programs
Set aside substantial federal funding for affordable housing subsidies in rural areas, and for quality improvements for rural areas (since current policies discriminate against availability of housing in urban areas, which are almost all Democratic even in “red” states, but the quality of that housing stock is good), while rural residents are often housed but in de facto poverty.) The context is the declining federal subsidies for housing over the past few decades, as in education. [27]
Develop and Disseminate Guidelines on Best Housing Practices and Serve as a Clearinghouse for These Practices
Because land use and housing policy is generally made at the local level, state and local policymakers are typically unaware of which policies have been enacted elsewhere and how they are faring in practice. HUD could and should act as the facilitator of websites, conferences, and other ways to disseminate these best practices, and develop guidelines for such practices based on the combined experience of different localities. [28]
How the Politics Can Work
In California and around the country, momentum is shifting decidedly in favor of pro-housing and pro-construction coalitions. In the past, even the threat of a lawsuit under CEQA, like the promise of a Congressional filibuster directed at a bill, could stop development in its tracks. Now the proliferation of “YIMBY”( (“Yes In My Backyard) groups, broadly defined, is creating a countervailing force in favor of building new housing. [29] A new surge of renters, many by choice and higher income, is shifting the political debate in ways that may ultimately benefit lower-income renters as well. According to a recent poll conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California, over three-quarters of likely voters in the state felt that California “needs more policies geared toward making home buying and rental housing more accessible.” [30]
Many states, cities, towns, and regions, from Montana to Minnesota, from New Rochelle to New Orleans, Seattle to San Antonio, have taken significant steps toward easing the housing crisis in recent years. [31] These efforts show that change is possible while also pointing out the hurdles that many of these reforms face. Unlike many other key issues in contemporary U.S. politics, the issues around housing, and the coalitions that back them, do not always line up along partisan party lines.
Community leaders increasingly realize that they need to balance the desire for exclusivity and control of the environment, both physical and social, with housing for teachers, policemen, firefighters, and local business owners, many of whom currently live far from their place of work, and especially in California. As Phil Brock, a councilmember in Santa Monica, noted, “You can’t just fight a losing battle. I think anybody who decides they’re gonna be an all-star NIMBY is up for failure.” [32]
While it is true that homeowners and especially suburban homeowners tend to make up a substantial group in opposition to new development, these lines are blurring in ways that make new building more feasible. Many of these homeowners who value privacy and dislike the idea of greater density and change also want the many services, emergency and personal, that a workforce which can afford to live nearby can provide. Sensible development, even streamlined approvals, can muster support. By contrast, the aggressive use of provisions such as the “builder’s remedy,” that allows developers to bypass zoning laws altogether when a city is out of compliance with state housing can split even local pro-housing advocates. [33]
As the debate over the renewal of SB 35 demonstrated in detail, one of the key obstacles to California development in the past—the unified opposition of the “Trades,” namely construction unions—has been partially circumvented in recent years. While new projects and commercial projects specifically must meet a “skilled and trained” worker standard a strict adherence to employing union labor is no longer required in many circumstances. Unions like the carpenters and the SEIU broke ranks with their peers and dislodged the common interest group opposition that tends to stymie new housing construction. [34] Similar “divide and conquer” strategies, in addition to alliance building, might be used with developers and real estate industry groups. [36]
Various reforms that on the surface seem to have little or nothing to do with housing can have a key role in building support for a pro-housing coalition. For example, simply altering the timing of elections for the powerful L.A. City Council to coincide with presidential year elections, when turnout rises, brings many more renters to the polls and over time is likely to bring about a pro-housing majority.
A variety of approaches may be needed even in the same towns, cities, and unincorporated areas, even as new state mandates take effect. This is important for getting both the politics and the policy right: encouraging cooperation rather than rigidly enforcing mandates will be best for the state in the long run.
Towns and cities that try to game the system blatantly get the most media attention, such as the wealthy Silicon Valley community of Woodside that attempted, unsuccessfully, to exempt itself from state mandates by designating the entire town a mountain lion sanctuary. But inability to meet housing targets can result from much more prosaic reasons and without the conscious intent of undermining regulations, For this reason, deadlines need to be handled in ways that aren’t needlessly punitive or arbitrary.
The proposals under consideration have a psychological component as well as an economic one: while the acquisition of a detached single-family home is seen as the fulfillment of the American dream, or the California dream, it will be hard to close the housing gap completely. Overcoming the stigma associated with multi-family, social, or public housing will help change political dynamics. Studies continue to show that Americans prefer big houses with longer drives to services than neighborhoods where access to needs is more accessible on foot and square footage is less. [37] Combined with the fact that many households use their home as their primary or sole savings vehicle shows that diversifying housing stock will remain a political challenge.
Housing Chart
This table shows some key California housing bills along with their status and a brief description.
Bibliography
Benioff Institute, “Homelessness in California,” 2023.
Rachel M. Cohen, “How Housing Activists and Unions Found Common Ground in California,” Vox, August 21, 2023.
Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern, Homelessness Is A Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns, University of California Press, 2022.
Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, Penguin, 2020.
Maggie Eastland, “A New York City Suburb Eases Way to New Housing,” The Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2023.
Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, Penguin, 2023.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, Nimbyism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See, Public Affairs, 2023.
National Low-Income Housing Coalition, “Housing Needs By State,” https://nlihc.org/housing-needs-by-state
Paul Lewis and Nicholas J. Marantz, Regional Governance and the Politics of Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, Temple University Press, 2023.
Andro Linklater, Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership, Bloomsbury, 2013.
Issi Romem (MetroSight and Terner Center, “HOPE Tool” Data and Dashboard for Understanding California’s Housing Crisis,” September 2023. https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/blog/hope-tool-data-dashboard/
Jenny Schuetz, Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems, Brookings, 2022.
Footnotes
1. Richard D. Kahlenberg, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, Nimbyism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See, Public Affairs, 2023. Lawrence Block quote, In the Midst of Death, on single family housing and NYC politics.
2. https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/california-association-realtors-homebuying-house-affordability-report-2022-housing-los-angeles
3. Jordan Zakarin, “The National War on NIMBYism Has Arrived,” Progress Report, November 27, 2023.
4. Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, “Buy and Displace,” The American Prospect, December 2023.
5. Kahlenberg op.cit., Jessica Mark & Najaf Ahmad, “Home is Where Our Health Is,” The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, July 22, 2019.
6. Gavin Newsom, “The California Dream Starts at Home,” Medium, October 20, 2017.
7. Terner Center, “New Pathways to Encourage Housing Production,” April 2023; Binyamin Appelbaum, “California is Actually Making Progress on Building More Housing,” New York Times, October 4, 2022: CalMatters, “California Policy and Politics: 2022-2023 Primer”
8. Matt Levin, “Too Few Homes: Is Prop. 13 To Blame For The State’s Housing Shortage?” CalMatters; John Fensterwald, “California Prop. 13’s ‘Unjust Legacy’ Detailed in Critical Study,” EdSource, Mike Tolj, “Proposition 13 Impact on California Real Estate: A Deep Dive,” December 9, 2023.
9. Dream for All Loans and California Dream For All Shared Appreciation Loan
10. Jenny Schuetz, Fixer-Upper
11. Bill Fulton, et.al., “New Pathways to Encourage Housing Production: A Review of California’s Recent Housing Legislation," Terner Center for Housing Innovation, UC Berkeley, April 2023.
12. Ethan Varian, “What’s Behind the Bay Area’s Push to Add 441,000 New Homes by 2031?” San Jose Mercury-News, February 15, 2023. Terner Center, “Findings From the First Five Years of SB 35,” August 3, 2023.
13. Ben Christopher, “’Godzilla Next Door’: How California Developers Gained New Leverage to Build More Homes,” CalMatters, June 5, 2023; Dan Walters, “California Plays Whac-a-Mole With Cities Resistant to Building Much Needed Housing,” CalMatters, December 17, 2023.
14. Housing CA, “Joint Statement Regarding Final 2024 Ballot Initiatives,” August 7, 2023.
15. Emma Waters, “Converting Vacant Offices to Housing: Challenges to Opportunities,” Bipartisan Policy Center, July 31, 2023.
16. Ben Ikenson, “An Old Median Near a Los Angeles Freeway Sat Empty for Years: Now It’s Affordable Housing,” Fast Company, November 2023?
17. Gabriel Greschler, “’Death Spiral’: It’s Getting Obscenely Expensive to Build Housing in San Jose,” San Jose Mercury-News, October 26, 2023; Ethan Varian, “Apartment Construction in Silicon Valley Grinds to a Halt Amid Cost Crunch,” San Jose Mercury-News, August 28, 2023; Justin Lahart, “How High a Rate Can Housing Take?” The Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2023.
18. Jessica Laskey, “Sacramento’s Housing Crisis: Seven Possible—and Tested—Solutions,” CapRadio, October 10, 2023; Francesca Mari, “Imagine a Renter’s Utopia. It Might Look Like Vienna,” The New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2023.
19. Rachel Cohen, “How State Governments are Reimagining American Public Housing,” Vox, August 4, 2022.
20. Natural Resources Defense Council “Groundbreaking California Law Will Create Innovative Pathways for Social Housing,” October 26, 2023.
21. Lewis, 62f.
22. Dan Walters, “Brown Talks CEQA Reform, But Hasn’t Done It,” CalMatters, August 2, 2018; Will Parker and Christine Mai-Duc, “A Housing Project’s 17-Year Saga,” Los Angeles Times, December 14, 2023.
23. Chris Elmendorf, “The Green Movement’s Best Weapon Has Become a Problem,” Mother Jones, May/June 2023.
24. Jennifer Hernandez, “California Environmental Quality Act Lawsuits and California’s Housing Crisis,” Hastings Environmental Law Journal, 24:1, Winter 2018; Elmendorf and Timothy G. Duncheon, “When Super-Statutes Collide: CEQA, the Housing Accountability Act, and Tectonic Change in Land Use Law,” Ecology Law Quarterly 49:655, 2022.
25. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Policy Basics: The Housing Choice Voucher Program,” Updated version, April 12, 2021.
26. Yonah Freemark, “How the Federal Government Could Expand Support For Local Housing Production,” The Urban Institute, June 21, 2023; Margot Kushel, “California Will Keep Struggling With Homelessness Until Federal Leaders Step Up,” CalMatters, December 20, 2023; Charles H. Moore and Patricia A. Hoban-Moore, “Some Lessons from Reagan’s HUD: Housing Policy and Public Service,” Political Science and Politics, American Political Science Association, March 1990.
27. Jared Bernstein, Council of Economic Advisors
28. See Jenny Schuetz, Testimony for Hearing on “Housing Supply and Innovation,” United States Senate, Committee on Banking, Housing, Transportation, and Community Development, September 12, 2023.
29. Jordan Zakarin, “The National War on NIMBYism Has Arrived,” Progress Report, November 27, 2023.
30. PPIC, Joe Garofoli, “People’s Park Protesters Have Lost the Plot,”
31. Kriston Capps, “Why Housing Reform Worked in Montana,” Bloomberg News, August 31, 2023.
32. Quoted in Christopher, “Godzilla Next Door”.
33. Liam Dillon, “This L.A. Developer Aims to Tear Down Homes to Build Apartments Where the City Doesn’t Want Them,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2023; stories in SF Chron about high-rise possibility in Sunset district.
34. Rachel M. Cohen, “How Housing Activists and Unions Found Common Ground in California,” Vox, August 21, 2023.
35. Schuetz, Fixer-Upper
36. Conor Dougherty and Soumya Karlamangla, “California Fights Its NIMBYs,” New York Times, September 1, 2022.
37. Pew Research Center, “Majority of Americans Prefer a Community with Big Houses, Even if Local Amenities are Further Away,” August 2, 2023.