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PERSPECTIVE -
Good public policy should be judged not by its aspirations, but by whether its design is capable of producing the results it promises—and whether those results can be measured.
In my previous CityWatch article, The Doctors Got It Wrong, I argued that California had misdiagnosed its housing crisis.
We do not simply have a housing shortage.
We have an affordability crisis.
If the diagnosis was wrong, it should not surprise anyone that the prescription is not working.
That realization led me to ask another question.
If affordable housing was the promise, where is the statutory requirement?
I assumed the answer would be easy to find.
It was not.
So I did something surprisingly simple.
I read the legislation.
Not the press releases.
Not the political speeches.
Not the campaign slogans.
I read the statutes.
California lawmakers repeatedly told the public that extraordinary housing streamlining laws were necessary because our state faced an affordable housing crisis. Californians were asked to accept sweeping changes to decades of planning law because too many families could no longer afford a place to live.
Environmental review was reduced.
Local planning authority was limited.
Community plans and zoning protections that had guided neighborhoods for decades were weakened or overridden.
Public participation became more constrained.
These were extraordinary changes justified by the promise of affordable housing.
So I asked what seemed like a very simple question.
If affordable housing was the public purpose repeatedly offered to justify these extraordinary changes, where is the statutory requirement?
Not language encouraging affordable housing.
Not legislative findings expressing hope that increasing the housing supply may eventually improve affordability.
Not assurances that the market will somehow deliver the promised result.
Show me the statutory requirement.
If Californians were asked to surrender longstanding planning and environmental protections to address an affordable housing crisis, somewhere in these statutes there should be a clear requirement ensuring that affordable housing is the public benefit being delivered.
There should be measurable standards.
There should be reporting.
There should be accountability.
And there should be a way for Californians to determine whether the extraordinary concessions they were asked to make are producing the result used to justify them.
Before going further, one clarification is important.
California has enacted numerous housing laws over the years, and many contain affordability requirements for specific funding programs, tax-credit developments, subsidized projects, or specialized categories of housing. This article is not an evaluation of every housing statute enacted by the Legislature.
Rather, it examines several of California's principal housing streamlining laws—legislation that broadly reduces regulatory barriers while being presented to Californians as part of the solution to the state's affordable housing crisis.
Legislators know how to write mandatory requirements into law. They define terms, establish percentages, create eligibility standards, impose reporting obligations, and provide enforcement mechanisms. They do it every year.
The Standard
I evaluated four of California's principal housing streamlining laws using the same standard.
Does the law generally require affordable housing as a condition of receiving its extraordinary streamlining benefits?
Does it establish measurable affordability standards?
Does it require transparent public reporting so Californians can determine how many affordable units are actually being produced?
Does it provide meaningful accountability so lawmakers and the public can determine whether the legislation is accomplishing what it promised?
Good legislation enacted to address a public crisis should define the public benefit, require it, measure it, report it transparently, and provide meaningful accountability so the public can determine whether the law is fulfilling its purpose.
Good public policy should never require citizens to guess whether a public promise was kept.
That became the standard against which I evaluated California's principal housing streamlining laws.
This is not a report card on whether California should build more housing.
Reasonable people can disagree about housing policy.
This is a report card on something much narrower.
If affordable housing was the promise, where is the statutory requirement?
Sacramento's Affordable Housing Report Card
AB 130
Affordable Housing Requirement: F
AB 130 provides extraordinary streamlining benefits for qualifying housing developments, including significant reductions in environmental review and local discretionary oversight.
Yet after reviewing the statute, I could find no general statutory requirement that projects receiving those extraordinary benefits provide affordable housing.
Affordable units may certainly be included in individual developments, and other laws or funding programs may impose affordability requirements. But AB 130 itself does not generally require affordable housing as a condition of receiving its streamlining benefits.
Nor could I find comprehensive statewide public reporting allowing Californians to determine how much affordable housing is actually being produced under the statute.
Overall Grade: F
SB 684
Affordable Housing Requirement: F
SB 684 streamlines the subdivision of qualifying urban lots but does not generally require that the housing ultimately built on those lots be affordable.
Overall Grade: F
SB 1123
Affordable Housing Requirement: F
SB 1123 expands the framework established by SB 684 but, again, I could find no general statutory requirement that projects receiving these expanded streamlining benefits provide affordable housing or comprehensive statewide accountability showing whether affordable homes are actually being produced.
Overall Grade: F
SB 79
Affordable Housing Requirement: C−
SB 79 came closest to recognizing the connection between streamlining and affordability.
Unlike the other statutes reviewed, SB 79 requires qualifying projects of more than 10 units to include an affordability component by providing at least 7% of the units for extremely low-income households, 10% for very low-income households, or 13% for lower-income households, unless a stronger local requirement applies.
The affordable units must generally remain restricted for 55 years if rented and 45 years if owner-occupied.
For those reasons, SB 79 earns the highest grade in this report card.
Developers choose among the three affordability options, but I could not identify comprehensive statewide reporting showing which options are selected, how many affordable units are ultimately produced, or whether the law is achieving the public purpose repeatedly offered to justify its enactment.
SB 79 contains an affordability requirement.
But it still falls well short of the transparency and accountability Californians should expect from legislation promoted as a major response to the state's affordable housing crisis.
Overall Grade: C−
What the Grades Reveal
I did not begin this project intending to assign failing grades.
I began with a question.
If California's principal housing streamlining laws were enacted to address an affordable housing crisis, where is the statutory requirement?
After reading the statutes, I found that their strongest provisions focused on streamlining approvals, reducing procedural barriers, expanding development opportunities, and limiting local discretion.
What I generally did not find were corresponding statutory requirements ensuring that affordable housing would actually be produced in exchange for those extraordinary benefits.
Nor did I generally find the transparent statewide accountability necessary to determine whether Californians are receiving the public benefit they were promised.
But as I finished reading the statutes, another question emerged.
Even if the Legislature had required affordable housing...
Would the economics have allowed it to be built?
That question led me somewhere I had not expected.
The Math Doesn't Math
If affordable housing is the crisis Sacramento says it is trying to solve, surely someone performed the financial analysis before asking Californians to surrender decades of planning and environmental protections.
As it turns out, someone already had.
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)—California's largest public school system—explored whether district-owned property could be used to help address California's affordable housing crisis. Because the district already owned the land, one of the largest costs of residential development would effectively be eliminated.
If affordable housing could be made to work anywhere, this seemed like one of the best opportunities.
It didn't.
The district's own financial analysis reached a sobering conclusion.
Even with publicly owned land, affordable housing often could not generate sufficient rental revenue to support development costs without substantial public subsidies. By comparison, market-rate housing proved significantly more financially feasible.
That finding should give every Californian pause.
If affordable housing frequently does not pencil out financially even when the land is already owned by the public, how is streamlining private development alone expected to solve California's affordability crisis?
Removing environmental review does not reduce construction costs.
Overriding local zoning does not lower labor costs.
Reducing public participation does not make insurance premiums, financing costs, utility costs, or operating expenses disappear.
The math doesn't math.
No amount of streamlining can change basic economics.
That reality helps explain what I generally did not find in the legislation itself.
California's principal housing streamlining laws generally do not require affordable housing in exchange for many of their extraordinary streamlining benefits.
Legislators had a duty to understand the underlying economics before fundamentally rewriting decades of planning and environmental protections. Had they performed even a basic financial analysis, they would have known that private market-rate development does not produce deeply affordable housing absent substantial public subsidy. Streamlining cannot overcome the underlying economics. It only accelerates approvals.
If lawmakers understood the underlying economics—and one would reasonably expect that they did—Californians deserve to know why these laws were structured the way they were.
This is not an accusation.
It is a question.
If affordable housing often cannot be financed because the economics simply do not work, why did California choose to focus so heavily on streamlining approvals rather than on solving the financing gap that prevents affordable housing from being built?
The Los Angeles Unified School District did not answer that question.
It sharpened it.
If publicly owned land cannot make affordable housing financially viable, California's housing debate should not begin with streamlining.
It should begin with economics.
Perhaps Sacramento identified the right crisis.
Perhaps it chose the wrong tool.
If so, Californians deserve an honest conversation about that reality.
Because streamlining approvals alone cannot overcome the economics of affordable housing.
Housing Policy Has Two Constituencies
There is another conversation Sacramento rarely seems willing to have.
Housing policy has two constituencies.
The first consists of Californians struggling to buy or rent a home. Their challenges are real, and California has an obligation to address them.
The second consists of the millions of Californians who have already achieved homeownership—often after decades of mortgage payments, rising property taxes, soaring insurance premiums, maintenance, and personal sacrifice.
For many families, a home is not simply where they live. It is their retirement security and the largest investment they will ever make—the product of a lifetime of work.
Good public policy has an obligation to both constituencies.
It should help families who dream of owning a home.
It should also respect the millions of Californians who have already achieved homeownership through decades of mortgage payments, rising property taxes, insurance premiums, maintenance, and sacrifice.
The goal should never be to solve one housing problem by unnecessarily creating another.
Good public policy should protect the dreams of tomorrow without unnecessarily sacrificing the investments of yesterday.
Instead, much of California's housing debate proceeds as though only one constituency exists.
When homeowners ask how sweeping changes to zoning, neighborhood planning, wildfire evacuation, infrastructure, neighborhood character, or property values may affect the investment they spent decades building, too often the response is not an answer.
It is a label.
"NIMBY"—"Not In My Back Yard."
A term widely associated with developer and real estate lobbying organizations has become a powerful rhetorical tool in California's housing debate, often substituting a label for a substantive response to legitimate questions about infrastructure, wildfire safety, neighborhood planning, the economics of affordable housing, and whether the legislation is accomplishing the public purpose for which it was enacted.
That may be an effective political slogan.
It is not public policy analysis.
The moment a citizen is labeled instead of answered, the public debate has stopped and the politics have begun.
Labels do not answer questions.
Evidence does.
If Californians are being asked to accept extraordinary changes to decades of planning law in the name of solving an affordability crisis, they deserve more than assurances.
They deserve evidence that those changes are producing the public benefit they were promised.
That is not resistance to housing.
It is accountability.
Californians Accepted Extraordinary Trade-offs
Californians accepted extraordinary trade-offs.
They accepted reduced environmental review.
They accepted diminished local planning authority.
They accepted greater uncertainty about how their communities might change.
They accepted these extraordinary changes because they were repeatedly told they were necessary to address California's affordable housing crisis.
But Californians did not simply surrender planning protections.
Many also placed decades of mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance premiums, maintenance costs, and the financial risks that come with investing a lifetime of work into a home on the line.
These questions are no longer theoretical.
In my own community of Granada Hills, AB 130 is being used to process a proposed 98-unit assisted living and memory care facility in a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone.
Californians were repeatedly told these extraordinary streamlining laws were necessary to address an affordable housing crisis.
Yet one of the projects now being processed under that same legislation is not an apartment building for working families, but an assisted living and memory care facility in a wildfire-prone area.
Is this the type of project Californians believed they were authorizing when they accepted extraordinary changes to decades of planning and environmental law?
That question deserves an answer from the Legislature and the Governor.
If this reflects the Legislature's intent, Californians deserve to know it.
If it does not, they deserve to know that as well.
The Question That Remains
Perhaps Sacramento identified the right crisis.
Perhaps it chose the wrong tool.
California's affordability crisis is real.
Families across this state struggle every day with housing costs that continue to outpace wages. That challenge deserves thoughtful, lasting solutions.
But good intentions cannot substitute for good public policy.
After reviewing these statutes, I generally could not find the statutory requirement I expected.
After examining the economics, I found evidence that streamlining approvals alone cannot overcome the financial realities that often prevent affordable housing from being built.
And after looking for meaningful statewide accountability, I was left with one unavoidable question.
If affordable housing was the promise, where is the statutory requirement?
If the economics do not support affordable housing—even when publicly owned land is available—how does streamlining alone solve the problem?
And if Californians were asked to surrender extraordinary planning and environmental protections, where is the evidence those trade-offs are producing the public benefit they were promised?
If lawmakers knew—or should have known—that the economics did not support the result repeatedly promised to Californians, why was streamlining made the centerpiece of California's housing policy?
If the economics made affordable housing financially infeasible without public subsidy, what public purpose were these streamlining laws actually designed to accomplish?
Perhaps the Legislature has answers.
Perhaps the Governor has answers.
I welcome them.
Public policy is strengthened by honest debate and transparent evidence.
Californians deserve more than assurances. They deserve statutory clarity, economic honesty, and meaningful accountability.
If affordable housing was the promise...
Where's the statutory requirement?
Outside the circle, we'll be waiting.
Author's Note: Before publication, I submitted twelve questions to the Governor's office. The office acknowledged receipt and asked how much time it had to respond. As of publication, no substantive response has been received. If one is provided, I will update this article.
(Eva Amar is a West Valley community coordinator and national sexual assault victims' advocate.)
