Opinion: Local control over housing has pushed Californians to other states
Across the world, cities have struggled to figure out how to provide more affordable housing to people in need.
In Copenhagen, Denmark, so-called social housing accounts for 20% of the region’s housing stock. In Auckland, New Zealand, a set of reforms initiated by the national government in 2021 created a building boom that dropped rents by 28%.
Coastal California cities, by contrast, have run a two-pronged strategy for low-income housing over the last several decades — the freeway system and inland counties hours away.
With the California Legislature’s recent passage of Senate Bill 79, a bill that automatically permits dense multifamily housing near high-frequency transit stops, many in the state’s most exclusionary cities have found their eyes filled with tears at the prospect of losing “local control.” (SB 79 now lies on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. He has about a month to sign the bill, which state legislators approved on Friday.)
But California’s century-long policy of handing land use policy off to cities and counties has allowed jobs-rich coastal areas to build gilded walls around themselves with segregationist zoning. The result is mass displacement of all but the wealthiest from coastal metros like San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego to inland regions like the San Joaquin Valley, the Inland Empire and, increasingly, out of the state entirely.
Even the most strident neighborhood defenders agree that California is being strangled by a severe housing crisis. According to the Joint Center of Housing Studies at Harvard University, 6 of the top 10 metropolitan areas with the highest share of cost-burdened households are in California. About 1 in 3 renters in the Los Angeles metro area spends 50% or more of their post-tax household income on rent. And as of last year, the city of San Francisco had about 1,000 more homeless people than all of Missouri.
How we got to this point is not mysterious, nor is it controversial — at least for those who study the issue. For about 40 years, California has simply not produced enough new housing to accommodate demand.
Further exacerbating this shortage is the fact that the vast majority of California’s new homes are built far away from the coast, even though coastal cities are where the majority of the state’s jobs are located. Land use politics are less fraught in places like San Bernardino or San Joaquin County, where there’s still undeveloped land to sprawl over and where poorer, mostly non-white communities lack the resources to oppose development like their wealthy coastal counterparts.
The result is an equilibrium that serves no one besides wealthy coastal homeowners.
About 11% of San Joaquin County residents and 7.6% of Riverside County residents drive more than 90 minutes each way to get to work. More than just devastating the lives of these commuters — most of whom earn under $49,000 per year and work blue-collar jobs — each of these cars on the freeway is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Also, the displaced newcomers being pushed hours away from their jobs end up competing for scarce housing with inland Californians, making housing more expensive in the regions where there are fewer high-paying jobs.
Bills like SB 79 are needed because a city’s land use policy has the potential to adversely impact the lives of many thousands more people than the ones currently living within its borders. When costs are borne by everyone, then it is only fair that everyone gets a vote.
If policy affects the entire state, then it is the state — not the city — that should have the final say.
California’s housing crisis produces untold human misery and environmental degradation. It also proves that control can no longer be local when the consequences are universal.
Stan Oklobdzija is an assistant professor at UC Riverside’s School of Public Policy, where he researches housing policy. He wrote this column for CalMatters.