To Ease Affordable Housing Crisis, California Views a Broad New Law

The classic American ideal of a single-family home surrounded by a green lawn and picket fence may no longer be sustainable in California. Today, most of the state’s residential land—more than two-thirds of it—is set aside exclusively for one home per lot. The practice may not only have driven up land prices, it has also created intense racial and economic segregation. Single family zoning is the “new redlining,” wrote Richard Kahlenberg in a New York Times op-ed earlier this year. Scholarly work on the exclusionary effect the practice has had in U.S. cities has recently come to public attention.

Now, California’s legislative leadership hopes to allow up to four homes on a single lot without local government approval. The state would become the second to do away with single family-only zoning. More homes on less land—at least in theory—could lead to more homes that more Californians could afford. Oregon eliminated single family zoning in larger cities in 2019. The city of Minneapolis did so the year before, and Berkeley and Sacramento have also moved to bar the practice.

Authored by Senate President pro tem Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), SB 9 would allow developers or homeowners to build duplexes on a single parcel or to split a single lot in two to make way for as many as four homes per property anywhere in the state, except where local governments ban such development in high fire zones. The law wouldn’t apply in historic preservation districts and prohibits displacement of those who’ve lived in rental units for at least three years. Seven hundred thousand new homes could spring up under the bill, according to a report by the University of California, Berkeley, Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

But whether SB 9 would actually lead to more affordable home ownership opportunities and low cost rentals—housing that California needs the most—is a matter of intense debate. The legislative fight over SB 9 highlights a conundrum of California’s housing crisis: Housing is primarily a private business. Lawmakers try to create the conditions that will lead to more affordable housing, but they don’t build homes or control the market and can’t assure that their fixes will benefit those who need affordable housing.

Read more: https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/to-ease-affordable-housing-crisis-california-views-broad-new-law/
(American Prospect)