Newsom Fights The NIMBYs

On pretty much every single issue even remotely related to politics you will find California Governor Gavin Newsom and me on opposite sides. However, when it comes to fighting NIMBYs, we couldn’t be any closer according to Conor Dougherty and Soumya Karlamangla’s piece in the New York Times.

The Times notes that for the last six years California’s Legislature has ended each session with a blitz of new laws that aim to make housing more plentiful and affordable. However, thanks to a housing prices skyrocketing the last two years, these laws are finally being enforced…

• Gov. Gavin Newsom “has, for reasons practical and political, shifted toward an increasingly aggressive effort to enforce laws already on the books. This ranges from small-scale stings, like the state housing agency’s sending letters to local governments telling them that they are out of compliance with state housing regulations, to much larger efforts, like a first-of-its-kind investigation into San Francisco’s notoriously complex development process.”

Newsom is not alone in this fight either. Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, told the Time “We are just getting started.”

All politics is local. Where and how to build has traditionally been left to local governments, on the theory that land use is better handled by people closest to the problem. As the Times points out “The problem is that homeowners and renters from a wide range of income levels are frequently antagonistic to having anything, and especially anything dense, built in their neighborhoods. And local elected officials are beholden to them.”

The Times They Are A-Changin’. Governor Newsom, along with the the help of the AG is fighting back. Newsom “used $4 million to create a housing Accountability and Enforcement unit to investigate cities and implement the laws, while legislators have usurped local authorities by forcing them to plan for more and denser housing, hemmed their options for stopping it, and created measures to strip them of land use power when they don’t comply.”

The median existing-home price in the West is currently $614,900. This is 38% higher than the next closest region and is up 50% from February 2020, the month before the pandemic. This unsustainable level of growth has created an even bigger divide between homeowners and renters. As property prices rise, rents follow suit. Property prices rising has even less impact on existing home owners in Cali thanks to Proposition 13 which capped property tax rates at 1% of a property’s purchase price. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, only 56% of California’s own the home they are living in. Considering that Republicans and Democrats tend to split pretty evenly on homeownership both parties have an equal incentive to fight for affordable housing.