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From 2000 to 2024, according to Ballotpedia, California voters approved eight housing measures. Most of their $17 billion-plus in funding came from state bonds.
Some measures focused on adding affordable housing in general; some on helping veterans; some on sheltering the homeless. All were billed as obvious, straightforward responses to a chronic housing shortage.
But none laid a glove on the problem. When affordable units cost $800,000 or more to build, billions in funding doesn t add enough housing to matter in a state with 39 million people.
The extreme cost of housing remains the main reason a state whose leaders love to boast about how big its economy is has the highest percentage of impoverished residents in the nation.
The epicenter of American poverty isn t a grim, jobs-starved metro area in the Deep South or Appalachia, it s Los Angeles County. So why do state politicians keep asking voters to approve costly, ineffective initiatives?
Because the Message: I care optics of such measures allow these pols to insist they actually care about California s extreme cost of living. Which brings us to Proposition 1, placed on the November ballot by the Legislature.
It would let the state borrow $11.25 billion to build affordable housing that is only affordable to the relative handful of residents lucky enough to get a taxpayer-subsidized unit.
With broad institutional support, little opposition and a smart campaign that focuses on how the measure prioritizes helping veterans, it seems sure to pass.
But the U-T Editorial Board opposes costly propositions — whose bonds must be paid off for decades to come — if their primary effect is to create an illusion of progress.
As progressive reformers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson pointed out in Abundance, their persuasive 2025 book, many influential California Democrats value process over results. They see signaling their shared values to party voters as more important than their performance in office.
This is particularly unfortunate because if voters this November approve Proposition 45 — reducing the tools in CEQA that have been used for 50-plus years to block housing construction — state lawmakers would have a real opportunity to create change.
According to Princeton economist Evan Soltas review of 60 large U.S. cities, it takes longer or nearly as long to get a single-family home building permit in San Francisco, Los Angeles or San Diego as it does to permit and build such a home in Indianapolis, Fort Worth or Colorado Springs.
The time it takes to get a permit and to build a home directly correlates with its final cost. To fix the housing mess, CEQA reforms should only be the start.
Reducing the state s hostility to non-union construction companies would help. So would new thinking about zoning that frees up hundreds of square miles of agricultural parcels for housing.
So would embracing the sturdy new versions of inexpensive prefabricated homes that have been very popular in Japan and Great Britain.
So would passage of a bill that would fix flawed regulations that have the effect of incentivizing lawsuits against condo builders; such a measure (Assembly Bill 1903) died in the Capitol two weeks ago without ever drawing a single no vote in the Assembly or Senate.
This specific and constructive agenda could make a real difference. But for a dozen years, lawmakers have preferred posturing about the housing status quo to meaningfully addressing it.
Proposition 1 is one more example.
Gợi ý thực hành:
1. Theo dõi thông báo từ cơ quan địa phương tại California.
2. Kiểm tra nguồn chính thức trước khi chia sẻ lại thông tin.