By Dan Walters
December 17, 2023
For years, California’s state government has been playing whac-a-mole to persuade – or compel – local officials to become more receptive to housing development needed to close an immense gap between supply and demand that drives up living costs and contributes to the state’s very high poverty and homelessness rates.
By Thomas Elias
December 11, 2023
California’s top officials and the bureaucrats who back them up persist in telling us there’s a massive housing shortage in this state, amounting to something between 1.8 million and 3 million units (over five years, they’ve used varying figures within that range).
Even in the midst of the building boom, not enough units are going up to satisfy the shortage, while prices and rents remain too high for most of those who would like to move to new quarters, even for many so-called affordable units.
This week the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 to finally advance Mayor London Breed’s legislation to streamline the city’s notoriously lengthy housing approval process. The board is set to take a final vote on the legislation next week to meet a last-chance Dec. 28 deadline imposed by the state Housing and Community Development Department, which has taken increasingly aggressive steps to force San Francisco to implement the policies necessary to accommodate 82,000 new
homes over the next eight years.
By Pat Marriott
November 24, 2023
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed over 50 housing bills this year, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Our representatives compete to pass the most housing laws without any analysis to gauge their effectiveness. Chris Elmendorf’s Open Forum points out the unintended consequences.
It’s the Winchester Mystery House school of planning and it’s not working.
NOVEMBER 22, 2023
Marin Forum/Teliha Draheim
There is a shortage of affordable housing in California, but there is no shortage of expensive homes. In their flawed assessment of how to solve housing needs, the State manufactured a crisis. Cities were blamed for not producing enough housing. Yet, California towns and cities don’t build housing, developers do.
By Chris Elmendorf
Updated Nov 20, 2023
The state desperately needs changes to its housing laws. But did a recent fix create more problems than it solved?Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a package of more than 50 housing bills. Most seemed inconspicuous, but sometimes changing just a few words in a statute makes a world of difference. AB1287 is a case in point. It makes a small tweak to a state law that gives developers “bonuses” for building low-income housing.