A housing development goes up in downtown Hayward in October. Local governments are under a state mandate to plan for 2.5 million new homes by 2031.
California has a lot to accomplish in the next decade.
Local governments are under a state mandate to plan for 2.5 million new homes by 2031. Meanwhile, cities may face permanent water restrictions, sea levels are rising and growing areas of the state face significant risks from wildfires and other climate threats, pushing California’s home insurance market to the point of combustion. The state also needs to overhaul its transportation, energy and building infrastructure to reach its ambitious goal of slashing greenhouse gas emissions 48% below 1990 levels by 2030.
Yet California doesn’t have a long-term land-use plan that accounts for and integrates all of these critically important factors. Instead, it has a byzantine, fragmented system of state and local agencies, each of which develops plans optimized for its own priorities — regardless of whether they directly conflict with other key objectives.
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This inefficient, overly complex system needs to change.
A new report published Tuesday by SPUR, and exclusively shared with me by the public policy research group, proposes 11 key reforms — with an emphasis on five at the state level — that policymakers should seriously consider.
In recent years, California has made it increasingly clear to local governments that they need to do their part to address the state’s housing shortage, with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s housing department and Attorney General Rob Bonta cracking down on NIMBY cities.
But, as SPUR report author Sarah Karlinsky told me, the state still isn’t putting enough emphasis on housing — and that’s reflected in its bureaucratic structure.
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While there’s an agency devoted to transportation, for example, the state Department of Housing and Community Development is lumped into a much broader grouping — the California Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency — that deals with everything from cannabis to horse racing to alcoholic beverage control. Further complicating matters, there’s a dizzying, acronym-rich array of affordable housing financing agencies — each with its own set of funding requirements — that results in mountains of paperwork, developer headaches and less-than-ideal outcomes.
A 2020 state audit, for example, found that California’s lack of a comprehensive statewide affordable housing financing plan led to one of the agencies mismanaging and ultimately losing $2.7 billion in bonds.
To streamline and focus the state’s housing approach, Karlinsky proposes creating a standalone California Housing Agency with a one-stop-shop for affordable housing financing, with one funding application and one committee awarding the money.
Defending the state’s current affordable housing financing setup is impossible. But experts I spoke to were lukewarm on the California Housing Agency proposal. A Newsom administration official noted that Tomiquia Moss, the incoming secretary of the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, has a background in affordable housing and will likely make that her top focus.
And Sunne Wright McPeak, who from 2003 to 2006 led what was then called the California Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, told me, “It doesn’t matter what you put on the organizational chart if there isn’t a directive as to the outcome with enough political will.”
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Bonta’s new power to intervene in any lawsuit filed over a potential housing law violation, for example, won’t mean much unless he uses it.
Still, structure alone can make a big difference.
Consider the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, which develops long-term land-use plans for the state. The last time one of its plans was formally adopted was in 1978 — partly because the office is closely associated with the governor, complicating political negotiations with state lawmakers.
Karlinsky proposes moving land-use issues into a new California Planning Agency with a director confirmed by state lawmakers.
Kate Gordon, who led the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research from 2019 to 2021, told me that “there is a really big difference between being an office within the governor’s office and being a standalone agency.” While the staff in a governor’s office tends to turn over with each administration, she said, standalone agencies often have longtime, experienced civil servants and are better positioned to implement and oversee long-term plans.
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Karlinsky wants to empower the new state planning agency to resolve land-use conflicts, which, as she notes in the report, “include tensions between greenhouse gas reductions and affirmatively furthering fair housing, between wildfire risk and housing demand … and between water availability and housing demand.”
This will require better integration of California’s two state-mandated regional housing planning processes, which have different goals, timelines and methodologies. It will also mean more judiciously using state funding to incentivize developments that the statewide long-term land-use plan calls for.
But, as McPeak noted, none of these policy changes will translate to tangible results without political buy-in from a broad array of interest groups.
This is difficult to imagine in our polarized world, where it’s getting harder to define, let alone advance, a shared vision of the future. As the uproar over California Forever — a proposal by a group of billionaires to develop a new city on Solano County farmland — shows, people have very different ideas of what a “utopian” community looks like.
But the antidote — implicit in Karlinsky’s report — is bringing people together, not keeping them apart.
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We’ll never solve the challenges of the next decade by staying in our separate silos. We can’t talk about housing without talking about water and fires and insurance and emissions — so we need to create a system to better understand how it all fits together and, hopefully, figure out what to do next.
Reach Emily Hoeven: emily.hoeven@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @emily_hoeven
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