Our Neighborhood Voices Responds to Governor Gavin Newsom’s Endorsement of More Bad Housing Legislation
While it was not surprising, it was nevertheless still disappointing to hear California Governor Gavin Newsom endorse more neighborhood-destroying housing legislation this week. State Senator Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) and Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D–Richmond) have each introduced a number of bills that aim to further erode local authority when it comes to development. These are the latest efforts to wrest decisions away from local leaders and hand California’s neighborhoods over to for-profit developers and the financial interests behind them.
The Governor’s remarks are particularly disheartening because at this point the proof is in: The “build, baby, build” approach to California’s housing affordability crisis has been an abject failure. It amounts to trickle-down economics applied to the places 39 million people call home. It’s making the affordability crisis worse for millions of hard-working residents, while enriching the sorts of developers whose interest in the housing they build begins and ends on their balance sheets.
There is a heartlessness, even ruthlessness, in the approach favored by Wiener, Wicks, and Newsom. They treat Californians’ homes and neighborhoods as little more than assets to be developed and traded by the highest bidders. They couldn’t care less about livability and quality of life, or the character of the neighborhoods where people live and raise families.
The supply-siders assume that if only we build enough dense, high rise apartments and condos, the 82% of Californians — of all backgrounds — who live in single family homes, townhomes, duplexes, fourplexes, and small apartment and condo buildings will bend to their will. They’ll give up their yards, gardens, and trees for soulless “stack and packs” with zero green space. They’ll swap quiet, safe, tree-lined residential streets for loud, crowded urban cores. They’ll fundamentally transform the way they live, because the political class tells them to.
They claim their approach will result in affordable housing. It won’t, and it hasn’t. They claim it’s sustainable. It’s not. One thing they don’t even try to claim is that it’s livable — because they know it’s not. It’s all about profit, and control. The good news is that more and more people are waking up and realizing that our political class is hell-bent on selling us out. Make no mistake: A reckoning is coming.
Newsom was right about one thing: He said that when it comes to housing, “we’re as dumb as we want to be.”
Mr. Governor, at least we can agree on that.
Our Neighborhood Voices is a California 501c3 that advocates for livable, sustainable, affordable neighborhoods. We believe neighborhood character should be determined by the people who live there and want to live there, not by profit-motivated developers and distant bureaucrats.