Oct 1, 2025 | Housing
by Selena Young
October 1, 2025
The South San Antonio area is slated for up to 2,000 new housing units in the next eight years under the City of Palo Alto’s housing plan. However, city infrastructure and particularly poor traffic management are complicating these plans. At a recent Planning and Transportation Commission meeting, commissioners agreed they would need to work closely with Mountain View on developing traffic, pedestrian and public transportation goals for the housing units to succeed.
Sep 28, 2025 | Housing
By JEFF GOERTZEN1 | JONATHAN LANSNER
September 28, 2025
The debate over renting vs. owning has long posed a challenge for households in California. Arguments have morphed in recent years as home prices and mortgage rates soared beyond the increasing rents. To illustrate the complexities, we’ve created a hypothetical rent vs. buy scenario to track housing finances over a 30-year period. However, the math doesn’t account for the intangibles: the flexibility of renting compared to the stability of owning.
Sep 26, 2025 | Housing
By Ben Christopher
September 26, 2025
For nearly a decade now, the Legislature has been churning out bills, Attorney General Rob Bonta has been filing lawsuits and Gov. Gavin Newsom has been revamping agencies, dashing off executive orders and quoting Ezra Klein with the explicit goal of easing the state’s chronic undersupply of places to live.
Sep 15, 2025 | Housing, Opinion
by Guest Opinion Writer
September 15, 2025
As my colleagues and I enter the final weeks of the legislative session, housing is rightly at the center of our attention. But as high-profile bills move across the floor, I keep returning to an elephant in the room: our broken Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) process. It is the very mechanism meant to drive housing production, but it is too costly and confusing to do the job we ask of it.
Sep 14, 2025 | Housing, Legislation, Opinion
By Emily Hoeven,
Sep 12, 2025
Two months ago, California passed what many described as the “Holy Grail” of housing reform: a law that exempts most urban infill projects from review under the California Environmental Quality Act, which interest groups often cynically leverage to delay or deny developments for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment. Now, one of the state’s most powerful Democratic lawmakers is seeking to reverse that.
Sep 5, 2025 | Housing, Legislation
By Dan Walters
September 5, 2025
Two months ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators from both parties celebrated enacting landmark legislation to remove the California Environmental Quality Act as an impediment to new housing construction. Lopsided votes in the Legislature for Assembly Bill 130 and Newsom’s immediate signature seemingly ended decades of debate over how the environmental law, signed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan more than 50 years ago, was being used to delay or kill residential developments.
