As has become usual over the past several years, the California legislature is considering a number of bills that would override local planning control and weaken environmental review for new development projects. Two of the most controversial bills are SB 79 and SB 607. SB 79, from State Senator Scott Wiener, would remove local zoning restrictions for housing projects proposed on sites near transit. SB 607, also from Senator Wiener, along with principal co-author Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, would essentially gut the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), giving local agencies broad latitude in deciding what level of environmental review was needed for a project, if any. (On May 19, both bills were placed in the Senate Appropriations Committee suspense file, which generally means a bill is on hold, but both are scheduled to be heard again by the Committee today, May 23.)

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that, while these bills have a long list of supporters, they’ve also generated major pushback from both individuals and established organizations. SB 79 is opposed by Public Counsel, the Public Interest Law Project, the Western Center on Law & Poverty, and numerous California cities. SB 607 is opposed by a number of environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club California and Friends of the LA River. (Full disclosure: I work with a group that has sent letters opposing both bills, United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles.)

This has turned into a routine. Every new session, state legislators present a number of bills designed to allow developers to build bigger and faster, with little or no environmental review. The legislators claim it’s the only way to solve the housing crisis. What’s unusual about this year is that Governor Gavin Newsom has upped the ante. As the efforts of citizens and organizations opposed to these bills seem to be having an impact on legislators, Newsom has come forward to say that he’s going to use the budget process to achieve the goal of speeding up new development. Like Wiener, Wicks and many others, Newsom sees the housing affordability crisis purely as a matter of supply and demand. They believe that housing prices will go down if they erase local planning authority and let developers build with little or no environmental review. It’s the classic supply-side economics argument. Unleash the free market, and it will solve your problems.

Unfortunately, the legislature has been unleashing the free market for years now, and it doesn’t seem to working. Take a look at the graph above. This is taken from a report produced by the State Senate and State Assembly Housing Committees. The report is titled….

Recent Legislative Actions to Increase Housing Production in California

With the sub-heading….

California’s Housing Crisis: More Construction Is Needed to Meet the State’s Housing Needs

The paper was produced by the State Senate and Assembly Housing Committees. It argues that California has failed to produce enough housing for decades, and that lawmakers in Sacramento have been reversing this trend with the many bills that have been passed in recent years. They cite reforms to density bonus law, reforms to the Surplus Lands Act, faster approval timelines, and increases in “by-right” approvals. (When a project is approved “by-right”, it means an application is approved automatically, with no public hearings and no environmental review.) The text emphasizes large increases in the percentage of Low-Income and Very Low-Income units completed, and says there’s been a 61.5% overall increase in affordable housing production. That’s great, but the report doesn’t give numbers for rent-stabilized units lost during the same period, or the number of affordable units that converted to market-rate when their covenant expired, which means we don’t know if there’s really been a net gain.

And in spite of the report’s claims about increased housing production, the graph seems to show the opposite. By my count, the report lists 98 bills that were intended to spur housing growth over the last two decades. Things really kicked into high gear in 2017, when Sacramento passed 15 pieces of legislation related to housing. Looking at the lists compiled in the report, it appears that from 2017 through 2024 the Legislature approved a startling 87 bills to jump start housing. Based on the number of bills, if you accept the arguments that Wiener and friends are making, you’d expect housing production to go through the roof. But if we look at the chart above, you can see that the number of units permitted since 2017 is well below the number permitted during the first decade of this century. While it looks like there’s been a slight increase in multi-family units produced over that period, there’s been a huge drop in the number of single-family homes produced. The numbers look even worse if we go back to the 80s. The quantities of both multi-family and single-family homes produced in that decade are far higher than the quantities produced since 2017.

Which brings us to the question, What has this onslaught of legislation actually accomplished? Wiener and his pals have spent years pushing bills to override local zoning restrictions, and they’ve also been busy hacking away at the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). They argue that loosening local zoning and sidelining CEQA will spur new housing growth. But look at the numbers. Wiener and friends started their assault on local zoning and CEQA back in 2017. While the text of the report seems to be telling us that their campaign has been a resounding success, the graph the authors lead off with tells a different story. Housing production since 2017 is well below what it was in the 2000s, and it’s WAY below what it was in the 1980s. And it’s important to point out that in both of these earlier periods, local zoning was more restrictive than it is now, and CEQA was in full force. No doubt some will argue that the pandemic held down new construction, but California’s own housing dashboard shows that the number of permits issued actually increased during the crisis. (See slide 8 on the housing data dashboard.)

Newsom, Wiener, Wicks and their cohorts keep telling us that local zoning and environmental review are two of the biggest roadblocks to new housing. But given the numbers that we see in the Legislature’s own report, it seems these folks have no idea what they’re talking about. The graph they lead off with tells the story. California was producing more new housing before the Legislature began its attack on local zoning and environmental review.