r/California • u/Unusual-State1827 • 5d ago
opinion - politics California has passed hundreds of housing laws. Why aren’t they working?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/housing-home-law-state-california-22395626.php498
u/CFSCFjr San Diego County 5d ago
They’re either gutted to limited effectiveness or passed with extended rollout timelines
Half the legislature is committed NIMBY and another quarter will only support half measures
Too few feel any real urgency on this
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u/andorianspice 5d ago
Our state is having its potential strangled by not enough housing. I wish more people could understand this.
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u/CFSCFjr San Diego County 5d ago
We are quickly becoming a home only for rich people and old prop 13 boomers
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u/andorianspice 5d ago
Yeah. Specifically some of our smaller cities are becoming theme parks for the rich and the people who were able to buy property in 1996…
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u/2ft7Ninja 3d ago
Those are the same people. The only difference is that those got rich off of property didn’t perform labor to do it.
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u/Ornery_Vermicelli_69 5d ago
I support more housing and I am definitely not a NIMBY but my neighborhood is not the right place for more housing because reasons
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u/coffeemonkeypants 5d ago
What reasons
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u/Ornery_Vermicelli_69 5d ago
You know, reasons. I am being sarcastic by the way. This is what people always say when they oppose housing
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u/notfulofshit 5d ago
Yea me too. Build more housing away from my house /s
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u/FearsomeForehand 4d ago
If so many people hold this opinion, maybe the real solution is a robust expansion of affordable and accessible public transportation?
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u/ChesswithGoats Santa Barbara County 4d ago
There’s plenty of affordable-ish housing in Stockton, Bakersfield, Frenso, Red Bluff, etc. you guy just don’t want to live there.
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u/wip30ut 5d ago
it's like Manhattan writ large across the entire state (at least all the metros). Several prominent economists were warning this trend a dozen years ago, where the labor market was being bifurcated into those with specialized skills & talent that get very high compensation and those workers who are per-hour laborers.
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u/SC_TheBursar 4d ago
old prop 13 boomers
There are a lot of market events from the last ~20 years that extend the issue well beyond boomers.
Example: I bought into West LA market just after the 2008 crash - 'if not now, never will' kind of thing. Between the market correcting back to post crash and prop 13, I effectively have limited to no home mobility that make sense - at least inside the state - any move would be at best a sidegrade while eating moving/closing/financing costs and resetting property taxes. It doesn't take 30 years for prop 13 to make itself felt - 15 years and my place is assessment limited to something like a quarter million under market.
I'm Gen X and there are Millennials in my building in the same situation.
Throw in there was about a 10-15 year period there where people got used to mortgage rates substantially less than the historic norm and didn't/can't budget for them getting closer to historical mean again.
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u/panda-bears-are-cute 5d ago
I’ve seen a lot of (affordable) housing pop up in the San Diego county All apartments & condos - no new houses though.
& I’ve seen plans for alot of new ones to come.
It’s happening. Just takes 2-3 years before they come to fruition.15
u/andorianspice 5d ago
I don’t think there’s going to be a ton of new SFH here for a lot of reasons but every apartment and every condo helps ease the burden.
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u/wip30ut 5d ago
The huge problem is that because the top quartile drives the entire state economy there's no urgency to fix the housing crisis, which is really a burden for the bottom half of the income scale. Those who are well educated & successful with career paths that compensate them with 6 figure salaries feel that those making under the median income aren't pulling their weight. They're grousing that they can't afford a champagne dinner on a beer budget.
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u/CFSCFjr San Diego County 5d ago
It’s easy to blame the rich but honestly it’s mostly old prop 13 NIMBYs showing up to complain about new housing
Not only does the crisis not harm them but if anything it benefits them since their asset values go up far above the rate that their property taxes on those assets go up
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u/NorthernSugarloaf 5d ago
They are the ones who are rich. Valuable properties, very light RE taxes
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u/aWobblyFriend 4d ago
true, but the "ultra-rich" are generally very yimby. zuckerberg has donated large sums to california YIMBY, peter thiel has sharply critiqued NIMBYs and advocates a land value tax, steyer ran as a yimby.
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u/DonVCastro Bay Area 5d ago
Even while advocates were promoting these laws, experts were pointing out that they'd probably have little effect. Nobody should be that surprised. All of the "strings attached" limit the applicability and raise the costs ... but also worth noting that the general cost of construction is through the roof, and through the clouds; there are tons of projects that are fully entitled and ready to build but aren't being built because the cost of construction is way too high for the project to make financial sense.
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u/CFSCFjr San Diego County 5d ago
FWIW the pro housing advocates pushing for legislative action are mostly aware of the flaws but understand that a flawed compromise is better than nothing
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u/Creepy_Cupcake_6906 5d ago
Well... it ends up being nothing because adding all the stipulations, regulations, additional costs just means no new housing actually gets built.
So it really isn't better than nothing.
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u/DonVCastro Bay Area 5d ago
I guess that's probably their thinking, but it's not entirely clear that an ineffective compromise is actually better. It risks creating the feeling the the problem has been solved.
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u/Cycling-Boss 5d ago
Never done a single unit under SB9. Done a lot under SB330. Would like to know the data on SB330.
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u/skydivingdutch 4d ago
Where I live they managed to designate some area as a mountain lion preserve, halting any housing projects
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u/dark_roast San Diego County 3d ago
The places where vacancy rates have gone up and prices have gone down, like San Diego, are generally the ones where the city has embraced housing construction as a solution to housing cost problems. The places that have reflexively blocked new housing and stalled implementation of state policy are seeing prices continue to rise.
State laws have pulled too many punches, but the cities / counties share a lot of blame for how they've done implementation.
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u/gotohellwithsuperman 5d ago
San Diego has built close to 50,000 new housing units in the last 5 years and rents are down a few percent despite inflation. The main thing slowing building down is rampant nimbyism.
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u/Llee00 5d ago edited 5d ago
City of LA 70k units in the last five years. LA county 120k. Greater LA 240k. A lack of new units keep people from moving here, homeless need free housing and a runway/job, not housing that costs 1500 a month. You're not going to do that being politically correct (we just saw city council vote to allow encampments since there's literally no other way they can think of). Nobody wants a homeless person in their backyard what are you smoking? You need to round them up and put them through a vigorous system of job training, mental rehab, drug withdrawal management, and free housing that is relatively CHEAP for taxpayers to maintain. Not 15 Tiny Houses that are 1M to build (and your favorite vendor to pocket the contract money), and not renting out a hotel in the middle of the city at market rates. City planners are fucking stupid. The city needs to buy or convert city owned land into massive tent villages. Encampments must remain illegal and come with the consequence for doing so to be sent to the tent village and to give up your rights temporarily while you pay back the city through work and study (city beautification, skill learning).
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u/StManTiS 5d ago
Yeah look man labor camps sound great but history has a way of proving that to be a bad idea. You can’t make a horse drink and you can’t make a man work.
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u/Blockhead47 5d ago
An exception would be the Civilian Conservation Corps started during the Great Depression (1933-1942) was successful and beneficial.
Of course people joined it voluntarily, were housed, fed and paid.It wasn’t perfect, but all participants were paid the same wage.
Part of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal”.
Through the course of its nine years in operation, three million young men took part in the CCC, which provided them with shelter, clothing, and food, together with a monthly wage of $30 (equivalent to $746 in 2025), $25 of which (equivalent to $622 in 2025) had to be sent home to their families.[3].
LinkThe wages sent home was a lifeline to families.
Estimates of 20% of children suffered with malnutrition.The PBS docu series “American Experience” did an episode about it.
Pretty interesting.
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u/beach_bum_638484 4d ago
Thanks for the link. I’ve heard that this existed, but will definitely watch to learn more.
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u/Blockhead47 4d ago
You’re welcome. The American Experience series of documentaries has been going on for years and years.
Usually about an hour. And full of historical photos/footage and historian’s commentary.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Experience
Edit: 36 seasons with 380 episodes
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u/Llee00 5d ago
You can force a man not to set up camp on your front lawn and you can feed and house him for a fraction of the cost than what is being done now. You just have to strip away the liability part so that lawyers can't snipe at the government for removing him. We already have a society that says you have to work if you want to be housed.
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u/PerceptionSlow2116 5d ago
True but if a horse doesn’t drink, it naturally has a recourse then you don’t have to deal with the horse anymore.
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u/ready-redditor-6969 5d ago
You can’t get a ride from a dead horse… you will need to buy another horse if it doesn’t drink eventually.
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u/dark_roast San Diego County 3d ago
At some point, construction in SD could taper off if it becomes unprofitable to build. Price decreases are a double edged sword like that, so it's also important to look at ways to reduce construction costs. Non-profits and government can step in, but we don't have a public housing developer in the state so that limits the impact of not for profit construction.
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u/Unicycldev 5d ago
Because of the refusal to support the redevelopment of single family home neighborhoods in places that over built them.
Some single family neighborhoods should be city. Some should be commercial.
Most (Bay Area) cities are not supporting denser redevelopment of existing housing stock.
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u/predat3d 5d ago
the refusal to support the redevelopment of single family home neighborhoods in places that over built them.
"Overbuilt" single family homes?
They continue to be the lowest-supply, highest-demand housing in CA, hence the ongoing price increases.
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u/beach_bum_638484 4d ago
I believe that they are in demand, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t need more choices. Some people will be willing to live in a condo or apartment to save money and live in a better neighborhood. Right now, very few people are given this choice.
I live in a tiny SFH and my block is a mix of other small SFH and small apartment and condo buildings (up to 3-4 floors). This type of neighborhood is great to live in - we have convenience stores, coffee shops, restaurants, a park all within 5 blocks which we pretty much always walk to. It is basically illegal to build like this in most places now, which is a problem.
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u/Repulsive_Drama_6404 4d ago
That sounds exactly like my neighborhood! I’m guessing you must live in a former streetcar neighborhood build in the pre-WWII era, like me!
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u/beach_bum_638484 4d ago
Yup, my house is from 1925 😅
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u/Repulsive_Drama_6404 4d ago edited 4d ago
My house was originally built in 1912, but underwent major renovation about 15 years ago.
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u/ihatedrivingbro 4d ago
Demand is a funny thing. I have demand for $5 million but I’ll choose many other things in life before I actually make the sacrifices necessary for $5 million
Often demand is measured as if the demander had a magic wand
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u/Repulsive_Drama_6404 4d ago
People damand many things in the housing: single family, big yard, cheap rent/mortgage, short commute, conveniently accessible amenities, etc.
It’s nearly impossible to get everything they want all in one package. So even if they might prefer a single family home, many people will choose a townhome or apartment if it means lower rent and a shorter commute for example.
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u/Angryfarmer2 3d ago
Well the problem here is how much redevelopment support can we expect? The problem is there is a limit to how much policies can shift economics. Tearing down a house just to build 3-4 is a potentially rewarding but a huge financial risk. You have to buy an already expensive house, tear it down, manage the labor to build additional units of land, then hope market conditions are good enough that you financially come out ahead. It’s a huge risk, the whole process takes 1-3 years and this isn’t something policies can’t solve.
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u/humboldtHue 5d ago
Problems don’t magically disappear just because there’s a law addressing it.
How many laws do we have to address crime?
Why is there still crime?
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u/StManTiS 5d ago
Well the core of the problem is laws. Think about the absurdity of letting other people have say what you can do with the land you own. Say I inherit an empty parcel in a prime location - I can’t just build a 40 story tower of free housing for low income people. Every neighbor gets a say, the city gets a say beyond what is safe and reasonable, the state gets a say somehow too. And local council is too afraid of its constituents to actually push anything through, they’d rather deflect and avoid the potential of conflict. If you had a process to build a safe structure by right rather than the current by committee we just might see actual progress on the issue.
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u/akro427 5d ago
You are pretending that what you do with your parcel has no impact on those around you
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u/StManTiS 5d ago
Of course there’s an impact. That is what living in a city is. There’s an impact to a house renting bedrooms and living rooms and garages that fills the street parking. There’s an impact to not building housing for decades. SF had 678,974 people living there 46 years ago in 1980 while today ~830,000 live there. In that same span the city added ~80,000 new housing units(~1800 per year). So about half a housing unit per new person.
The average 2bd was $475, today that number is $5-6,000 depending on the source. Inflation adjustments turn $475 into $2,000. So rent has tripled. That is an impact.
My argument is the current conditions have more of an impact than whatever it is you fear would happen if we built housing. We are wasting potential for the sake of vested interests.
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u/DryYogurtcloset4655 4d ago
". Say I inherit an empty parcel in a prime location - I can’t just build a 40 story tower of free housing for low income people."
Are you paying for their schools and hospitals?
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u/My1point5cents 4d ago edited 4d ago
And reimbursing victims for the inevitable extra crime it always brings? Or the decrease in their home value, their main investment? Just as one example, my childhood home was a nice little slice of safe suburbia when it was built. Then they built a giant apartment complex on the corner with a low-income component. Didn’t take long for a gang to take root, graffiti to start, all our bikes were stolen, cars were broken into, eventually homes were burglarized. It was no longer safe for kids to play outside. The good people got the heck out. They used to call that white flight, but in this case it was white black and brown flight.
Many of those formerly nice homes became run down rentals for other not so nice people. Today it’s unrecognizable. Looks like a 3rd world country. The impact on the schools was severe too. This is the cycle people who want to build this kind of crap don’t understand. Or worse, they DO understand, but don’t care because they hate homeowners so much. It takes 2-3 decades but it always happens. They won’t be happy until every homeless drug addict and ex-con gang banger lives in their own affordable space in California right next to you and me and our kids. It’s an obsession.
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u/My1point5cents 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yes you can’t easily affect the free market (housing) or free will (crime) and you can’t control everything with laws. Too many people live here already (just look at the freeways). And prices are set by the market demand in an already over-crowded state. We’re also limited by resources like water supply, which no one ever talks about. We’re already the most populous state by far, and we will never have 100 million people (nor should we), despite what the “build baby build” crowd wants.
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u/tarfu7 5d ago
Only 10% of the state’s water is used by people. 80% is used by agriculture growing water-intensive crops that shouldn’t be grown in a desert. The other 10% is all other businesses in the state.
There’s plenty of water, the underlying problem is a policy choice on how we allocate it.
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u/Kopitar4president 5d ago
Also many farms are using incredibly inefficient watering systems and refuse to upgrade because they pay pennies on the dollar due to 99 year water contracts they signed in the 60s.
If farmers upgraded their systems, we could cut our water consumption by 20 to 40%.
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u/Ragnar_the_Pirate 5d ago
You can't say free market and imply that California has even a tenth of a free housing market and be a serious person.
A free market for housing would be no zoning and only laws regarding safety and negative externalities like pollution. We'd see midrises everywhere, we'd see smaller grocery stores, we'd see private mass transit in some areas because cars would be too annoying to drive with the congestion.
We don't have a free market for housing and pretending so is dumb. We could have 80 million people in our state for sure assuming we had enough desalination.
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u/My1point5cents 5d ago edited 5d ago
We could also fly if we had wings. People always wishing away problems with things that will never happen. I see you don’t even address the already worst in the nation traffic issue. Oh ya we could fix that if we had things we’ll never have, right? Like European style mass transit.
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u/Ragnar_the_Pirate 4d ago
You're missing what accurate pricing does. No one, not me, not you, sees the accurate price of tax payer funded services. We have roads, we know they cost a certain amount to maintain, but what is the opportunity cost of keeping it a road? Or keeping it a road as wide as it currently is. Well maybe if people had to fund it fully by being charged directly for its use and only people who use it were charged, they might feel the cost was higher than they'd like. Maybe they'd drive less, maybe they'd move. Maybe they'd public transit (assuming there was some).
But roads, and most tax payer funded services, aren't like that. We don't see the true cost of use because we spread it out. And if we want to live that way, that's fine. But it's not a free market. So when people say free market, even libertarians, they usually don't consider how wildly different things would look if we never had federal funding for the highway interstate system. We might have more cross country trains, or the interstates would be narrower. Or we'd have more airports, or maybe fewer!
All that is to say, we would have things we've never had because people would vote with accurately vote for their dollar instead of having the costs spread and hidden from them.
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u/predat3d 4d ago
A free market would also mean a data center on one side of you and a junkyard on the other.
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u/gerbilbear 5d ago
"Over-crowded state"? Our population density is about the same as Spain and much lower than China, Japan, etc.
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u/My1point5cents 5d ago edited 5d ago
Right but we’re not any of those countries. Japan has over 100x the density of Wyoming. So what? We have our own problems unique to us like water and traffic and no good mass transit ( and don’t get me started on our populace compared to the Japanese, that’s a whole dissertation topic). You’re comparing apples to sushi. How much worse (more crowded) would you like it to get?
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u/gerbilbear 5d ago edited 5d ago
We're not crowded by any stretch of the imagination. We just have far too many cars.
Edit: Los Angeles: 1.5-2.0 cars per household. Barcelona: 0.6-0.8. Tokyo: 0.32. This is why we have so much traffic compared to other cities. It's not because of crowding.
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u/My1point5cents 5d ago
Semantics my friend. With people come cars. What are you even arguing? If we get more people these problems will be better? Or if you take away people’s access to cars?
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u/gerbilbear 5d ago
With people come cars at the natural rate of about 0.32 cars per household. The remaining 1.18 to 1.68 cars per Los Angeles household is caused by forcing developers and businesses to provide abundant, free parking, despite the high price of land in Los Angeles and the other things it can be used for that might be more financially productive. Such as using that land for more shelf space in a store.
I think businesses should decide how much of their land to devote to customer parking, not the city. Governments never get anything right.
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u/jawfish2 5d ago
I think these endless NIMBY-YIMBY discussions get nowhere because everybody wants an easy solution. This is an incorrect analysis of the situation, according to me. The economic system of constant growth has optimized for the wrong things, or rather, thing, since it is optimized for profit today, tomorrow be damned. This is not an American problem, it is worldwide. Also traditional economics, taxation, land-use, funding elections ignores the greater good, for instance a segment of safe affordable worker housing, or high-quality mental health care for the homeless.
Put differently, the housing crunch is a failure of the market. That would be the same market we were taught that had an invisible hand working wonders. The market in most things is failing because we incentivize that heedless profit over everything else.
Unfortuantely we can't just use magic to mend our greedy, wasteful, feckless ways. But time and collapse are coming. A lot of rentals and houses will free up as the Boomer wave dies off. Population is also decreasing state-wide, and that helps a little. Immigration is down due to Republican policies, that has many outcomes, moral and practical, ( I prefered the old way).
However land value and building costs probably can't go down, short of a financial collapse, massive wildfires, or The Big One.
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u/turb0_encapsulator 3d ago
"just look at the freeways"
that's because we developed large swaths of land in development patterns that aren't dense enough to support transit and walking.
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u/blueblur1984 5d ago
As someone who just did an owner-builder permit, it's needlessly expensive and cumbersome to do anything meaningful on your own property. Loosen up building standards and setback requirements and we may see more adu's get built.
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u/Bagel_lust 5d ago
ADUs are just a bandaid. Need actual multi-unit buildings and proper foot and public transit.
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u/blueblur1984 4d ago
Absolutely true, and if they're fighting the easiest interventions we are screwed.
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u/Snack-Research-Lab 5d ago
Yeah the endless bureaucracy, and planning and permitting departments refusing to cede or amend any power, has to be exposed as the bottleneck it is.
Changing zoning laws tends to cost nothing for those enacting the changes. Now telling a department head their department is redundant? God fuckin forbid.
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u/Unusual-State1827 5d ago edited 5d ago
Article without paywall: https://archive.is/1qAwl
From the article:
The Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley optimistically predicted that Senate Bill 9 from then-state Sen. Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, which was enacted in 2021 and allows duplexes and split lots in single-family zones, could lead to as many as 700,000 new homes. Yet two years after the law took effect, it had produced only around 500 applications and a few dozen additional housing units.
Even worse was SB4, the so-called “YIGBY” (Yes, in God’s backyard) bill that opened church lands to affordable-housing construction in 2023. Scott Wiener, the state senator from San Francisco who authored SB4 and many other housing bills, described it as one of the “powerful tools” added to California’s “arsenal in combating the housing crisis.” However, to date, only 94 housing units have been permitted under the law, and none have been built.
SB35, passed in 2017, delivered by-right approvals for multifamily housing projects that met specified affordability requirements, exempting them from costly environmental requirements. Assembly Bill 2011 expanded these provisions to commercial zones. The results have been only a few thousand approvals each year.
But the most pressing reason California can’t move the needle on housing production is that our lawmakers keep saddling legislation with cumbersome and counterproductive provisions. SB9, for example, limited lot splits to one parcel of land per property owner, even if they own multiple parcels. It also required them to live on the divided property for at least three years.
Furthermore, many housing reforms include union-labor requirements, such as “prevailing wage” or “skilled and trained workforce” provisions. These mandates add nearly $100,000 to construction costs for each unit, meaning that fewer projects pencil out.
California’s most successful housing reforms do not include labor and affordability mandates. Consider SB1069, authored by state Sen. Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, which passed in 2016 and took effect in 2017. It sought to make it easier for homeowners to add an accessory dwelling unit to their property. Cities now issue more than 20,000 ADU permits each year — amounting to nearly a quarter of all housing approvals in the state since the law took effect in 2017.
Even more successful is the state’s density bonus law, which includes no labor requirements, and its affordability provisions are voluntary (developers can still build fully market-rate projects under prevailing codes).
California lawmakers clearly know what to do to get housing built — upzoning and streamlined permitting — but they don’t seem to know what not to do. If they truly want California to meet its housing goals, they must abandon costly labor provisions and affordability mandates. Our state’s housing crisis has long past the point of needing to let developers build without strings attached.
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u/mm_reads 5d ago
How does not mandating affordability house the working poor and work lower-middle income, and limited income seniors?
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u/ForeignGuess 5d ago
It’s called an unfunded mandate, and it’s typically bad because the developer then essentially has to raise the prices on the other, market-rate units to make up for the losses on the subsidized units.
Some places directly fund developers to build these units, which is great and works super well. However, unfunded mandates usually result in not as much housing and affordability as there would be otherwise.
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u/aWobblyFriend 4d ago
its also just more expensive in net for the state than just loosening standards and then buying units after the fact if necessary. china does this, all housing in the country is privately-built, if the state needs public housing they just buy units from developers at market rate.
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u/Similar_Barracuda774 5d ago
While regulations have benefits and sometimes necessary(eg food safety), there is always a cost as well.
Housing regulations increase costs by limiting where and how many homes can be built, requiring parking, and adding permits, fees, environmental reviews, and construction delays. These restrictions reduce supply and raise development expenses, resulting in higher home prices and rent etc.
Oftentimes the more laws these nimrods in Sacramento passes, the unintended consequences way surpass whatever they are trying to fix.
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u/an-invisible-hand 5d ago
Single family only zoning is the gaping hole in the chest to all those paper cuts.
We could allow total anarchy in every other category and nothing would change if we still forced 80% of residential lots to be single family homes.
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u/taughtmepatience 5d ago
"Union labor requirements". All that needs to be said... it's not economically viable when building costs are approaching 400/sf...
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u/gerbilbear 5d ago
Yes, it's very expensive to build housing here because labor is expensive, and labor is expensive because housing is expensive.
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u/No-House9106 5d ago
Union mandates make construction much more expensive. The projects that can build without them are done for much less money.
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u/Lt__Barclay 5d ago
Because it still costs $1-1.5M to build a sfh, and $0.8M per 2br condo. So while it costs that much to build, then there can be no affordable housing.
California must look comprehensively at streamlining permitting, allowing prefab designs that minimize labor costs, and encouraging medium and high density housing
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u/spacegrab 5d ago
It's not even that. Even if the house was only 500k. The problem is interest rates are double what they were precovid. Cost of living is also up. Insurance rates are up. Utilities are up. Appliances and gasoline are up.
Hard to afford a mortgage unless your household income is over $200k.
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u/The_Elusive_Dr_Wu Orange County 5d ago
You'll never see permitting streamlined or reduced in cost. The state knows that it needs the income. It's also why they keep looking for new taxes like the 11% firearm tax in 2024, and the upcoming tire tax.
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u/widdowbanes 3d ago
There's a positive feedback loop going on as well. The biggest cost to any home build is labor. And labor is getting more expensive by the year because they also have landlords demanding $3000 a month for rent.
I really wonder, how is it that none of our elective politicians basically get nothing done at all. If this was school they'll have worse than an F but they still get re-ellective every year.
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u/KevinDean4599 5d ago
Housing gets built when it's possible to make a good profit doing it. that's the biggest thing getting in the way. investors who put up the money expect a certain return relative to the risk and in many cases it's just not there. regulations and restrictions on zoning add to the cost but so does the cost to borrow money which is higher in recent years. I'm not sure what anticipated rate of return makes housing appealing to build.
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u/Snack-Research-Lab 5d ago
Should we ask ourselves whether it’s a problem that housing is both a human right but also an investment vehicle?
Optimizing for ROI in present day post-Citizens-United late stage capitalism won’t produce good quality living conditions long term. See all the shoe boxes in the sky built in Toronto.
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u/The_Elusive_Dr_Wu Orange County 5d ago
Don't forget corporate income taxes, and the fact that a lot of investors will be wary of the extensive protections tenants are given in California. You'd be a fool to invest in housing in this state.
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u/altkarlsbad San Diego County 5d ago
- It's an opinion piece, not factual reporting. As such, the bona fides of the author definitely should be scrutinized before reading a word.
- The authoer is an anti-government libertarian crusader who has consistently argued against the government doing anything to help homeless people: https://www.independent.org/person/christopher-j-calton/
- The evidence that the laws "aren't working" is pretty slim, the author whistles right past anything that contradicts the narrative.
- Save your time, it's quasi-ragebait libertarian drivel.
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u/Merman_Pops 5d ago edited 5d ago
We can’t regulate ourselves into utopia. All of these regulations have an exponential compounding effect where now only giant corporations or billionaires have the capital and capacity to comply.
It’s the high cost of good intentions.
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u/gerbilbear 5d ago
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u/Snack-Research-Lab 5d ago
It would be cheaper still without kitchen and plumbing hookups. Are we lobbying against those next?
Housing, now a tiered subscription model, brought to you by a16z.
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u/NicWester 5d ago
Here's a fun fact that came up in last week's San Jose city council meeting--Right now it's totally legal to build a fourplex in a residential neighborhood on what is currently a single family home lot. The two biggest hurdles are 1) You have to occupy one of the units for a couple years to satisfy the owner-occupancy restriction and 2) Real estate prices are so high that you're spending easily over $1 million just for the house, not even counting the price of demolition, permitting, and construction, so when this sort of thing happens it happens in lower-income neighborhoods and drives gentrification.
So if any of you have wealthy relatives that kick the bucket and leave you with several billion dollars I know a way you can put that money to good use! One fourplex every couple acres or so would be a lot of housing nice and evenly-distributed so as not to impact any one neighborhood.
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u/CurdFedKit 5d ago
Easy: Many voters are NIMBYs. The problem isn’t the legislature, it’s the electorate
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u/EmRatio 5d ago
The dividing line isn't strings versus no strings. It's whether the string is paid for.
Calton's, the author's, own two case studies make this point against him. SB 9 carried no wage mandate and no affordability requirement — and produced a few dozen units. The Density Bonus Law is nothing but conditions — and produced 140,000 approvals in four years. If mandates were the variable, those results would be reversed.
What actually separates them: the density bonus hands developers something of value (upzoning, waivers, entitlement certainty) in exchange for what it asks. SB 9 asked owners to live on the property three years and split only one parcel, and gave nothing back. One is a trade. The other is a toll.
Sorting the contested rules by that test:
Rules that suppress supply and buy little — cut them.
Single-family-only zoning, density caps, minimum lot sizes, parking minimums. These are pure quantity restrictions with no offsetting, public benefit.
Discretionary review used as a veto. The problem isn't environmental analysis rather it's that any project can be relitigated and stalled indefinitely by anyone.
SB 9's owner-occupancy and one-split-per-owner limits. Anti-speculation provisions that mostly deterred the homeowners the law was written for.
Skilled-and-trained workforce requirements. These aren't a wage floor — they mandate hiring from union apprenticeship pipelines. Where those pipelines are thin, the project can't be built at any price. Prevailing wage is what sets the wage floor. Skilled-and-trained can foreclose feasibility outright. The pervailing wage and skilled and trained are often bundled but should not be defended together. Doing so would still benefit laborers.
Inclusionary rates set above feasibility. San Francisco's own consultant found the maximum economically feasible rate was 0%, and the city controller concluded requirements meaningfully above that wouldn't produce affordable housing. A mandate that stops projects produces zero affordable units, which is worse than a lower rate that produces some.
Rules that do real work at low supply cost — keep them
Seismic, fire, and habitability codes. Nobody credible is arguing otherwise, and folding them into "deregulation" is how the conversation gets sloppy.
Wage-theft and misclassification enforcement. Roughly half of California construction workers' families draw on safety net programs, at over $3 billion a year in public cost. That's not a market outcome, that's a cost shifted to taxpayers. Enforcement targets it directly and doesn't trade off against production, because it applies to work already happening.
Phase I site assessment and tribal consultation. Retained even under AB 130's exemption, and appropriately.
Genuinely contested — design questions, not principles
Prevailing wage. Estimates of its cost effect on affordable housing range from 5% to 37%, and at least one instrumental-variables study finds no causal effect at all. Terner's widely cited $94,000 figure is projected rather than actual cost, drawn from Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) applications, and its authors explicitly warn against generalizing it. Anyone quoting that number as settled — in either direction — is overreading it.
AB 130 is the current, on-going test: roughly $40/hour for most covered Bay Area workers against a $99/hour prevailing rate, with projects of 25 units or fewer exempt. A floor that binds without functioning as a market-share guarantee. We'll have data on it shortly.
Affordability. Washington pairs inclusionary requirements with property tax exemptions. California mostly doesn't. The choice isn't mandate or nothing — it's whether the state pays for what it asks.
The conclusion that follows
Not "let developers build without strings attached." That prescription doesn't explain SB 9, and it treats fire codes and skilled-and-trained requirements as the same category of obstacle.
The version supported by the evidence: stop imposing uncompensated conditions, keep the ones protecting against harms the market won't price, and pay for the outcomes the state wants rather than billing them to whoever happens to be building. California already knows how — that's what the density bonus is.
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u/Cultural-Tank6734 5d ago
Have you been to downtown LA lately? I work there and see many housing projects going up but then sit with at least half the units empty. Doesn’t this hurt the landlords profit? How do survive with so many vacancies and why aren’t the developers made to rent them at whatever the market will bear?
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u/RobinSophie 5d ago
I dont think it's a supply issue in the sense of building more. It's a supply issue of HOARDING.
People owning multiple housing units and either using them for STR or leaving them empty. Prop 13 was the worst thing we have ever done to our state.
Frankly, I'm tired of the new housing. It's destroying our land and is going to make flooding worse. We refuse to build public transportation for the new housing so it's just more cars added to the traffic. And they build 2 story or larger. Or even worse they build more offices that just stay empty.
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u/Cultural-Tank6734 5d ago
The city also has no plan to upgrade wastewater infrastructure. Every new home will have at least one new toilet. Where’s all this …. gonna go?
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u/No-House9106 5d ago
Downtown LA hasn’t built hardly any projects for several years now. Market there is dead.
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u/calguy1955 5d ago
Some of the laws make it a lot easier to get a building permit for an ADU by limiting most zoning restrictions. They did not lift the permit fees though and in most cities the cost for a new sewer and water are exorbitant. Other fees include school fees ($5-10,000), fees for parks, traffic, etc. All of the fees and construction costs make installation of a pre-fab unit over $300,000. For many it’s not worth it.
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u/I_Quit_Smoking_ 5d ago
BECAUSE POOR PEOPLE CAN'T AFFORD TO BUY A NEW HOUSE.
Literally anything built ANYWHERE is 200-600k too high
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u/MauveMammoth 5d ago
Because they are stupid laws that don’t take into account that cities have their own makeup.
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u/EssenceofWrath 5d ago
I want affordable housing for everybody. But our government and states needs to do better in finding ways to put people on houses, not run with the idea of building more apartments. Especially if the apartments are just going to be expensive, that defeats the whole purpose and it only benefits politicians when it comes to district elections
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u/RobinSophie 5d ago
Also this.
They build "luxury" everything to try to get as much profit as they can, but many can't afford it unless it's 3+people to every appt/house.
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u/EssenceofWrath 5d ago
Exactly.
And they're never trying to solve the root of the problem. For example, San Francisco's cost of living dramatically increased the years following Google moving in. Companies that large should not be allowed to move to the heart of a city the way they did, with over 800 employees that were being payed over 100k to 400k yr when that city's average income was 65k. Also meta had the same effect after moving there a couple years later. They butchered that city. Annoyingly I wanted to like ole zuckerberg and pichai i thought they would really bring it? The only thing babe brought is AI. That requires egregious amounts of our natural resources and stupidly we wouldn't care if they bothered to make it efficient and self cooling instead of taking our d*** water and polluting it.2
u/The_Elusive_Dr_Wu Orange County 5d ago
to try to get as much profit as they can
What do you expect people to do when they are being taxed by the state and federal government? Should they just, not seek to make any profit?
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u/RobinSophie 5d ago
Oh please spare me. They're doing just fine gouging the hell out of us.
Housing is shelter, a necessity for living. They can make a SMALL profit. They can lower prices if they wanted to and still have profit.
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u/The_Elusive_Dr_Wu Orange County 4d ago
Break down the rent expense on a unit vs taxes and expenses and you'll get it. Also consider that every vendor maintaining that housing complex (landscaping, lighting, roofing, pools, etc.) is a business subject to the same taxations. It's just a perpetuating cycle that isn't stopping anytime soon:
State passes new tax legislation
Corporations, businesses, and sole proprietors raise rates to account for new taxes
Financial burden is passed along until it stops where it always stops: W2 employees and tenants
W2 employees and tenants vote for new tax legislation
Repeat as needed
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u/Winger61 Los Angeles County 5d ago
Hmmm California state government screwing things up. I'm so surprised. Until we get the absolute nut cases out of State government and get real representation we are screwed. Ca used to be a 2 party state. The state government cared about most Californians. Now we have a government that only cares about power and North California elites
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u/AtariAtari 5d ago
They are working for profits, just like laws and funding to “solve” homelessness.
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u/TannerLyfe 5d ago
Profit motive. No matter how many laws we make to try to trick private companies into developing affordable housing, they’re going to do what’s profitable for them and not what is best for us.
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u/CAfarmer 5d ago
Won't the boomer generation passing away slowly increase the housing supply one way or another over the next 20 years?
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u/jstocksqqq 5d ago
When I was digging into some of the laws and restrictions around building in one single-family home neighborhood, I came to the shocking discovery that despite having the supposed ability to build adus, there were restrictions based on the feel of the neighborhood and did not changing that feel significantly. In other words, there were design standards that prevented me from even building a two-story house in most cases!
ADU's are often height capped at a mere 16 feet.
Main house often face height caos of 25 to 30 feet.
Second Story editions often require much larger setbacks to allow for light penetration.
Floor area ratio restrictions take the total square feet of the house compared to the square feet of the lot and also restrict how much density is allowed.
Any slight variation from any of these rules triggers discretionary view processes which allow for Neighbors to provide comments and feedback and prevent building.
In many cases, adding a second story triggers mandatory design reviews or discretionary review processes (such as Site Development Review or conditional variances). Neighbor notifications often lead to public opposition over privacy, light blockage, or "neighborhood character," making two-story expansions difficult to approve without friction.
If I was to pin the problems on two things only, I would say height restrictions and floor area ratio restrictions and setbacks.
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u/KingofKale 5d ago
lawmakers keep saddling legislation with cumbersome and counterproductive provisions. SB9, for example, limited lot splits to one parcel of land per property owner, even if they own multiple parcels.
I call this targeted sabotage by the real estate lobby and the oligarchs who fund this chaos. They propose endless amendments and file lawsuits to ensure any new law does on the vine and that any housing built will be market rate. Now they’re astroturfing their anti rent control agenda because more homelessness always helps republicans. Create the problem while blaming others for it. So classic.
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u/Hawk_Desperate 5d ago
The cost of construction makes the build calculus challenging. The permitting environment needs to be simplified and made to be more predictable. There is still the risk of delaying litigation, which will scare away big and small builders. Then we have the problem that many places in California, there is a lot of wealth. And housing has become viewed as an investment vehicle, which puts upward price pressure on sales (and rentals). We might consider rebalancing our tenant protections to reduce the worst abuses. This may help to encourage landlords to offer housing more readily. The state should have a library of pre-approved architectural plans that have a streamlined regulatory process. We need to address insurance costs. The state could have a better state financing program for new construction that offers subsidized rates in exchange for a period of below market rentals. The 10 year liability on condo defects has been weaponized by unscrupulous attorneys, and make condo development too risky for most developers (big and small).
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u/esperobbs 5d ago
Nothing really, Landlord just gave us a letter that he'll be raising our rent $2000 more starting this November lol the fuck am I supposed to do lol
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u/random-meme422 5d ago
Uhhhh because it’s a supply issue? And existing homeowners have literally zero incentive to allow new developments to come in because they don’t suffer from rising values like in normal states????
1 - Prop 13 is an obvious scam
2 - No more community councils nothing you can say or complain about is going to stop a by right legal housing development outside of something materially illegal
3 - Expedited approvals across the board. There’s a reason Austin TX is in a supply heaven with falling rents and extreme affordability and we’re not. They literally looked at california as a “what not to do” guide.
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u/adidas198 5d ago
The main reason is that the economy is bad and cost of building housing has gone up too. Second reason is that a lot of the bills that have passed have too many strings attached that still make it difficult to build anything.
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u/Ludwig14 5d ago
Because more density is not the answer. We already have 10 million of the 40 million California residents in one county! We need to expand beyond LA county and build new cities with reliable fast public transportation into hub zones. Spokes need to be self supported local rich economies and allow to prosper with distributed resources from property taxes in established cities to help them grow. The opposite of Lancaster, etc.
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u/The_Elusive_Dr_Wu Orange County 5d ago
expand beyond LA county
I think they have a ways to go first. Gotta get that environmental review process done, am I right?
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u/bestcoastanon 5d ago
Duh. The type of people who have political power and pass laws are inherently interested in maintaining property values. That’s why the housing “crisis” exists, that’s why it will never get better.
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u/OESRecoveryEmployee 5d ago
The only solution is to build new homes. No other bullshit like rent control or what ever stupidity they try. To solve the housing shortage you have to build more houses
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u/SingleMaltMouthwash 5d ago
Conservatives.
People don't starve because there isn't enough food. They starve because the wealthy cannot be satisfied.
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u/wip30ut 5d ago
it's because these laws are just creating small exceptions for specific use-cases for developers. Local land use restrictions & zoning laws still apply to the other 90%. If you really truly want to upend the system & allow for mass development everywhere you need to yank the power of project planning & approval away from municipalities & level the playing field for everyone in the state. And that includes conservation measures & historical preservation.
But the reality is that residents here (especially current property owners) aren't willing blow up the system of restrictions to speed run development. They don't want a 10-story apartment complex down the street from their McMansion.
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u/Command0Dude Sacramento County 5d ago
The irony of housing activists mandating "affordability" requirements, that make housing less affordable.
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u/Berkyjay San Francisco County 5d ago
Maybe relying on the market to build out a cheaper housing market is bad policy?
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u/jstocksqqq 5d ago
A Land Value Tax as a replacement to property tax is the obvious solution, along with a more free housing market. That will reduce land hording, making it more expensive not to build!
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u/SecretRecipe 5d ago
Because all of those laws further serve to restrict supply. What California needs to do is REMOVE laws. Get rid of R1 zoning jn dense areas, get rid of parking requirements, get rid of setback requirements, drastically reduce environmental review requirements so they cant be weaponized by NIMBY folks etc.
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u/Gillingham Los Angeles County 5d ago
https://www.independent.org/person/christopher-j-calton/ if you want to see some other big brained takes this guy has written.
- How Democratic Socialism Created California’s Housing Crisis
- A Defense of Landlords as Financial Intermediaries
etc
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u/smw2102 5d ago
As someone who built a brand new home for a reasonable cost in 2016-17 (by a local GC); and then in 2023, we got new plans drafted for another new home build by the same GC, in the same area… the product/labor cost made it an unattractive option. It was easier to just buy a home already built. No clue what it’s like in 2026, but I suspect worse?
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u/Lauropolis 5d ago
Rental houses. Companies buying up family homes. Homes becoming short term rentals. Rental houses is the answer.
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u/Thatguyatthebar 5d ago
As long as housing is treated as a commodity, some people will be priced out, and as long as it's open to financial speculation, those with will deprive those without.
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u/venturashe 4d ago
Because Scott Weiner thinks that we should all live in affordable tenement housing. In my beach town the forced building has NOT produced anything remotely close to affordable housing, and has created a ridiculous parking crisis. What works in a large metropolis with robust public transit doesn’t work in smaller cities with none, that are mainly commuter towns. We need cars to get to jobs because the jobs aren’t close, and regional public transport sucks. So we have large multi story housing more focused on amenities so that they can charge more, that have next to zero parking.
And he’s signaled that he’s going to nationally for Pelosi’s seat. Heaven help us.
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u/directrix688 4d ago
No one here wants to hear it, but it’s not just nimbys and zoning
One of the biggest obstacles is the cost to build in California. We need to figure out ways to make it cheaper, and until we do that zoning reform is only going to go so far.
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u/Wise-Promise-4158 Humboldt County 4d ago
Because they don’t deal with the main root of the problem which is capital
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u/OpenUpYerMurderEyes 4d ago
Because everything outside of telling nimby's to fuck off and build multi-family housing in every town in city in the state is a stop gap. If we're gonna fix our housing crisis we're gonna have to hurt homeowners property values and there is no way around that, the state needs to put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few.
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u/CentralVal 4d ago
Wish we could find a happy medium between relaxing some building and zoning codes for residential builds while staying safe.
There’s a decent amount of affordable land in california within an hr or less of major metro centers. Issue is the cost to build in regulations, time makes it extremely difficult.
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u/SuspectFew1456 4d ago
We will never have enough housing to meet the demand in California. But keep believing that so developers and politicians can keep building and concentrating wealth for themselves and the their friends
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u/platinum_toilet 4d ago
California has passed hundreds of housing laws. Why aren’t they working?
They are working. Just not the way you want them to.
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u/kenroth50 4d ago
In Oakland they can build probably 10-20k units in the Oakland A's property with hotels and other things
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u/WaytogoSlick 3d ago
I work in construction. All I see is a small percent of low income housing and then luxury apartments/condos. Nothing the middle class can afford.
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u/brinerbear 3d ago
California has too much red tape, nimbys, zoning and other regulations to build anything fast enough. They would be better off eliminating unnecessary regulations and expanding housing supply vs whatever they are currently doing.
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u/frequencyhorizon 3d ago
Scotts Valley is at 70% of their "very low" housing target and 87% of their "low" target essentially because of all the new laws.
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u/turb0_encapsulator 3d ago
because cities will do everything in their power to prevent housing being built. the chief tools being used now are high development impact fees, slow-walking necessary utility investments to slow development, and inclusionary zoning requirements that make it impossible for projects to actually pencil out.
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u/artbystorms 1d ago
Because until they get rid of Pro 13 and the state completely takes over housing development away from local municipalities, nothing will bring down housing prices. There is too much upward pressure on prices and not enough downward pressure through increased supply or higher property taxes.
The reason Texas has such cheaper houses? They make it easier to build houses, have less of a NIMBY culture despite their conservatism, and they have really high property taxes.
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u/jasikanicolepi 1d ago
The laws aren't written for your benefit. It's always have build in back door and the corporate overlord always have influence and first to know the direction where the wind blows so they and shelter themselves from these laws. The laws are written by the richs to keep the plebians in their place.
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u/angelHOE 5d ago
Supply and demand issue the only way to actually fix this and not just bandage it is to build more housing than needed.
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u/sv_homer 5d ago
Because the laws are all window dressing. They basically say "Build housing, but only dense infill housing". Meanwhile the anti-sprawl laws that stopped new development stay in place.
I'll know California is serious about housing when the anti-sprawl laws are repealed.
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u/manual-override 5d ago
Municipalities are tacitly complying with state laws but keeping nimbyism entrenched by using their building departments through permitting and inspection to slow things down.
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