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PLANNING WATCH - Are your lying eyes still deceiving you? Do you see vacancy signs on unrented apartments and houses in your neighborhood, yet you are repeatedly told that Los Angeles has so much homelessness and overcrowding because of a housing shortage? No, your eyes are not deceiving you; those vacancy signs are for real, and the claims of a general housing shortage are fabricated. They are a ruse because the homeless and overcrowded do not have enough money to rent or buy vacant apartments or houses. Furthermore, once the Trump II tariffs take effect, the national and local housing crises will get even worse.
These deliberate deceptions about the worsening housing crises are on full display in Sacramento, in the state Legislature. The latest draft housing bill, Senate Bill 79, is another Senator Scott Wiener scheme to deregulate California’s housing market. If adopted, Senate Bill 79 would:
- Permit developers to build seven (7) story tall apartment buildings up to a half-mile from high-frequency bus stops, train stations, and ferry terminals.
- Transfer land use authority from cities and counties to transit agencies.
- Allow ministerial (not discretionary) approval of all SB79 projects. In other words, SB 79 projects will not have any public hearings or approval votes by local officials.
- Prosecute cities that deny a SB 79 project based on CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act
- NOT apply CEQA to SB 79 projects, regardless of their environmental impacts, as long as the underlying parcel is owned by a transit agency.
- NOT fund infrastructure improvements to serve the new apartments and residents it allows.
The author of Senate Bill 79 is Senator Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat who is supported by Big Real Estate and is a darling of California YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) Movement. Wiener’s SB 79 bill pretends to be a grass-roots housing bill, even though the real estate and high tech industries pay the bills and reap the benefits from inflated prices for new market housing.
The bill’s secret sauce is that it upzones (i.e., legislative changes that allow more people and more buildings on existing parcels) the entire state of California. This top-down, statewide upzoning by the California State legislature raises the market value of private parcels. This then allows developers to build expensive housing to maximize their profits, hiding behind the lie that this high-end housing eventually trickles down, becomes affordable, and decreases homelessness, Despite these demonstrably bogus claims, this and similar Wiener/YIMBY legislation only increases the supply of costly housing. Furthermore, another supposed benefit, increased transit ridership, also fails to appear because the tenants who move into this new market housing are well off, own and drive cars, and rarely use public transit, especially in Los Angeles.
You might assume that statewide legislation that consistently increases homelessness and reduces transit ridership would not garner support from elected officials in Sacramento, but this common-sense assumption is false. Regardless of their political background, nearly all elected officials in the United States are shills for the real estate sector. This explains why the Nixon and Clinton administrations eliminated Federal public housing programs decades ago, and why similar elected officials now support statewide legislation in California, such as Scott Wiener’s draft Senate Bill 79. They expect the public to not discover that this and similar legislation is a gift to real estate speculators, hidden by fallacious claims that it expands the supply of low-priced housing and also increases transit ridership.
So, when you wonder why the homeless and overcrowding crises continue to get worse despite so much effort that claims to reduce them, this is the answer.
(Dick Platkin (rhplatkin@gmail.com) is a retired LA city planner, who reports on local planning issues. He is a board member of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA). Previous columns are available at the CityWatchLA archives.)
