California housing laws have failed to increase the number of new homes

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

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California YIMBY, an organization founded eight years ago to promote housing in response to the ever-widening gap between supply and demand, held a victory party recently in San Francisco.

“Welcome to California’s most victorious of YIMBY victory parties,” Brian Hanlon, the organization’s founder and CEO, told attendees.

His acronym (Yes In My Backyard) symbolizes his long-standing battle with NIMBYs (Not in My Backyard), people and groups who have long thwarted housing projects by pressuring local governments that control land use.

The YIMBY party celebrated the passage of several pro-housing bills this year, two of which have long been sought by housing advocates. Assembly Bill 130 exempts many urban housing projects from California Environmental Quality Actwhile Senate Bill 79 makes building easier high density housing near transit stops in major cities.

“2025 was a year,” Hanlon gleefully declared.

The celebratory mood was understandable, as this year’s legislative action ended a half-decade of ever-increasing state government housing activism that followed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2017 campaign promise to build 3.5 million new housing units if elected.

This goal was wildly unrealistic, as Newsom should have known, but he pressed hard for legislation to remove barriers to housing. His housing agency has also stepped up pressure on local governments to remove arbitrary roadblocks erected by YIMBY-influenced officials and meet quotas to identify land that can be used for housing.

However, the holiday missed one important factor: legislative and administrative actions in favor of housing construction failed to significantly increase housing production.

New housing starts were around 100,000 a year when Newsom took office in 2019, and they are around that number today, with net increases even lower.

As the Department of Housing and Community Development acknowledges in its state housing plan“Not enough housing is being built: Over the past ten years, housing production has averaged less than 80,000 new homes each year, and current production continues to fall well below the projected need for 180,000 additional homes per year.

The Census Bureau estimates that since Newsom took office, new housing permits in California have ranged from a high of 120,780 units in 2022 to a low of 101,546 last year. Newsom’s own budget agrees with Census Bureau data for the same period and projects future construction through 2028 at 100,000 to 104,000 units per year.

Those are the numbers. But the way housing data is collected and collated is a somewhat murky process, and opponents of housing projects often dispute how they measure up to quotas the state imposes on local communities.

Fortunately, the Census Bureau has revealed a a new statistical tool this should go a long way toward obtaining complete data that includes not only conventional single-family and multi-family projects, but also alternative forms of housing such as backyard granny flats, formally known as accessory dwelling units; basements or garages converted into apartments; single-family houses converted into maisonettes or apartments; mobile homes or office buildings that become residences.

The tool uses several data sources, but is heavily dependent on the Post Office, which maintains a constantly updated list of addresses that includes all types of housing.

More accurate data should make it easier to overcome conflicts and may even reveal that California’s pro-housing actions have had positive effects that the current methodology misses.

“The housing crisis persisted in part because we failed to accurately measure our progress,” article on the new tool edition of the Niskanen Centerthink tank, concludes. “With data from the Census Bureau’s address census file, that excuse is gone. The question now is whether policymakers will use this powerful new tool to finally build the housing America needs.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.