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.
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.
By Beth Porter
September 13, 2025
One thing that has become really clear since yesterday is that we live in at least two different realities. Talking to a friend who only knew Charlie (Kirk) as a Christian motivational speaker because that’s all that ever came across her feed.
I showed her videos she’d never seen before of his racism, misogyny, homophobia, advocating for violence against specific groups of people. She was horrified by a number of things that he said, but she had never seen or heard them before, the same as I had never seen or heard the clips of him as a perfectly nice loving man and father.
By Susan Kirsch
September 3, 2025
As founder and director for the Marin-based Catalysts Institute for Local Control group, I was pleased to see elected officials and community leaders in Marin, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego rally against state Sen. Scott Wiener’s Senate Bill 79 on Aug. 23. Nearly 50 people gathered at Larkspur Landing Ferry Terminal. Wiener calls SB 79 the “Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act.” I think a more accurate title is “Accelerating the Decline of Affordable Housing and the Rapid Transfer of Wealth from the Middle Class to Billionaires Act.”
By AMY KALISH
PUBLISHED: August 20, 2025
For years, Marin’s cities and unincorporated areas have juggled ambitious state housing mandates with realities of wildfire risk, evacuation constraints, sensitive and beautiful ecology, fragile infrastructure and beloved historic districts. We’ve done the hard work — parcel by parcel, plan by plan — crafting state-certified “housing elements” to add multi-family housing while protecting public safety while preserving what we can.
by Brian Shearer
August 14, 2025
Since Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance was published, the policy world has debated the causes of our current housing supply drought. Abundance argued that zoning laws are the culprit, as part of its broader thesis calling for liberals to embrace a policy vision oriented around building more of what we need (i.e., “abundance”) primarily through targeted deregulation of private industry and de-proceduralization of government.