If you spent your life savings and your life’s earnings to buy a home on a quiet street in a single-family neighborhood in California, you’ve been robbed.

Your camera-enabled doorbell and security system likely failed to record the evidence, because the robbery happened in Sacramento. Worse, it’s not against the law. It is the law.

Single-family zoning has been abolished. The people who profit from that include developers who want to buy the land and put up high-density housing on small parcels, building industry and real estate interests who will see a nice payday from the new construction, and various nonprofit groups run by moist-eyed executives drawing six-figure salaries for “managing” low-income or homeless housing projects.

Against these special interests stand homeowners and local government officials who have battled for years against laws proposed in the state capitol to force cities to accept state-imposed zoning changes.

The special interests won a battle in 2021. The Legislature passed Senate Bills 9 and 10, ending single-family zoning in California, and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed them into law just as soon as he was past the risk of being recalled. The war isn’t over, however, as a bipartisan coalition of local leaders filed an initiative that would prevent those laws from having any effect and would ban any similar state laws in the future.

The local leaders call their initiative “Our Neighborhood Voices,” and the attorney general has given it a circulating title – the title that appears on the official petitions – of “Provides That Local Land-Use and Zoning Laws Override Conflicting State Laws.” It needs nearly 1 million valid signatures of registered voters by mid-April to qualify for the November 2022 ballot. If it passes, cities will once again be empowered to control local zoning and make the decisions about where higher density housing may be built, along with decisions about any requirements for developers to provide off-street parking or traffic mitigation measures.

Does it have a chance?

Some people clearly think so. Another initiative has been introduced that contains a poison pill to kill it.

Initiative 21-0032A1 was filed on November 10 by attorney Stanley R. Apps. The attorney general has given it a circulating title of, “Increases Homeowners’ Property Tax Exemption and Renters’ Tax Credit. Increases Taxes on High-Value Properties. Limits Local Restrictions on Housing Development.”

The Apps initiative is another attack on Proposition 13, cracking the 1% tax rate on property that the 1978 initiative wrote into the state constitution. If this new measure qualifies for the ballot and is approved by voters, properties valued above $4 million would see an increase in their tax rate. This would affect commercial, residential, industrial, mixed-use or vacant land. The measure also changes the law to require cities to approve certain low-income housing projects “ministerially without discretionary review or a hearing.”

The poison pill is in Section 9 of the initiative. It declares that the Our Neighborhood Voices initiative is “deemed to be in conflict with this Act,” and states that if the Apps initiative gets a greater number of votes than the ONV measure, “the provisions of this Act [the Apps measure] shall prevail in their entirety” and “all provisions of the other measure or measures [Our Neighborhood Voices] shall be null and void.”

Now, you may be asking yourself, why would more California voters choose an initiative that both attacks Proposition 13 and cements the abolition of single-family zoning so developers can more easily construct high-density housing in more neighborhoods?

The answer is: because they’re planning to pay you to vote for it.

Not literally, of course. It would be illegal to pay voters to mark the “Yes” circle on their ballots. What the Apps initiative does instead is boost the homeowner’s exemption and raise the tax credit for renters.

The homeowner’s exemption exists in current law. If you own the home that is your primary residence, you can fill out a form and have $7,000 knocked off the assessed value of your home. At a 1% tax rate, that will save you $70 per year. The Apps initiative would raise the homeowner’s exemption to $200,000, saving qualifying homeowners $2,000 per year.

The measure would also increase the renter’s tax credit to “up to $2,000 for joint filers making up to $400,000.”

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This will be paid for by raising the property tax rate on apartment buildings, office buildings, shopping malls, self-storage facilities, movie theaters, restaurants, hotels, supermarkets and every other property worth $4 million or more with a surcharge of up to 1.2%. If I’m doing the math correctly, that will roughly double the tax bills on those properties.

Prices will soon reflect the higher costs, which will further increase the cost of living in California, already so high that the state has the highest poverty rate in the nation when the cost of living is taken into account.

The Apps initiative will give you a tax cut of $2,000 per year if you’ll just help to dismantle Proposition 13, raise prices throughout the state and permanently destroy single-family zoning in California.

Here’s a better plan. Defeat the Apps initiative now, and next time, back a new initiative to increase the homeowner’s exemption and the renter’s credit without all the carnage and wreckage attached to it.

Californians are not obligated to take bad deals and suffer with them. It’s within our power to write better initiatives that solve problems without causing new ones. Let’s do that.

Write Susan Shelley at [email protected]