California’s next governor will probably be a YIMBY

from Ben ChristopherCalMatters

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Earlier this year, in the windowless conference room of a downtown San Francisco hotel, one of the first governors candidate forums of the season began with a simple question: “Do you think California’s housing shortage is primarily the result of local and state regulatory barriers to housing development?”

That summed up the Yes In My Backyard movement’s pro-development philosophy that the questioner — Brian Hanlon, co-founder of California YIMBY — and his organization have been pushing California lawmakers to adopt for more than a decade. California’s chronic inaccessibility is born of a shortage of homes and the state should play an aggressive role in building more units, YIMBY argues.

Seven candidates were on stage, including the current Democratic leaders Tom Stair, Katie Porter and Xavier Becerra.

One by one everyone answered. – Yes. – Yes. – Yes. – Yes. – Yes. – Yes. – Yes.

The show of unanimity made Hanlon realize something.

Oh yes, he thought. “We won.”

The crowded race for California’s next governor may still be undecided, with no clear front-runner among a half-dozen plausibly viable Democrats and two Republicans, but one clear winner has emerged: the Backyard Yes movement.

Underscoring that, five Democratic candidates gathered in Oakland on Friday to take part in the another forum on housing. The moderator was New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, whose best-selling book, abundancehas become something of a shorthand for a new emphasis in elite Democratic policy circles on rethinking government processes and regulations to make it easier to build more stuff, cheaper and faster, including homes.

The candidates did not find much to disagree with.

“Noises in favor of housing”

What a difference eight years of skyrocketing rents and house prices make.

Think back to 2018, the last time California had an open race for governor. The Legislature was considering a bill that would force local governments to permit apartment buildings near transit stops. Few of the gubernatorial candidates were willing to accept it, and many were strongly opposed. Newsom, the clear favorite who touted his overambitious goal of overseeing the construction of the 3.5 million new homessaid he appreciated the general idea of ​​the bill, but nevertheless refused to support him. it died later that year.

Newsom won that race, and as governor he embraced the cause of build, baby, build, especially in this second term. Last summer, he signed a curb bill environmental affairs against urban housing, a longtime target of YIMBY politics. During the signing ceremony he announced the end of NIMBYism in California and dropped the Klein name.

A few months later, Newsom signed Senate Bill 79 — successor to the failed 2018 transit-oriented rezoning bill — into law. “YIMBYs rejoice!” announced his press service in press release received.

This year’s top Democratic gubernatorial candidates don’t see supporting state-mandated development efforts as an election obligation. Porter publicly supported the new rezoning law in a social media post before Newsom signed it. Steyer defended it in a newspaper opinion. After it became law, Becerra signaled his support and vowed to “keep building.”

Not that every candidate supports the legislation. a republican Steve Hilton warned that he would “destroy” California’s “single-family suburbs” by allowing the construction of mid-rise residential buildings. The former Fox News anchor objects to state-led planning mandates and the prevailing orthodoxy among YIMBY Democrats in Sacramento that the state should concentrate new construction in dense urban areas.

Nor did all candidates embrace the new elite consensus on housing policy with equal enthusiasm. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan supports housing deregulation, limiting local development fees and relaxing building codes. Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, by contrast, is focused on finding more public support for affordable housing. Some YIMBY groups have already taken sides. YIMBY Action, a California-based pro-development advocacy organization with branches across the country, supported Steyer in early May.

But everyone, especially among poll-leading Democrats, at least rhetorically embraced the idea that California should build more houses and that state government must play a role in ensuring they are built, even if that sometimes means ignoring local authorities, neighborhood groups, environmentalists and unions. As YIMBY’s former California policy director Ned Reznikov noted in a recent blog post“most of the candidates are making pro-housing noises.”

New conventional wisdom about housing

The shift in campaigning is just the latest indicator that housing policy has changed radically in California.

In the last decade, the cause for ease of construction has somewhat faded thankless, niche interest in the California Assembly and Senate to a priority issue defended by legislative guidance. c San Francisco and Berkeleyonce synonymous with local obstructionism against development, mayors rose to power touting their pro-housing bonafides. In Los Angeles, top Democrat fundraiser trying to unseat Karen Bass in the upcoming mayoral race, stood up for compaction of the city’s single-family neighborhoods and changes in The Los Angeles Transfer Tax that developers want.

“The fact that we’re now talking about housing production, to the extent that we’re talking about it, is important,” said Clayton Nall, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has studied public attitudes regarding housing policy.

But only because the best candidates offer YIMBY-flavored generalities on the debate stage and set ambitious goals for units to be built does not mean they will govern as pro-development purists, he stressed.

There may be good political reasons for this: whatever successes organized YIMBYs have had in the California Legislature — and in state institutions throughout the country — that agenda sometimes seems disconnected from what the typical voter wants or cares about, Nall said. When asked about the best way to make housing more affordable, a majority of respondents in America tended to express a preference for rent control and financial subsidies for renters and aspiring buyers. Polling support for pro-development policies tends to be more muted—and rightly so it depends on how the question is asked.

“There are very few people who support what I would call the libertarian YIMBY position, which is that we should deregulate to free up the market to build more housing,” Nall said.

Oakland YIMBY Party

As eager audience members lined up outside the Henry J. Kaiser in Oakland on Friday for the Klein-moderated event, a group of about 60 left-leaning tenants’ rights groups gathered across the street to offer some critical counterprograms. Activists welcomed rent control, eviction protection, affordable housing funding and restrictions on large, for-profit landlords. When new market apartments were mentioned, the crowd booed.

Tenant rights and landlord greed won’t be the focus of YIMBY-fest at the Kaiser Center, predicted Anya Swanoe, spokeswoman for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

It represented “a complete abdication of responsibility for tenants who live now and cannot wait 10 years for a delivery decision”, she said.

Later, the Democratic candidates — Steyer, Becerra, Porter, Mahan and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — mostly proposed ways to make it easier, cheaper and simpler to build more homes. They discussed and largely agreed on the detrimental effects of local development fees, slow permitting processes, and NIMBY roadblocks. A research paper on California’s glacial pace of housing development, published by RAND, was the breakout star of the event, receiving repeated mentions and praise.

Although a few significant disagreements popped up, no one violated the general agreement to facilitate construction. Becerra is more comfortable requiring projects streamlined under state law to require higher labor standards; Porter, not so much. Steyer Wants to Raise Commercial Property Taxes; Villaraigosa said he would defend California’s property tax system, although he conceded some changes may be needed.

Rent control appeared, but briefly and at the very end.

“As an interim situation, I’m all for it,” Villaraigosa said, responding to Klein’s question about whether state lawmakers should renew his current rent cap policy. “(But) if you want to reduce rents in the long term, you need supply.”

The following Tuesday, California YIMBY released its official announcement of approval for manager: No approval.

This is not because none of the top candidates are acceptable to the group – quite the opposite. While no one is perfect, “overall, the top four Democrats have really good housing plans,” Hanlon said in an interview, referring to Becerra, Steyer, Porter and Mahan. “YIMBYs should feel pretty good about the choice they have for governor and should probably pick the guy they like based on other, non-residential districts.”

For YIMBY, California’s next governor—whoever he turns out to be—is already saying all the right things.

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