California is spending billions to house its increasing population of unhoused people. But it hasn’t come close to building enough to meet its ambitious goal of ending homelessness. And many Californians have lost hope that it ever will.

California is spending billions to construct a high-speed rail system. But it hasn’t come close to completing what would be the first such line in the nation. And many Californians have lost hope that it ever will.

In the face of these crises, what is to be done? One option would be to sit around and lament two massive failures of government, and conclude that mega-projects are just too challenging for our state.

Or we could steel ourselves and embrace the wisdom of Dwight Eisenhower—who famously said: “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.”

In that spirit, I suggest we solve the big problems of homeless housing and high-speed rail by combining them into something even larger.

So, I hereby propose—very modestly—Homeless High-Speed Rail.

You read that right. Finding permanent lodging for unhoused people, already declared the state’s top priority by Gov. Gavin Newsom, would become the new, urgent mission of our flagging high-speed rail authority.

Under Homeless High-Speed Rail, the state’s unhoused people would no longer have to live in cars or temporary shelters or controversial encampments. Instead, everyone would have the option to take a sleeping-car berth on a brand-new bullet train.

Sure, this fusion of housing and high-speed rail might create some new challenges. But it would solve even more problems.

To pick just one example: advocates and media have long criticized our state government for its confusing mix of competing homelessness initiatives. The state splits up housing funding among different local governments, who complain that the flow of money is not consistent enough to solve the crisis. The state’s official auditor, along with other experts, has called for consolidating state and local programs on homelessness.

My proposal does just that—by consolidating every single state and local program to house homeless people under one single state agency: the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

Now, some cynics might look at that combination and call it crazy—a mere merger of two giant dysfunctional money pits. And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

The state has spent more than $20 billion on housing and homelessness since 2019—but the number of unhoused Californians has grown by one-third. Meanwhile, the high-speed rail project has secured $25 billion—but is still as much as $10 billion short of the $35 billion required to complete its first segment, in the Central Valley. Both projects will require tens of billions of dollars in additional funding to achieve their goals.

But what cynics are missing, amid all the red ink, is how these two failing programs, in combination, could save each other money.

Building homeless housing is incredibly expensive—Los Angeles is paying more than $800,000 for some one-bedroom units. But much of the cost is in expensive California land, high-cost California labor, and time-wasting California permitting processes. None of which are factors when people are housed on rail cars.

Instead, using housing money to buy rail cars—with private bathrooms—means that the high-speed rail authority could devote more of its funding to building rail and stations (which might also be used for housing).

Talk about a win-win!

Indeed, combining homeless housing and high-speed rail could answer objections that dog both programs.

For example, cities often can’t build homeless housing because of aggressive opposition from neighborhood NIMBYs. But NIMBYs would lose their developer targets, and their backyard objections, when housing is simply zooming past, at 200 miles per hour.

And on the high-speed rail side, hosting homeless Californians answers persistent questions about whether there would be enough riders to support the project. Surveys show little public interest in using high-speed trains, especially because the first segment will run between the smaller cities of Merced and Bakersfield.

But in a Homeless High-Speed Rail project, unhoused individuals would provide a large and steady ridership base.

Strange as my proposal may seem, almost nothing about it is new.

Keeping homeless people constantly on the move sounds cruel, but it is already an established and popular policy across California. After all, cities and police are always tearing down homeless encampments, and forcing unhoused people to keep moving.

In addition, the idea of converting spaces intended for other purposes into housing isn’t new. The state, cities, and counties have already converted dozens of hotels to serve as housing for the unhoused, under Projects Roomkey and Homekey. A Bay Area housing activist even offered a plan to house homeless people in old railcars.

If you board L.A. Metro or the San Diego trolley or other local transit systems in the state, you’ll see that individuals without homes are California’s most dedicated train riders. Thousands of unhoused Californians all but live on these local trains now, because of the low-cost shelter they provide. Indeed, homelessness is so much a part of transit that, earlier this year, BART adopted its first Homeless Action Plan, which includes promises to develop housing itself.

Of course, there will be some Californians, perhaps millions, who object to the whole concept, finding it perverse. These misguided moralists, a few of whom write columns, will say that California is a very rich place that surely can afford to house all its people and to build the same high-speed rail system that two dozen other countries have. And they will claim that California must learn to build and manage giant new housing and infrastructure projects if it’s going to survive the adaptation challenges of climate change.

In theory, these skeptical Californians will probably be right. But California doesn’t operate on theory. It operates on an unmanageable budget process, a volatile tax code, and a broken governing system that both parties refuse to fix. It has a state government that can’t adopt modern technology or manage a payroll, much less translate its people’s democratic preferences into major action. The way California operates now, the state will never have enough housing for the homeless, or a real high-speed spine for its transportation networks.

So, before you dismiss my modest proposal, just ask yourself: In the face of massive failures, when doing big and essential things is nearly impossible, is there any plan too awful to take off the table?

The post A Modest Proposal<span class="colon">:</span> Give High-Speed Rail to Unhoused Californians appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s because Palm Springs, like the Golden State, is a modernist project, built by people who broke from old tradition and established cultures, and experimented relentlessly to construct new systems that buried the past. Throughout California, modernism has produced freeways that span the state, waterworks through swamps and deserts, culture-dominating industries from Hollywood to Silicon Valley, and brand-new approaches to art, architecture, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion.

But modernism also damaged California communities, structures, and habitats. So, today modernism is in retreat, with post-modernism ascendant. We worship the past, and tell ourselves we want to go backward and restore it. We talk about taking down the dams and interstates, getting back to nature and repairing the environment, staying off our screens and cracking down on the tech companies, and restoring the lands and traditions of our ancestors.

That’s what makes Palm Springs—and its public devotion to modernism—so distinctive. The city is effectively promoting the creation of the new, by looking not forward but backward into its own past.

Palm Springs has long touted its mid-century modern architecture—those 20th century desert homes, with lots of glass and open spaces, that encourage indoor-outdoor living and have become synonymous with California in the American mind.

In 2006, after some years of holding a Modernism Show & Sale and successful symposia on modern design, Palm Springs created a major event—Modernism Week. It’s grown into a colossus of the February calendar, with home tours, bus tours, walking tours, bike tours, garden tours, films, lectures, parties, concerts, fashion shows, and cars shows. There’s now a second, smaller-scale Modernism Week, in the fall. This year, the pandemic expanded the calendar, with Palm Springs hosting an online Modernism Week in February, followed by an in-person week in April.

All celebrate a Palm Springs modernist aesthetic of—as the designer and writer Brad Dunning told Palm Springs Life—“forward-facing the future with open arms and a martini.”

Modernism Week, of course, is about commerce. Palm Springs’s tourist economy needs visitors, local arts-oriented businesses want customers, and real estate interests need to sell local homes. But the event also taps into what might be called a nostalgia for the new.

Palm Springs is keeping alive a time when Californians could violate old strictures and fashion entirely novel things without having to spend years fighting planning commissions or CEQA lawsuits. But Modernism Week also evangelizes for an updating of modernism, to fit the more diverse needs of today.

This year’s Fast Forward/Designing the Future of Palm Springs event showcased a new and decidedly modernist design for affordable housing by local architect Maria Song. Her design for the 60-unit Monarch Apartment Homes on Indian Canyon Way nods to the renowned work of Donald Wexler, the architect of many of the area’s steel-and-glass homes.

Song’s goal is creating affordable housing beautiful and distinguished enough to be embraced by wealthy neighborhoods. “I want people to understand that there is nothing cheap about affordable housing,” Song told me. “Rents are affordable, but not the materials or landscaping or the quality of the building.” The Monarch proposal, being developed by Fairfield-based Community Housing Opportunities Corporation, should produce “a building that opens minds and that any community would be proud to have as part of its fabric,” she added.

That Palm Springs is a citadel of modernism is both appropriate, and rich with contradictions. Is any California community more defiantly modern? This is a lush city in the middle of a desert valley full of golf courses and swimming pools, in a state plagued by drought. The largest landowner in Palm Springs is actually the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, which in recent years has asserted more of its property rights, frustrating the expansive ambitions of some businesses.

Palm Springs is thus, like California itself, caught in a purgatory, between the urge for the new and the demands of the old. In other words, we Californians occupy a no-man’s land, somewhere between modernism and post-modernism. We know we need to create new systems that are sustainable and climate-friendly, inclusive and anti-racist. But we are afraid of displacing stakeholders, or burying the past, or not respecting our ancestors. For these and other reasons, we maintain nearly insurmountable regulations and obstacles to building anything new.

This conundrum can leave us feeling as though we are trapped in time, not sure which way lies the past and which way lies the future. The feeling is expertly captured in a new installation outside the Palm Spring Art Museum by the artist Gonzalo Lebrija. It is a car that is suspended over a pool of liquid—not going in any direction, frozen. The work’s title is “History of Suspended Time (A monument for the impossible).”

If we take inspiration from Palm Springs, we’ll try to go multiple directions at once. We’ll take the risk of creating modern novelties for our post-modern world. And we’ll recognize that the fastest way to restore the past is to go boldly forward into the future.

The post If Only California Were More Like Palm Springs appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Most Californians agree that housing is the state’s biggest crisis. But we have nothing resembling a consensus on how best to address it.

Up in Sacramento, our leaders have come up with all manner of housing ideas, but few have attracted broad support or advanced to become reality. And few of us want to be the first to try out a new way of meeting our housing needs. We fear that any new housing idea, put into practice, will disrupt our lives.

What California needs then is a housing laboratory, an experimental setup for new housing concepts. But labs need lab rats. Since no one else will volunteer, I modestly suggest a small but influential subset of Californians as our guinea pigs: the 120 members of the state legislature, leading members of the Newsom administration, and their top staff members.

Who better to represent us in trying out our housing future than our representatives?

Just imagine the possibilities if we required lawmakers and policymakers to live their own ideas, before applying them to the rest of us.

State Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco is certain that Californians need the power to override local zoning to produce taller, denser housing in transit corridors. But it’s hard to know how this will play out. So why not let Sen. Wiener find out by moving his family, his staffers, and the co-sponsors of his housing legislation, SB 50, into the tallest apartment building that can be found along a transit corridor in Sacramento? Of course, we’d need to bar Wiener’s team from driving—giving them the opportunity to wait outside their building for buses that run chronically late, a routine experience for Californians who rely on our underdeveloped transit systems.

We can conduct a similar experiment for legislative supporters of building new housing for the homeless. The state and local governments have budgeted billions to such housing, but how can it be made to work? One way to find out is to have a few lawmakers live in the homeless units themselves.

Of course, very little of this housing has been built. So, to give legislators the full experience, they should sleep in tents on the Capitol grounds until the homeless housing projects the state has funded are actually realized. This might encourage state lawmakers to put real pressure on localities to produce such housing—and fast. And that would make the housing cheaper, since delays of five years for approving housing projects—a typical delay for California—can add more than $150,000 to the cost of a unit.

One possible way to reduce construction costs is to build new, cheaper forms of housing. So let’s push lawmakers into truly new housing models.

Take micro-housing, the super-tiny units being touted across California. One such 160-square-foot can SmartSpace apartment squeezes in a sofa bed and a “smart bench” which can become a table or an extra bed. I, for one, would love to see a Bay Area legislator, State Sen. Jim Beall of San Jose, a leader on housing issues, squeeze into one of those micro-homes. Beall is among many California politicians who propose spending big money to produce very small numbers of conventional affordable units, at relatively high prices. Maybe these pols could get behind more and cheaper housing if they lived in tiny places.

Modular and prefabricated homes, another cheaper alternative, should also be foisted on our legislative guinea pigs. Why not put up a bunch of prefab homes in Capitol Park, for lawmakers and staff? Yes, some will call such homes an eyesore—just as they do wherever they’re proposed elsewhere in California—so let state leaders experience the visual consequences themselves.

The same logic should apply to “granny flats,” or accessory dwelling units, which the state has tried to make easier for homeowners to build. Any lawmakers who own homes should be required to add a granny flat on their property. They’d learn the ways local governments try to stop people from building them, and the high costs of constructing even small places. I’d also make the legislator-homeowners pay their own construction workers the very high prevailing wages—essentially union wages—that they demand of other home builders.

By the same token, all lawmakers who are landlords—at least 25 percent of the members of the legislature, according to CALMatters—should be made to follow rent control regulations. Many Democrats have been pushing rent controls as a way to address the cost of housing, so let them live under such rules. Those lawmakers who are tenants should also gain rent control protections. That might seem like a perk at first, but pretty soon, they’ll share the experiences of those of us who have lived in rent-controlled apartments—landlords who won’t fix anything and do whatever they can to force you out.

Experience is the best teacher, and there may be no better learning experience in housing than having your home taken by the state by eminent domain. I’d suggest that each year—for their own edification—5 percent of the legislature (or six out of the 120 lawmakers) have their home taken by eminent domain. Then they can deal with all the legal headaches and spend many years waiting for compensation.

But why stop with the horror of eminent domain? Major disasters offer a great opportunity for legislators and staffers to move into devastated communities. Why not deed a few abandoned, rubble-filled lots in the town of Paradise to lawmakers and staffers? They could pitch tents and deal firsthand with endless rebuilding delays. They’d only have to stay in the tents until construction is complete. How long would that take?

Learning doesn’t just have to come from destruction. The “Yes in My Backyard” legislators keep calling for massive new building of homes—and Gov. Gavin Newsom wants 3.5 million new homes as part of his housing “Marshall Plan.” I think that’s great, but all that construction can cause headaches, so why not require Newsom and his young family to live wherever housing construction is moving at the fastest pace so they can feel the impacts firsthand?

Now, any grand experiment requires a control group. A number of legislators oppose virtually all efforts to address the crisis. Some of these housing deniers should be forced to move in with parents or relatives—sleeping on sofas, not in spare bedrooms. Others should be required to negotiate at least 50 miles of traffic jams to get to their offices. For example, when State Sen. Anthony Portantino, who blocked this year’s most ambitious housing bill, is working in Sacramento, he should have to stay in either Vacaville or Stockton, and drive himself the 50 miles to the Capitol along busy freeways during rush hour.

Some lawmakers and staffers will want taxpayers to help subsidize their experiences in housing reality. But we should resist such subsidies. Indeed, it should be a requirement that at least half of all lawmakers’ income gets devoted to housing, leaving them poorer when it comes to meeting other needs. That would give them a taste of what life is like for so many Californians, especially the one-in-three renter households who spend at least half their income in rent.

Would feeling the various pains of the housing crisis firsthand really inspire lawmakers to find consensus on housing and take action that makes a difference? I’d hope so. But even it didn’t work, at least those failing to address the crisis would be suffering along with the rest of us.

The post Want More Affordable Homes? Make Politicians Sleep in Their Own Plans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event—entitled “Are Housing Prices Destroying the California Dream?”—brought together a scholar, a politician, a leading journalist, the head of a nonprofit housing organization, and a national expert on housing to examine a crisis that the panelists said touches every person in every region of the state.

This problem “affects all ends of the economic distribution, and all ends of the age distribution,” said Gary Segura, dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, adding: “I am one of millions of Californians who cannot afford my house the day I retire.”

Moderator David Lesher, CEO and editor of the nonprofit media organization CALMatters, framed the conversation around three questions: “How big of a problem is housing? What’s the cause of the problem? And what are we going to do about it?”

The panelists said the housing crisis involves the intersection of many different problems: zoning, planning, taxation, environment, infrastructure, transportation, mental health, homelessness, demands on developers, financing, and Californians’ high expectations for the places where they live.

This complicated intersection makes the housing situation difficult to understand. One panelist, Kevin de León, president pro tem of the California State Senate, recalled a day he spent in downtown L.A. with a wide variety of people—from housing advocates to police and local officials—to learn more about housing and homelessness. “My conclusion was the following: The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing,” he said.

But that can’t be an excuse, given how high the stakes are. “We have a housing crisis, and it’s a big driver without a doubt when it comes to poverty,” de León said. He cited the statistic that a Californian who makes minimum wage would need to work three full-time jobs to afford the average two-bedroom apartment.

Another panelist, AARP housing policy expert Rodney Harrell, said that affordable housing is a national crisis, but it’s even worse in California. An AARP survey, he noted, found that almost two-thirds of Californians have thought about leaving the state because of high housing costs.

He said the heart of the matter is a lack of supply, but fixing it is not just a matter of building more places to live. “There are not enough housing units of the types that people need”—affordable, near jobs or transit, and with designs for people who may have special needs because of their age or health. And high costs leave people very vulnerable. “The folks I worry about most are the people who have not planned for an emergency—something happens to your spouse, you have a health crisis, you lose a job” and then you can no longer afford your housing.

Segura, of UCLA, spoke of the need to reduce the costs that local governments put on developers, by demanding they widen streets, provide parking, or take on wage issues as a condition of building housing. Such demands add to the cost of housing and make “pulling a building permit the most expensive thing you can do in California.”

He also argued that linkage fees, which make developers pay for affordable housing, reflect attempts by local governments to make up for some of the control and revenue they lost under Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot initiative that limited property taxes. While noting that it’s unpopular to free up developers, he warned, “We cannot use developers and development to solve all issues.”

Lisa Hershey, executive director of the nonprofit Housing California, said that too much public money goes into tax subsidies for our homes—she mentioned the mortgage interest rate deduction—and not enough into infrastructure, transit, access to schools, and livable community policies that stabilize neighborhoods, and keep people in their homes. “The stability of home makes everything else possible” in terms of improving people’s lives, she said.

She also lamented how efforts to address the housing crisis—by building more transit and housing—can end up pushing out longstanding residents of certain neighborhoods, as land values, rents, and home prices rise. Many Californians are being pushed out of established neighborhoods to places far from jobs, creating longer commutes.

De León noted that a development in Boyle Heights, which is part of his Senate district, was blocked because of concerns about such displacement. “People are thinking, ‘If I’m going to be displaced, where am I going to live? My cultural identity, my linguistic identity—everything is in this neighborhood, this block,’” he said.

Hershey and de León both touted a package of 15 bills that the legislature passed in the just concluded session, and that Governor Jerry Brown signed into law. It includes a dedicated funding source for affordable housing, a housing bond that will go to voters, and legislation that should speed up permitting in localities. De León said that the push on housing would be enhanced by other new laws that promote road and infrastructure repair, boost transit, add parks, and reduce pollution.

“This package we’ve moved forward—I’m hoping it will be the first step of many steps,” he said.

De León also noted that the housing package—in combination with previously allocated state money for the homeless and mentally ill and local measures for funding housing and homeless programs—meant that an unprecedented amount of money is flowing to address housing issues. But that doesn’t guarantee that local leaders will find ways to turn money into housing that meets people’s needs.

“At a macro level we can move all the capital that is necessary to catalyze and attract money,” de León said. “But if at the local level, the leadership is lacking, it just takes a really bad problem and makes it even worse.”

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, one person asked why, if California is producing so little housing, she sees so much development as she drives around.

Harrell, of AARP, responded that “not all supply is created equal—just because a building is going up, it doesn’t mean it has enough units that folks can afford.” And UCLA’s Segura noted that the housing being built is simply not enough for a state that’s reaching a population of 40 million.

Hershey, of Housing California, called this “a historic moment,” with opportunities to address the housing crisis given the resources, the focus on the problem, and “a gubernatorial campaign with several candidates who are interested in housing.”

But she cautioned that such a complex problem won’t be solved quickly. “This is the long game,” she said.

At that, Harrell added, “We all need to take part.”

The post California’s Housing Crisis Is a Nasty Intersection of the State’s Worst Problems appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Sorry, Utah.

And apologies to the rest of the West. California’s epidemic shortage of housing hasn’t just sickened our own state—by driving up prices, forcing residents into rentals and onto the street, and putting a $140 billion annual drag on the Golden State’s economy. The disease is spreading to our neighbors, too.

Today, every significant city in the Western United States is experiencing a minor league version of the California housing crisis. Shortages are especially severe in Seattle, Portland, and Eugene, Oregon, and cities across the Mountain West are seeing big run-ups in home prices and rents; even in Boise, prices are increasing at a nearly 10 percent annual clip.

California’s housing crises and those of its neighbors share some of the same causes: lack of water sources to support development, shortages of skilled construction workers, and the rising price of increasingly scarce land near job centers. But our Western neighbors face an additional challenge: the influx of Californians unable to find housing in their own state.

I witnessed the spread of the California housing epidemic firsthand during a recent trip to Utah. There, the housing shortage, while less severe than in California, is considered historic. The Wasatch Front, which includes Salt Lake City and 80 percent of the state’s population, has seen record increases in single-family home prices and rents that far exceed the fast-growing region’s rising wages. The median home price in Utah is more than $264,000 (nearly $300,000 in the Salt Lake City area), which seems cheap by California standards but is more than 25 percent higher than the national average of $209,000.

For the first time since the 1970s, Utah, growing via births and incoming jobseekers, is adding more households than housing units. As a result, rates of homeownership are falling, homelessness is on the rise, and the Salt Lake City council has declared an affordable housing emergency. There are few homes for sale, even for those who can afford them; in the past five years, housing inventory has dropped 69 percent. The president of Salt Lake’s Board of Realtors has called this “the strongest seller’s market ever.”

Facing these challenges, Utah has a consolation: its housing shortage is not at the scale of California’s yet. But that is cold comfort. Leading Utahans are examining the California situation as an example of how to avoid a deeper crisis.

“California’s housing market can shed some light on our own,” said a recent housing assessment by Envision Utah, a non-profit planning and civic engagement organization. “Faced with rapid growth, many California communities, and even the state, imposed ever-more-stringent regulations designed to curb development, believing that if they slowed development it would put the brakes on growth.”

The trouble, said Envision Utah, was that, “California’s constraints didn’t slow growth, so demand for housing stayed high. Instead, those regulations simply diminished the supply, and we know what happens next.”

While Utahans know California’s problems, we Californians haven’t returned the favor. So late this spring, I went to Utah to see what lessons the Beehive State could offer Californians about housing. California has 13 times as many people as Utah, but the comparison is not completely outlandish. The states have two of America’s most diversified economies, and despite vast open lands, we’re among the most urbanized states in the country. Both states skew young (Utah is the youngest in the nation), our median household incomes are well above the national average, and we have similarly well-educated populations.

Most intriguingly, Utah and California are distinguished by their lack of housing. California is ranked 49th in the country in the number of housing units per person. Utah is 50th. But Utah, for its housing struggles, hasn’t had a shortage as deep or long-lasting as ours, or prices that exceed the national average by two-and-a-half times. Why?

One part of the answer might sound obvious: Utah doesn’t need as many housing units because it has the country’s largest families and households, a product of the prevalence of the Church of Latter Day Saints. That suggests one solution to the housing crisis—California could embrace Mormonism as its state religion—that I considered omitting from this column because it’s wildly impractical. But it’s no more farfetched than the 50-plus bills in our state legislature that offer minor or counter-productive changes to California’s housing markets.

Putting religion aside, the most serious difference between Utah and California housing involves local government. Utah is a place where state government defers to local government, and local communities retain control over their destiny. California is not.

It’s hard to exaggerate how little control California communities have over their fate. For 40 years, California government has been the site of a war between a state government that has centralized power at the expense of locals, with the help of voters. While housing is financed with money from all over the world, it is approved and built locally, so when we limit the power of local governments, one power we limit is the power to approve housing.

Today, California local communities are badly constrained from both the left and the right. Liberals enact and defend state environmental regulations that make it slow and costly to build housing. Conservatives enforce state limits on local taxes, especially Proposition 13, that create incentives that discourage the building of housing.

This state of affairs fuels NIMBYism. With their local representatives having relatively little power, local communities cling to the power they do have: saying no to change in their communities. California’s direct democracy allows communities to use local ballot initiatives to limit growth restrictions, no matter the statewide need for more housing.

Utah, a strait-laced place, has almost none of California’s local whips and chains—there are few local anti-growth restrictions, no state environmental law like California’s project-blocking CEQA, no Prop 13, and little NIMBYism. It takes years, even decades, for brave developers to navigate California’s anti-housing regime and build something. In Utah, housing comes together in a matter of months.

“We don’t have the problem you have with widespread anti-growth sentiment,” says Utah economist Robert Spendlove, a member of the state legislature.

That culture makes Utah likely to resolve its housing problems before they do more damage to its people and economy. There’s momentum to lift limits on housing density and streamline permitting processes to make them even quicker. Utah developers and builders are already adapting to the shortage by increasing production of more moderately priced homes and apartments.

In California, the response is very different. Gov. Jerry Brown and leading legislators want to impose even more rules on local governments, with the goal of forcing the construction of more housing. That might sound good in theory, but local governments are already weary of state mandates. Might new housing ones only worsen the state-local war and encourage more defiance and more NIMBYism?

Of course, it would be incredibly difficult to end California’s state-local war, restore more power to local government, and eliminate tax and regulatory limits that discourage housing. But how easy is it to live under a miserable housing shortage that ends up exporting our people—and our housing challenges—to states like Utah?

Failing to address our housing crisis is bad for California. And it isn’t very neighborly.

The post Will California’s Housing Shortage Epidemic Infect the Rest of the West? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the real import of the more than 100 bills that have been introduced in the legislature to change housing policy in various ways. None of the current proposals is up to the task of getting the state to build sufficient housing. But the varied legislative activity—proposals to cover production incentives for builders, rental assistance, streamlining regulations, new regional planning initiatives, increased enforcement of state housing laws, and even taxation of second homes—clearly signals the state’s intention to take a leading role in how California houses itself.

The prospect of a Sacramento intervention is usually worrisome. But this one should be welcomed. The threat of the state seizing power may be one of the few levers that could prompt the biggest obstacles to new housing—local governments—to get out of the way.

One can hardly blame state government for aggressive meddling in housing. California has a nasty history of destabilizing calamities: from the run-up in housing prices in the 1970s that produced the Prop 13 backlash; to the debt-fueled mid-2000s increases that led to the housing crash and the Great Recession.

Today, California’s crisis is rising prices resulting from a profound failure to create enough units to meet the population’s needs. While the state needs an estimated 180,000 new units a year, it has been getting less than half of that. By one estimate, the resulting shortage is a $140 billion annual drag on the state economy. Companies and individuals leaving the state most often cite housing costs as their top reason. Home ownership is at the lowest rate in California since the 1940s.

The crisis also represents a public health issue. Millions of Californians pay so much for housing that they have less to spend on health care, food, education, and transportation. Housing costs force Californians into long commutes that damage our health, infrastructure, and environment. And housing prices are one big reason why California suffers from the greatest homelessness and the highest poverty rate of any state.

Adding to the difficulty is the bewildering mix of federal, state, and local policies that affect housing. Federal and state programs support people who seek housing and those who wish to provide moderately priced housing. But such programs are tiny compared to the need for subsidies in expensive California; the Legislative Analyst’s Office found that most low-income households receive no assistance with housing, and that nearly twice as many households are on waiting lists for housing vouchers as there are available vouchers.

Local governments add to the shortage by passing and enforcing limits on housing development, density, and sometimes rents themselves. This local hostility to new housing is fueled by NIMBYism, environmentalism, and a state fiscal system that encourages local governments to pursue retail development (which produces sales tax for local coffers) instead of housing.

The state has a great deal to do, but its goal should be straightforward: more housing. That should mean more assistance to those seeking housing, more incentives to produce more housing, and fewer regulations that limit housing. But the politics are wickedly complicated, even by California standards.

The debate is already dividing key interests that must come together to pass ambitious laws. Labor is split on housing, as building trades unions oppose reforms to lower housing costs, a change that would benefit working-class members of service sector unions. There also are divides among environmentalists (between those who embrace denser development and hardliners who oppose any growth at all), advocates for the poor (between those who want to revive poorer communities with new housing and those who fear new housing will merely displace poor people), and even among Republicans (between those who want to protect older people and their housing values and those who want more housing for the young families in their inland communities).

“I’m not super optimistic about the state being a positive force in housing yet,” says Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget & Policy Center. “The number and range of proposals suggests that there isn’t consensus yet among state leaders and housing advocates about what levers to pull.”

Some of the more than 100 housing bills could make things worse, by adding to the costs of housing, or creating disincentives for local governments to approve housing. It’s also difficult to make even small gains in encouraging more housing for poor and working-class people.

State Senator Toni Atkins of San Diego, for example, has built a formidable coalition behind a bill to provide a dedicated funding stream to support below-market housing. Politically, such funding would be a major breakthrough. But the legislation would produce just $250 million a year, a fraction of the tens of billions in affordable housing needs statewide.

And subsidized housing reflects only a fraction of the California housing market. The Legislative Analyst’s Office has called for a focus on encouraging additional private housing construction in high-demand coastal areas. Shortages there, the legislative analyst said, have rippled across the state, sending people further inland in search of cheaper housing, and driving up housing costs for everyone in the process.

The crisis is urgent and has been years in the making, and the state’s legislative efforts to gain power over the problem could take many years, with hiccups and mistakes. Is there any way to go faster? Perhaps, but it would require the politically difficult step of empowering developers.

One model, with roots in Massachusetts, gives private developers, nonprofit organizations, and local authorities great powers to challenge land-use regulations that prevent housing development. The developers get an especially free hand in localities that fail to meet state requirements on housing. The Massachusetts model thus puts local governments on the defensive. They can no longer say no to housing projects; they either must make plans for housing, or watch as developers do as they please.

Such pressure from the state may sound extreme. But so are the consequences of our housing shortage.

The post Aggressive State Meddling Could Fix California’s Housing Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dig deep enough into any of California’s biggest problems, and you’ll eventually hit upon a common villain: our court system.

California’s housing shortage, its poverty, its poor business climate, and its failing infrastructure all are explained in no small part by the failure of our underfunded, delay-prone courts to provide anything resembling timely justice. But in public narratives of what’s wrong with the state, we have mostly let the courts dodge responsibility for their many crimes against California’s future.

This is, in part, because, our courts have been broken for so long that we’ve stopped expecting them ever to work. In the meantime, we have become lazily addicted to blaming our favorite perpetrators—our regulators, our politicians, our media, our unions, our businesses, and, more recently, President Trump—for our collective failure to build a state that meets its population’s needs.

But the biggest reason why we’ve allowed the courts to skate responsibility involves a public lack of understanding of the courts, and a resulting underestimation of their importance. State government has been treating the courts, which account for less than 3 percent of state spending, as a small problem, distinct from the state’s other maladies. But the courts’ impact is far larger than their budget imprint, making them a dangerously faulty foundation for our state’s economy and government.

If you want to block a project in California, your best bet is to get it into the courts, where you can delay for years until the project’s supporters can no longer afford to go forward. This happens regularly in California’s housing battles. But rather than blaming the courts, real estate types routinely blame a law—CEQA, the abbreviation for the California Environmental Quality Act—for the state’s struggles to build sufficient housing and infrastructure.

At a recent conference at Chapman University in Orange County, Emile Haddad, the chairman and CEO of FivePoint, the largest developer of mixed-use communities in coastal California (from the Great Park Neighborhoods in Irvine to Candlestick Point in San Francisco), pointed to the courts instead.

“I’m one of those probably odd developers who say they love CEQA,” he said, praising environmental laws that protect communities and add to quality of life and the value of housing.

The real problem, he said, is “the entire legal system.” He recounted a project that got local government approval in 2003, but still hasn’t happened, as his company is now litigating the project’s 30th lawsuit.

With each challenge or problem with permits, he loses even more years, Haddad said, because “I have to go through the same courts that have approved me already … because I cannot go directly back to the Supreme Court or the appellate court and tell them that I’ve done what they needed me to do.”

Such legal delays bear a heavy responsibility for our historic housing shortage and add to housing costs that are more than twice the national average. In turn, costlier housing is a huge factor in California’s highest-in-the-nation poverty rate and its high incidence of homelessness.

Poverty is now highest in coastal areas with the most development restrictions, which produce more litigation and costlier housing. And the clogged courts make it harder for poor people to challenge evictions from housing, or mistreatment by people and financial institutions that prey on the poor.

The same court-related delays and resulting costs also plague any number of transportation and water projects, and of countless attempts to launch new businesses. The most high-profile example is the state high-speed rail project. While the state authority in charge of the project has drawn withering coverage for its mistakes—construction remains at an early stage, nearly nine years after voters approved the bonds for it—most of the delays involve the courts.

The state itself has a long history of using the courts to delay meeting even its meager funding obligations to schools and health programs. The state courts so utterly failed to resolve California’s prison overcrowding problems that federal receivers and the U.S. Supreme Court had to step in.

Meanwhile, the courts are being asked to do more with less. Newer reforms on criminal justice resources (Governor Brown’s realignment), sentencing (Propositions 47 and 57), and recreational marijuana (Proposition 64) have created new questions and petitions that boost court workloads.

At the same time, the Great Recession and budget crises were particularly tough on the courts. Thousands of court staffers have lost their jobs in the last decade, and more than 50 courthouses and 200 courtrooms have been shuttered. Delays have more than doubled; it now can take more than five years to have your civil complaint heard by a judge or jury. (One prominent lawsuit, by California local governments against lead paint manufacturers, is now 17 years old.)

Flat pay and a heavy workload have led to walkouts by court workers, and sparked bitter infighting among state judges. Court officers in 49 of 58 counties warned in a February letter to Gov. Brown that without more money in this year’s budget, they’ll need to cut existing levels of service.

The pressure on the courts would be even worse if the total number of court filings hadn’t declined by 25 percent over the last decade. But that may be bad news. Almost all the decline has been in small claims, challenges to infractions, and minor civil cases. Regular Californians have simply given up on seeking justice in our courts.

“Inadequate funding and chronic underfunding of the courts is just one way a justice system can become unjust,” warned California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye in a recent speech, noting that since 2011 the state has added 6,408 laws while the judiciary budget lags.

I recently walked three blocks from my office to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, the state civil courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Like other central courthouses in California’s increasingly glittery city centers, the court building stands out as an eyesore, its exterior scars clashing with the new park and federal courthouse next to it.

Inside, nothing—from bathrooms to Wi-Fi—works particularly well. Lawyers receive trial dates that are usually more than two years in the future, court reporters are scarce, and overworked clerks scramble to keep things from breaking down. A lawyer acquaintance who took me around quoted Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a 19th-century novel about the delays and injustice of England’s Court of Chancery.

Broken courts, Dickens wrote, promote a crippling fatalism through a society, “a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.”

It’s way past time for California to pull itself out of this Dickensian muck. Yes, fixing our court system—making it the fastest and most efficient in the country—would be challenging politically. But it also would be relatively cheap, just a couple billion more dollars a year in a state with a $150 billion budget and a $2.5 trillion economy.

Justice delayed is justice denied. This budget season, let’s return timely justice to the courts, and stop this crime against California’s future.

The post The Verdict Is in—California’s Dickensian Courts Are Failing Us appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On my way home, I thought of an SAT exam-like question. One of these things is not like the others: San Francisco, Cleveland, Hong Kong, Sydney, and Vancouver. I am going to take a wild guess and say that you, the reader, have chosen Cleveland.

You are right. But why? After all, Cleveland rocks, but just not in the same way as the other cities. One of the many ways it is different is in the cost of living. Demographia’s just-released 2017 affordability study has Cleveland as one of the most affordable cities for housing, and each of the other cities in my SAT question as among the least affordable.

This suggests something important about the affordability crisis that has not, but really should, enter the discussion of housing affordability: The cities that we find most attractive are cities where housing is “unaffordable.” In other words, the affordable housing crisis is not just about a lack of housing supply.

In my current city, Los Angeles, one hears over and over again that everyone is leaving because no one can afford to live here. This talk reminds me of the Yogi Berra homily, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Of course, exactly the opposite is true, and that truth is what should guide us in our housing policy.

The oft-made mistake is to suggest that housing is expensive because, as Demographia incorrectly puts it in their report, “Studies do not leave the slightest doubt that unaffordable housing is almost everywhere and every time caused by the same factor: housing supply restrictions.” Well, these “studies,” some of which are by very thoughtful people, leave plenty of doubt, and some of their authors ought to go back to Econ 101. Prices are not just a supply phenomenon but are rather an interaction between supply, what is available for sale, and demand, what people want to buy.

Clearly the people who live in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities on Demographia’s list of cities with an affordability crisis could afford to live there. They just paid a larger portion of their income to do so. They could have moved to a more affordable place to live—Cleveland, for example. So those who say that housing prices are unaffordable are saying that, at lower prices, there would be more demand than supply. Let’s explore the implications of this.

Cleveland is so affordable because many people find it less desirable (think “lake effect” blizzards). Indeed, half the population of Cleveland left over the past 50 years. The housing stock is more than ample for the people who want to live there. Which reminds me of the time I interviewed for a job in Buffalo, New York, right after graduation. Part of the pitch was, “Buffalo is a great place. It is so depressed that you can afford a really good house.” Somehow this did not seem like an endorsement of a community I wanted to move to.

The reason San Francisco is different is that it is a wonderful place to live. The scenery is spectacular, the climate mild, cultural amenities are abundant, and in a very short time one can be in the Sierra for some incredible winter sports or at Mavericks for world-class surfing.

Edward Glaeser, in his towering work on urban economies, The Triumph of the City, said “vitality makes people willing to pay for space.” Glaeser, like many other urban economists, argues for more building, but the point repeatedly made by those who study urban migration is that exciting innovation (documented by UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti), natural amenities such as beaches, mountains, and lakes (documented in the “superstar cities” study of Goyurko, Sinai, Mayer), and cultural amenities (as oft described by economist Richard Florida) attract people from declining to successful cities.

To be sure, San Francisco is not to everyone’s taste; some prefer the charm of a Louisiana bayou, and others the silence of a Minnesota winter. But given the housing stock, many more people want to live in San Francisco than can. An estimate in a 2015 paper by Moretti and the University of Chicago’s Chang-Tai Hsieh found that more affordable housing could increase San Francisco’s population by 100 percent or more. So there exists significant demand for San Francisco housing that a moderate change in zoning and building standards will not correct.

The population growth Hsieh and Moretti found means that today’s locals in places where people want to live are going to have to write a check for the infrastructure to support them. This is an old story in a place like California. In 1967, one of Ronald Reagan’s first acts as governor was to increase taxes dramatically, giving us Californians the highly progressive income tax system we enjoy today, and that Republicans everywhere rail against. The reason? Large-scale migration to the state had caused his predecessor, Pat Brown, to build infrastructure to support a burgeoning population, and as a result the state was running a structural deficit.

So what’s happening in San Francisco—or Seattle or Austin, or any number of popular places where the cost of living is rising—is the market system doing its thing. The market increases prices to ration the available land through the cost of housing. And people economize on their consumption of housing by living in smaller quarters, sharing with roommates, or stacking up generations. And for some, the price is not worth the value they would receive, and they leave. That is how any market rationalizes differences between supply and demand.

What about those who are squeezed out of California (such as my kids, who moved to Colorado)? The Dad in me says, “That’s horrible, I want them down the block from me.” But the economist in me says, “They do not value what Los Angeles has, relative to their life in a small town in Colorado, enough to sacrifice other things for it.” Resources, when scarce, are appropriately allocated according to their value to those consuming them.

And what about our schoolteachers, firemen, police, and city officials who struggle to live in the high-priced cities where they work? Here is the rub. When a place is really attractive and therefore really expensive—take Santa Barbara—many who perform valuable services live elsewhere, like in Ventura, 90 minutes away during rush hour.

Instead of wringing our hands about affordability in high-demand places, and trying to build enough to meet a worldwide demand that is difficult to satiate, we should be saying, “Great, we have a really successful city, but we also want to have a city with certain professional, service, and demographic characteristics,” and design housing policy targeted to that. For example, Santa Clara County built high-quality affordable housing that it rents to schoolteachers. It is a small program, but it is a good start. What doesn’t work are overly broad measures, such as directing developers to make 20 percent of their units affordable in exchange for building permits. Such policies generate homes for only a very few San Franciscans (while attracting ever-more newcomers who want to live there).

That is not to say we should ignore affordability. We definitely must pay attention to affordability, as we plan the cities we want to live in. But in doing so, we must pay attention not only to whether we have enough housing supply but also to the nature of the demand in places where people want to live. If we ignore demand, we risk creating urban nightmares—of crowding, traffic, long commutes, and ill health—in pursuit of a successful and affordable city.

The post Why the Housing Crisis Won’t Get Fixed by Building Cheaper Homes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Perhaps it’s because all of the proposed solutions—more construction, sprawling construction, denser construction, granny flats, affordable housing mandates, new forms of financing and exemptions from regulation—are built on the same flawed premise: that housing must exist solely on land.

And on land, California’s high costs, environmental regulation, restrictive planning, anti-density NIMBYs, anti-growth local governments, and Prop 13’s protections for older homeowners, taken together, form a giant kludge that stops needed housing from being built.

What if there’s a way around all that? What if the future of California housing is on the sea?

If you haven’t heard yet of seasteading—that’s the ocean form of homesteading—don’t worry. You soon will.

Because where else does California have to go?

Floating cities are an ancient idea; Plato’s dialogues reported the sinking of Atlantis. Communities at sea have been a durable cultural trope, from the Kevin Costner film Waterworld to the video games BioShock and Bioshock2 to more recent science fiction, like the floating city Transhumania in Zoltan Istvan’s 2013 novel The Transhumanist Wager.

In this season of comfort and joy, it’s worth noting that the world’s most famous and hardiest seasteader is Santa Claus himself, laboring tirelessly among the Arctic ice floes of the North Pole. And less mythically, a half century ago, L. Ron Hubbard and other leaders of the Church of Scientology, created the Sea Organization, or Sea Org, a training compound that consisted of several ships that was were usually at sea, away from the prying eyes of the authorities.

More recently, seasteading has gained ground among libertarians, particularly those who drink from Silicon Valley’s dream-inducing waters. For a time, techies contemplated how to build cities far out to sea, in international waters, so they could live by their own laws.

At the forefront these days is the non-profit Seasteading Institute, which envisions such communities enabling “the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas for how to live together.” In 2008, the institute received high-profile backing and funding from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who preached for ocean communities as an “escape from politics in all its forms.” More recently, the venture capitalist has publicly soured on the idea, and sought an alternate avenue to escape political reality by backing Donald Trump.

In some sense, Thiel’s newfound skepticism is justified. Such experiments have yet to realize the vision of urban ocean realities—it’s costly and complicated to build a city on the sea. Among the Seasteading Institute’s findings thus far: the open ocean is too rough to support a city, but protected coastal waters look promising.

For California, that might be good news: We have 840 miles of coast. While seasteading may sound like science fiction, it’s no less Star Trekian than median housing prices that exceed $1.1 million in San Francisco, Marin, and San Mateo counties.

While previous visions of sea cities have incorporated futuristic aquafarms or novel modes of energy production, more modest cities—with the straightforward goal of providing housing for Californians—might be more viable. One might start with boats providing badly needed housing for the state’s homeless population. This is an idea that recently got a boost from former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, who suggested turning the decommissioned USS Peleliu into a shelter for his city’s homeless.

Of course, California’s many land-based regulators and environmentalists would quickly raise objections to people living in coastal waters. So it’s vital to sell the idea not merely as a response to housing (since the housing crisis demonstrably doesn’t move Californians to action or reform) but as a far-sighted answer to the two problems our state’s leaders care most about: climate change and the drought.

A proponent of seasteading recently suggested to me that off-shore housing could provide a financing base to change the economics of desalination. Plans to turn ocean water into drinking water have long seemed too costly, and inefficient. But manmade islands with desalination plants financed with the proceeds from off-shore housing sales might make the numbers work; the reclaimed water could supply these sea cities, thus offering a live experiment for a more sustainable water future.

Seasteading also could mitigate climate change. Sea-based cities would provide a dry run—okay, a wet run—for the not-so-distant future, when rising sea levels inundate California’s greatest coastal cities, forcing millions of us to learn how to live on the ocean. In this way, cities on the sea would ease today’s housing problems—while furthering our climate change leadership and preparations for a watery future.

It’s hard to overstate how much the ocean can teach us. I’ve always loved a Golden State story from 1965, when a California-born teenager named Robin Lee Graham began a five-year sailing voyage around the world, eventually publishing a book called Dove and becoming a celebrity.

“At sea,” Graham wrote, “I learned how little a person needs, not how much.”

That’s a lesson all of California could learn, if we’re willing to build a future just off the coast.

The post If California Won’t Build Housing on Land, Why Not “Seasteading”? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Just ask its princes and princesses—those fortunate enough to be able to afford to live and vote there. Most of the time, the nearly 900,000 residents can pretend that they live in the country, even though they’re part of greater Los Angeles. Parks or open space or farmland is almost always within easy walking or biking distance. The Santa Clara River, the least developed of Southern California’s waterways, is being protected. The Kingdom of Ventura’s cities remain separate and distinct developments on the landscape—they haven’t sprawled and melted into each other, like cities do elsewhere in Southern California.

Their secret? “No other county in the United States has more effective protections against urban sprawl,” says the web site of SOAR, aka Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources, a family of growth-controlling ballot measures.

Those SOAR protections have been fixed in the laws of the county and its cities for two decades. SOAR permits development only within certain urban cores in the county and makes no allowances for population growth. And if a developer wants to change the boundaries or develop open space outside the areas where growth is permitted, that developer can’t buy off the county supervisors or a city council. SOAR requires any development in protected open space be approved by the voters.

Ventura voters like the results so much they are moving to make them all but permanent this November, when they vote on county and city measures that would extend SOAR protections through 2050.

In practice, this has made the Kingdom a mighty fortress. Those sprawling suburban housing developments that fill up the San Fernando Valley to the east and the Santa Clarita Valley to the north? They stop at the county’s edge. It’s almost as if Ventura County has built a wall against growth along its border—and made neighboring Los Angeles pay for it.

All of which makes SOAR worth celebrating. But there is a problem with those walls, and within the Kingdom. And that problem is not the wonderful things that growth restrictions have done. It’s what the princes and princesses of the Kingdom have failed to do.

A group of SOAR volunteers in Ventura County.

Smart growth strategies like SOAR are not merely supposed to preserve open space. At their best, they are designed to promote smart growth—to drive more creative, dense, multi-family, and transit-oriented development in the urban cores where growth is still permitted. But the Kingdom has been far from welcoming to this type of development.

Yes, you can find smart, denser growth in the city of Ventura, particularly around its downtown. But infill development in Ventura County has lagged far behind what’s needed to serve the Kingdom’s growing population and its housing needs. The same citizens of the Kingdom who back SOAR also have opposed multifamily and denser developments (Thousand Oaks even passed a ballot measure limiting density), and resisted investments in public transit to connect their urban cores.

The results are as obvious as the choking traffic on the 101 Freeway and the astronomical housing prices. Ventura County is one of the 10 least affordable places to live in the United States. It’s been very difficult for middle-class people, much less lower-income people, to make their homes there, and that makes it hard for companies to locate there. Many service workers have to commute from outside the county.

“We need to understand that there is an uncertain capacity within our urban boundaries to accommodate job growth,” Bruce Stenslie, president of the Economic Development Collaborative of Ventura County, said during a public conference earlier this year on SOAR. “Which doesn’t mean that we should tear down the urban boundaries, it means we need to be a little more mature about questions concerning in-fill development and higher density.”

Of course such immaturity about growth—and high housing prices and inequality and traffic—is not limited to Ventura County. What’s frustrating is that after 20 years, the Kingdom doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson. The current proposed renewal of SOAR doesn’t include any new flexibility to account for population growth—and it’s not linked to any broader effort to do more infill development in the cores.

This represents at best a missed opportunity—and at worst an example of mass public selfishness.

Matthew Fienup, an economist with Cal Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting (who likes to talk about how much he loves living across the street from orchards), points out that there are myriad ways to require more regular analysis and adjustments of the boundaries, and to put management of the boundaries in the hands of planners, instead of the hands of people with the money to put questions to voters. Fienup suggests that the county would be better off establishing tradable development rights that would protect the same amount of land while bringing some flexibility to the boundaries.

But in its intransigence, Ventura is an example of the California disease—grab your piece of the Kingdom, and then keep out anyone who might come in after you. And few in Ventura seem to care that the county, like other urban coastal places in California, has seen such a decline in its number of children and young families that it might eventually resemble a well-off senior living community.

In California, local growth restrictions are only one small part of how the old block the young. State laws make housing development slow and costly. Prop 13 provisions keep their property taxes low, encouraging people to stay in their homes longer, which reduces the supply of homes on the market.

This local anti-growth bias is now a major statewide issue as California faces a crisis in housing affordability and availability—for anyone but the most affluent. To push back against anti-growth local communities, Gov. Brown is championing legislation that would exempt many urban housing developments from environmental or local government review.

Many localities have responded to this statewide push defiantly, via local ballot measures that block growth and housing, as the Voice of San Diego documented recently. The least responsible cities are going beyond growth boundaries to impose anti-density restrictions. The most reactionary of these ballot initiatives comes from Santa Monica, which was just connected to the L.A. rail system by L.A. county taxpayers. That rail connection should inspire denser, transit-oriented development. But anti-growth Santa Monicans want to derail all this by requiring a vote of the people on most developments taller than two stories.

The defense of those backing anti-growth measures is disingenuous: If you don’t like restrictions, you can go to the ballot. But that argument is an invitation for development to be determined by a showdown between NIMBY demagoguery and self-interested political money, as opposed to any rational long-range planning.

One lesson from Ventura County is that growth boundaries like SOAR shouldn’t be pursued in isolation. They need to be tied to rock-solid requirements for creating more housing, both for low-income and middle-income people. To put it another way, it’s great if your community wants to protect open space from development, but then you don’t get to block denser development, housing, and transit in your already developed spaces.

If Ventura County wants to wall off growth in its open areas until the end of time, fine. But it must be compelled to open gates in its walls big enough to bring much more progressive development into the Kingdom.

The post The Walls Are Too High in the Kingdom of Ventura appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.