In California’s Housing Fight, It’s Newsom vs. NIMBY

As affordable housing problems spread, California’s enforcement kick could be an indication of an increasingly pitched battle between cities and states over housing. It also gives a clue into how Mr. Newsom might defend himself from political attacks over California’s housing and homelessness problems, something that is all but guaranteed to happen if he seeks higher office. (A Newsom run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024 is currently the stuff of political parlor games, and despite the chatter, the governor and everyone in his camp dismiss such ambitions.)

In the interview, Mr. Elliott, the housing adviser, noted that the advantage the governor has in enforcing tough housing measures is that he draws votes from around the state instead of locally. The administration can play the heavy in a local dispute without having to worry about alienating its entire voting base.

“It’s very logical, politically, for an individual city council person or an individual member of a board of supervisors to be against an individual project,” he said. “I think the job of the state is to change the political calculus so ‘yes’ becomes the default instead of ‘no.’”

There is already some indication that years of state housing bills, combined with rising voter frustrations, have started to create such a shift. When the state housing department opened its investigation into San Francisco in August, London Breed, the city’s mayor, welcomed it with a tweet.

“When I ran in 2018, it was a vulnerability to be an unapologetically pro-housing candidate,” said Buffy Wicks, a Democratic assembly member from Oakland who wrote one of the two main housing bills passed by the legislature this week. “Now it is absolutely an asset. I get up on the floor of the assembly and I say, 10 times a week, ‘We have to build more housing in our communities, all of our communities need more housing, we need low-income, middle-income, market rate.’ You couldn’t do that in a comfortable way four years ago.”

Cities seem to have absorbed the new reality of a state on closer watch. Last year, after the legislature passed the duplex law, dozens of cities responded by adopting a slew of new ordinances that don’t explicitly prohibit the units but, through a series of tiny rules, tried to discourage anyone from actually building them.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/business/economy/california-nimbys-housing.html