By Zelda Bronstein : 48hills – excerpt
But what happens if developers don’t want to build anything but luxury condos — and maybe not even those?
On Friday, February 12, SPUR hosted a webinar entitled “Can Cities Use State Law to Overcome Housing Resistance?” The four panelists, all of the Yimby/Wiener persuasion, answered that question with a resounding Yes.
To anyone who’s depended on the mainstream media for an understanding of the current battle over California housing policy, that response must to be mind-boggling. The establishment press has claimed ad nauseam that the state has done little if anything to address California’s housing crisis.
Reporters have repeatedly memorialized the defeats of state Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB 827 (d. 2018) and SB 50 (d. 2019 and again in 2020) and the midnight-hour death of Assemblymember Toni Atkins’ SB 1120 in 2020, leaving the impression that these were the only housing bills or at least the only ones that mattered.
At Friday’s forum, the panelists told a different story. Since 2017, the state Legislature has enacted a slew of housing laws that, as former director of the Department of Housing and Community Development Ben Metcalf put it, “buil[t] out the power of the state” to overrule local land-use authority…(more)
The developer bills that force density on single family homes may be the governor’s downfall, as more people learn about his efforts to overthrow local jurisdiction and remove single family zoning all over he state. All it will take is a candidate who listens to what the voters want and, hopefully knows how to make it happen. Governor Newsom is really pushing his luck. He intends to included a new Housing Accountability Unit (HAU) in his proposed budget, to fund enforcement of the forced density bills.
See details on the bill and actions you may take to fight back. https://www.livablecalifornia.org/governor-newsoms-latest-executive-overreach-a-housing-accountability-unit-in-hcd/