California lawmakers can’t stop writing performative bills

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

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California lawmakers introduce hundreds of bills during their two-year sessions. While some are serious efforts to address real issues, many are performative—offered to please political constituencies their authors wish to cultivate, accommodate popular trends, or pay off political debts.

The easiest type of executive legislation is resolutions that express support for a cause. Many hours of taxpayer-funded time are wasted in hearings and debates, even though such measures have absolutely no impact.

A cousin of the powerless resolution is legislation that purports to affect a situation that has been ripped from the headlines, but is highly unlikely to pass, or if it does, is likely to be struck down by the courts.

This week, for example, Democratic lawmakers are fighting over measures that their authors say would repress or punish federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials who carry out rough checks in major cities, allegedly looking for undocumented immigrants. The state Senate spent 90 minutes this week debating a bill that would supposedly make it easier for Californians to sue federal agents for civil rights violations stemming from two fatal shootings of American citizens by immigration officials in Minneapolis.

the measure Senate Bill 747passed on a party vote. If it eventually becomes law, it is doubtful it will survive because of federal laws protecting federal employees from being prosecuted or sued in state courts, a legislative staff analysis of the measure indicated.

Thus, SB 747 and other measures against ICE are unlikely to be enforceable and are in fact merely an expression of political opinion, however justified.

The most disappointing performative measures poorly address the real problems, but allow politicians to claim success. This brings us to Senate Bill 417which also passed the Senate this week.

Worn by Sen. Christopher CabaldonDemocrat from Napa and endorsed by dozens of pro-housing groups and advocates for the poorSB 417 would put a $10 billion bond issue on the November ballot to house low-income families.

“Over the past several years, California has enacted landmark housing policies to provide affordable housing developers with tools that allow them to build hundreds of thousands of units across the state.” Cabaldon said. “But these homes don’t build themselves and it’s time to finish the job.

“So to unlock the full promise of these reforms, cash is needed. Sufficient capital is required, as always, to move these affordable housing projects through approval and planning permission.”

California’s housing shortage is real, especially for low-income families. The state has removed some procedural hurdles, but the most persistent barrier is the very high development costs.

A A Rand Corp. study. from 2025 found that it costs between $500,000 and $1 million — and sometimes even more — to build low-income housing, the highest cost of any state.

The Rand study also found that it takes 22 months longer to produce a home in California than in Texas, local taxes average $29,000 per unit in California but only $1,000 in Texas, and “significantly above market wages and unusually high architectural and engineering fees, likely related to highly prescriptive design requirements” are “key drivers” of California’s extremely high costs.

If, as Rand implies, it costs an average of about $750,000 per unit to build low-income housing in California, the proposed $10 billion bond issue would finance about 13,000 apartments. It’s nothing, but it’s small compared to the 180,000 units the state says we need to build each year.

Researchers say that if California lowered costs to those in Colorado, it could build four times as much housing for the same money. The Legislature needs to cut spending, not just pass token bond issues that will have little real-world impact.

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