California’s housing crisis is a long time in the making, caused by regulations, land-use restrictions and developer fees that depress supply and drive up the cost of building.
With statewide median home prices hovering around $750,000 and costs in sought-after coastal areas soaring above $1 million, the situation destroys homeownership opportunities for the non-wealthy, sends young families to other states and exacerbates homelessness.
It’s gotten so bad that the state Legislature — the same body that passed many of the growth controls, urban boundaries and environmental rules at the root of the problem — has passed a succession of laws that make it easier to build (at least within the urban footprint).
Those laws are welcome, but they haven’t yet made a dent because they don’t address the biggest obstacles.
A group called Californians for Home Ownership (californians4homeownership.com) is gathering signatures for a statewide initiative campaign that deals directly with two major cost drivers — the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and developer fees that localities impose on new projects.
Virtually anyone can file a lawsuit that halts or delays construction for years. And CEQA never was intended to be used for housing proposals, so the group would require any lawsuit alleging CEQA noncompliance to be filed by district attorneys or the attorney general.
That would stop labor unions from using the threat of CEQA challenges to secure wage demands from developers and NIMBY activists from stopping the construction of housing near their homes.
None of that is how CEQA was intended to be used, yet it is routinely how CEQA is abused. This is why, for many years, you can find elected officials from both the Democratic and Republican parties acknowledging the problems of CEQA. As this editorial board frequently recalls, Gov. Jerry Brown called CEQA reform “the Lord’s work.”
If Sacramento politicians can’t find the courage to stand up to special interests and change CEQA, this measure might have to do.
The initiative also would “would end the extortionate tax on new homes by capping impact fees at a proportion of construction costs, thereby creating the incentive to build truly affordable homes,” as one of the group’s founders, Steve Hilton, explained in these pages.
One of the reason that builders focus on luxury homes is because outsized fees make it cost-prohibitive to build more affordable places.
Fundamentally, the housing crisis in California is a matter of simple economics. When you make it harder and costlier to build more housing, you get less of it.
If you want more housing to be built in California, you must make it easier to do so. Part of that has been done by the California Legislature through implemented and ongoing zoning and land-use reforms. But the threat of frivolous CEQA lawsuits remains, and costly impact fees remain.
Most initiative proposals fail to raise the money needed to qualify for the ballot and successfully secure support at the polls.
Nevertheless, this idea offers a model for reform.
If lawmakers are serious about the housing crisis, they ought to lend their support to it.
Check out https://californians4homeownership.com for more information about the effort. Here’s to hoping it gains enough traction to make it to the ballot, or at the very least pressure state lawmakers to finally act.