A good article from the LA Times detailing the dysfunctional housing policies of California governments. A couple choice excerpts, one quoting SF's recently elected state senator Scott Wiener, who has introduced legislation to put some teeth into the law requiring communities to allow their fair share of housing:
"After an hour of debate, Herb Perez had had enough.
Perez, a councilman in the Bay Area suburb of Foster City, was tired of planning for the construction of new homes to comply with a 50-year-old state law designed to help all Californians live affordably.Everyone knows, Perez told the crowd at a 2015 City Council meeting, that the law is a failure. It requires cities and counties to develop plans every eight years for new home building in their communities. After more than a year of work and spending nearly $50,000, Foster City had an 87-page housing plan that proposed hundreds of new homes, mapped where they would go and detailed the many ways the city could help make the construction happen. But a crucial element was missing: Foster City was never going to approve all the building called for in the voluminous proposal, Perez said.
'What I’m seeing here is an elaborate shell game,” Perez said. “Because we’re kind of lying. It’s the only word I can come up with. We have no intention of actually building the units.'”
“Many local communities basically run a scam where they spend all sorts of time — lots of public hearings, lots of public discussion — and then it’s over and you have this collection of paper sitting on a shelf,” Wiener said. “It doesn’t result in any additional housing.”
The basic problem, of course, is lack of respect for property rights. Those who own property are not allowed to develop it without jumping through all kinds of hoops created by time-consuming and often expensive regulations that have empowered NIMBY residents to block any development near them that they don't like (which, often, means literally any development).
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))