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CALIFORNIA
California Affordable Housing Bill Stalls—What Now?
California is facing a housing shortage, an issue lawmakers are
seeking to resolve, but the Golden State's state senate has blocked
Sen. Scott Wiener's housing bill, putting it on hold until 2020, the
San Francisco Chronicle reports.
"It doesn't mean we're not going to focus on solving the housing
crisis," said Sen. Anthony Portantino, noting that his committee
voted to shelve Wiener's bill, SB50, until next year. "It just means
that this isn't the right fix at this time to do that."
"One of the challenges that SB50 had was that it wasn't nuanced
enough for jurisdictions that are already doing the right thing,"
said Marina Wiant, VP of Government Affairs for the California
Housing Consortium, which promotes affordable housing develop-
ment. "So much energy has been focused on SB50. Time will tell
where the energy will then shift."
Other proposals, including SB330 by Sen. Nancy Skinner,
overlap with aspects of SB50. SB330 would prohibit cities with high
rents and low vacancy rates from placing restrictions on housing
construction for the next five years, and bar those cities from cap-
ping the number of units that can receive permits, adopting new
parking requirements, and changing zoning laws to require less
dense housing.
Many of these bills are likely to face the same problems as SB50,
including opposition from local governments worried about losing
control over how their communities grow. Some advocates have
stated that with SB50 out of the picture, landlords and builders will
have less incentive to strike a deal on preserving low-cost housing
and protecting people who live there.
Wiener's SB50 is unlikely to return to session as state Senate
President Pro Tempore announced that she will "not circumvent the
decision" made by Portantino and his Senate Appropriations Com-
mittee to delay the bill until 2020.
"Regardless of my own personal feelings about this critical issue,
part of my job as the leader of the Senate is to uphold the authority
and decisions of committee chairs," Atkins said in a statement. "Short
of significantly amending the bill and limiting its applications in large
swaths of the state, there was no path to move forward this year."
