BY RYAN SABALOW AND SAMEEA KAMAL FEBRUARY 27, 2025
California Democrats pledged to tackle affordability in 2025, but their plans to address Trump cuts, housing costs, energy, insurance, grocery bills and inflation remain unclear.
By TIM REDMOND
FEBRUARY 26, 2025
Thanks to state Sen. Scott Wiener and his Yimby allies, San Francisco is under a mandate not just to zone for and approve but to issue permits for 82,000 new housing units in the next six year. The market-rate housing never going to happen, and not because of neighborhood opposition; private developers aren’t building because the projects don’t work at current interest rates and rents.
By Christian Leonard
Feb 21, 2025
When it went into effect in 2022, Senate Bill 9 was hailed as one of the biggest — and most controversial — housing laws in years. Observers called it the end of single-family zoning in California, with the law essentially legalizing duplexes in large swaths of the state’s suburbs. Combined with its lot split provision, SB9 let homeowners turn one home into as many as four. But three years later, California’s suburbs largely look the same as they did before SB9 — prompting legislators, including state Sen. Scott Wiener, to take a swing at tweaking it.
Leading up to this month’s Final Blueprint approval, MTC and ABAG also released the final update to the Equity Priority Communities (EPCs) geographies in December 2024. In addition to informing long-range planning efforts, EPCs are also used to identify funding and public engagement priorities, among other areas. The final Plan Bay Area 2050+ Equity Priority Communities Map ensures that no EPC tracts previously identified as part of Plan Bay Area 2050 will lose EPC status in Plan Bay Area 2050+.
By Cherie Zaslawsky
January 23, 2025
Though we’re told we’re facing a “housing crisis,” when you come right down to it, we’re experiencing more of a “legislation crisis” since Sacramento has robbed our cities of local control over zoning, insisting we squeeze hundreds of “affordable housing” units into our mostly built-out downtowns. These monolithic apartment complexes tower over a number of our suburban cities of mostly one- and two-story buildings. Such high-density high-rises have sprouted up all along El Camino Real as if overnight.
By KATE TALERICO
UPDATED: January 2, 2025
Developers who have reaped millions of dollars from an affordable housing program for middle-income renters with sometimes little-to-no discounts from market rents have spent hundreds of thousands on lobbying and campaign donations in recent years in a bid to keep lawmakers from imposing regulations. The expenditures represent a fraction of the $32 million the California real estate industry as a whole spent on lobbying the state legislature and the executive branch in the past three years.