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Episode 2: The Story So Far, with Scott Simmons
73 Plays9 months ago
Special guest Scott Simmons* joins me for the deep lore of housing legislation to date. Includes the rise of Scott Wiener, the ADU bills culminating in AB 68, the unsuccessful ambitious upzoning bills SB 827 and SB 50, the successful affordable housing bill SB 35, duplex bill SB 9, people over parking bill AB 2097, the power of Anthony Portantino, and many other Deep Thoughts along the way.
* Hear more from Scott's soothing voice and brain at his dating podcast, Wish You All the Best!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast with Scott Simmons
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to John Nerds Out on California housing legislation. I'm John Minot and this is episode two, the story so far previously recorded with special guest Scott Simmons. This episode goes on for longer than the first one and is more conversational and does not get through everything we wanted to. So we hope to bring Scott back to complete the story so far. I hope you enjoy.
00:00:27
Speaker
So last episode, I talked about all the things I want to achieve with housing legislation, and some of the ways that this takes shape in policy. And now we're going to talk about some of the bills that have
00:00:44
Speaker
been some of the big successes and failures or partial successes over the past five years or so of housing politics when everything changed.
Meet Scott Simmons: Housing Activism Journey
00:00:55
Speaker
And for this, I am joined by my good friend Scott Simmons.
00:00:59
Speaker
Hello, hello. Scott has been involved with us for a lot of this time and we have been, I've jabbered to him about a lot of the big developments in real time as they have happened. You have always been an awesome resource of up to the minute knowledge on this stuff, man. No two ways about it. Thank you.
00:01:27
Speaker
So Scott, why don't you tell people a little about yourself and your perspective on housing policy? Yeah. Hi, everybody. I'm Scott.
00:01:39
Speaker
very happy to be one of John's good friends. We go back to, we met doing housing activism at East Bay for Everyone, an amazing group of folks based in the East Bay, the San Francisco Bay area, so mostly in Oakland. During my time there, I did a
00:02:01
Speaker
couple of interesting things for a while. I was an executive and that activism is sort of where I started doing, really paying attention to, I would say housing and transportation issues in local policy. I would say what got me into it is I think
00:02:21
Speaker
I think national politics was kind of driving me up the wall as a Californian. I realized there wasn't a whole lot I could do about national elections. And I sort of was trying to rent an apartment one time and started Googling, like, why is rent so expensive in San Francisco and fell down a rabbit hole and eventually found East Bay for everyone. And they were like, hey, we think the rent is too expensive. Let's do something about it. And I think it's an issue that
00:02:52
Speaker
I could talk about this for way too long. I think it's an issue that impacts a lot of people. I think it's something that's local. So if someone is looking to get involved, it's
00:03:03
Speaker
You can really move the needle on housing and transportation policy at a local level if you're somebody that wants to make the world or your world a better place and make it more just. I really think it's a policy area that you can apply pressure and see results, which that's what excites me about it. So yeah, that's my intro. Thanks. Could you maybe tell us about one thing that has, let's say, given you energy in this fight over the years, the way you've been involved?
00:03:33
Speaker
yeah uh i mean this is such a cheesy answer but honestly it's it's the folks like you man it's all the cool people you meet along the way who care about this stuff who have a sense of purpose who work together who work through sometimes you know sometimes there's drama sometimes there's tough stuff you got to get through but
00:03:52
Speaker
you forge a community in doing this work. I do value it from a justice perspective. I do think it's a correct thing for us to do as a society, but the thing that gives me energy is all the cool people I've met doing this work.
00:04:12
Speaker
Thanks so much. Yeah. And I agree. That is a really great part of it. I think it is one of those policy arenas where we're figuring so much out and learning as we go.
00:04:25
Speaker
And there is so much openness, I feel, compared to some places. In some places, it's like bang the drum, keep banging the drum. And that's about all there is to it. And I may be oversimplifying. And sometimes you really do need that. I would say with unions is an example where you need to keep banging the drum.
00:04:49
Speaker
There's so much to be done and so much to figure out that you really have to take an eclectic perspective, which I like. Yeah. Okay, wait. Can I turn that back around on you? Yeah. The listeners can know, what first made housing policy twinkle in your eye? When did you first notice it?
John Minot's Dive into Housing Policy
00:05:10
Speaker
I think it was in 2017 and 2018.
00:05:19
Speaker
I was not as rent burdened because I was in a very lucky spot in Oakland, but I saw how much it affected all my peers around me. And I noticed some of those peers as I got involved in democratic politics, especially in 2016, 2017, were also interested in that. And I suppose what gave me some energy was that
00:05:46
Speaker
it made me realize that the stakes at the local level actually were very high. There was a long period when I was participating, I was participating in local politics because I thought it was relevant and to some extent my duty. But I thought it was sort of, well, most of the problems are at the national level, so we're electing all these deep blue people at the local level and there's not much more we can do besides that.
00:06:15
Speaker
And they're just, yeah. That's cool. So I'm going to tell a little bit about what I feel are some of the biggest changes, some of the biggest stories of bills in the past several years.
Scott Wiener and the Influence on Housing Politics
00:06:34
Speaker
And the first one is actually in 2017. But even before that, I think that
00:06:45
Speaker
You can probably trace a lot of the early movement formation, at least going from a very small local movement to a movement in the state legislature to Scott Weiner, who was elected for the first time to the state Senate representing most of San Francisco in 2016. And it's interesting because, as you know, San Francisco does not have a great housing policy or politics.
00:07:15
Speaker
Yeah. But as we've also seen, it tends to elevate people who have come up through the trenches and have a better perspective. And Scott Wiener came in with a bang. He started proposing some pretty darn ambitious bills that really changed the conversation. Some of them were preceded by
00:07:45
Speaker
things that he had tried in San Francisco, but a lot of it was pretty new. Which is to say, while he was a supervisor in San Francisco, because before that- Yeah, even that. Even that, yeah. And some of it- Yeah. I was just going to say, and like any supervisor in San Francisco, he was controversial. There is no leader in San Francisco that is not controversial, so if you dig in on Scott Wiener, you'll find more. But sorry, go on. Yeah, yeah.
00:08:08
Speaker
And I'm going to completely skim past everything before 2016, even though it is very important what happened before 2016, because this is not the first time these issues have been around. But it got a new lease on life around 2016, 17, and even started building on previous cycles of activism that had been almost forgotten.
00:08:30
Speaker
You mean like the modern sort of era of housing funds activism? Yeah. Yeah. OK. Yeah, I got it. Because there were some really important housing bills passed in the early 80s, others in the early 90s, sort of sporadically. But I'm not going to talk about that. That would make this far too long an episode.
00:08:50
Speaker
But I will talk a little bit about one of the first ways it came through.
ADUs and Assembly Bill 68: Simplifying Housing
00:08:55
Speaker
I only have one bill to mention, but really it was through many different bills that accumulated over time. And this is the topic of ADUs, or accessory dwelling units. What are all the many different words you have for ADUs? Granny flats, in-laws, casitas.
00:09:15
Speaker
Yeah, Liam Dillon at the LA Times, who if you're not a subscriber, the LA Times has great housing coverage, but his big thing is calling them Casitas. Yes, he wants everyone to call them Casitas. And sometimes they're just called secondary units. I think that's going out of style. And there is the great Casita Coalition. When we have a whole bunch more of them, I'll worry about the terminology. But they're great. Casitas are great.
00:09:42
Speaker
Yeah, and it's very simple. It's like if you have a home and you have a little spare land, you should be able to put up another home on that land. Yeah. And that does predate Scott Wiener.
00:09:56
Speaker
It was actually an interest of Jerry Brown. It was one of the things Jerry Brown liked to say, like, OK, we need to do something about housing. Let's make it easier to build ADUs. So I think there was actually a package. I haven't double checked this, but I think it was around 2016 before Scott Wiener was even in office that the governor pushed to make it easier to build ADUs. That's fascinating. OK. And the politics of ADUs was very iterative.
00:10:27
Speaker
They kept trying over and over because what they noticed was they passed a bill that tried to make it easy, and then they didn't realize that there were so many other choke points cities could apply to make it hard, despite a new state law. So in the end, and this was not Scott Wiener, the one that really cemented ADUs as something you could build almost anywhere,
00:10:57
Speaker
was Assembly Bill 68, which was passed in 2018. And I think it was the other San Franciscan, I think it was Phil Ting, but I haven't looked that up. And the basic gist of AB 68 was, you almost have a right to get an ADU approved.
00:11:27
Speaker
As long as it is no more than usually, to simplify, as long as it's no more than 800 square feet, and as long as it is no closer than four feet to your back lot line or your side lot line, then it is very difficult indeed for a city to deny the application.
00:11:55
Speaker
And it can be no more than 16 feet and one story high. Okay. So that's AB 68. Yes. And what was it or, or was it just like attrition? Like, did it just get past because, uh, Ting or, or folks like him were.
00:12:12
Speaker
were fighting for it and that's when they got over the finish line? Or was there some, you know what I mean? Like what's the thing that made that one pass when the previous ones had failed? Or do we know? I was not as closely involved there, so I can't gossip to the same extent. But I think what it felt like to me at the time was the legislature really was on board with the idea that people should be able to build ADUs. And they really did not grasp
00:12:41
Speaker
how much cities were interfering with it. So it was fairly easy to sell to them, you should be able to build an ADU. And when the cities complained, this is eroding our local control, as they so often do, the legislature was able to dismiss that because they were able to say, look, people should be able to build an ADU, full stop.
00:13:07
Speaker
And so AB 68 was a much more aggressive bill. It actually let people build both one detached ADU separate from the main home and one attached one called a junior ADU, which could be carving out some space in the existing home or making an addition. So it really allowed two ADUs per home.
00:13:30
Speaker
And some people said, this means that triplexes are legal in California. Well, sort of, only in that configuration, only if you have enough land, blah, blah, blah. Right. You got to have a pretty big yard to make that work. But still. Yeah. But it did take some advocacy, too. I remember writing letters. I remember it needed sign-on. I'm sure the cities were not happy about it, as represented by the League of Cities. Right.
00:13:58
Speaker
So yeah, so that still took some work, but I think in the end, it was just very persuasive to legislators. Can I ask a sort of bigger question about housing legislation, kind of connected to that?
SB50's Role in Housing Legislation
00:14:10
Speaker
I have this memory from us doing this work together in Oakland of like SB50. SB50 was the big Senate bill. I have similar, I forget when it was, but it was the big one. And like, if we were, spoiler, this thing didn't pass. But if we got this thing over the finish line, it was going to change
00:14:28
Speaker
like almost everything. This was, this was a big, big, huge splash. That is a very big one on my list. Yes. Yeah. And so, and maybe this is a good segue into that. My recollection of this is that
00:14:42
Speaker
Is it our, are the Houser movement, we kind of, um, or is it fair to call us YMVs? Like, what's the right term there? What would you call us? Pro-housing movement. Okay. But I accept that. I accept that YMV is also used. Well, yeah, it doesn't matter. We, you know, descriptively. Yeah. So that us Housers, we, I remember us pushing hard against SB 50 and what I felt like happened. You said against SB 50. Oh my gosh. Pushing hard for, for, for SB 50.
00:15:12
Speaker
And my recollection is kind of the opposition really focused on SB 50. And as a result of that, there were a bunch of little smaller things, little like minor tweaks that did get passed because the opposition was kind of focused on.
00:15:31
Speaker
the behemoth SB50. And if memory serves, we've done that a few times. That's something that's happened more than once. Am I close? Is that right? That has definitely happened. I don't remember what passed at the same time as SB50. I know something that passed at the same time as its predecessor failing SB827. That's right. So maybe we segue into that. Let's go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:15:56
Speaker
I want to set the stage for the audience. So the other big ambition. So so one of the big ambitious things Scott Wiener did in twenty eighteen, I believe, was Senate Bill eight twenty seven. Right. And that would have opened up zoning really broadly across California. Specifically focusing huge. Yeah. Yes.
00:16:24
Speaker
it would have been focusing on especially transit, including building up to eight stories if you were within one block of a major transit stop, or five stories if you were within a half mile of reliable transit service, and exemptions from local parking minimums and aesthetic standards and density maximums.
00:16:53
Speaker
So basically allowing, not high rises, but decent sized medium apartment buildings anywhere there's transit. And transit being light rail, heavy rail, or even really good buses, right? Yes. A major transit stop includes two high frequency buses intersecting, but most of it is going to be rail stops. Yeah. Yeah. Including light rail and ferries. Yeah.
00:17:19
Speaker
And I mean, to dig into it for folks, for any lay people that might have found their way to this podcast, right? The idea here is like, hey, you've got a train there that's going to get you where you want to go. Let a bunch of people live close there. They can walk there and take transit where they need to go, which is not only a housing win, but I'll put on my other kind of Sierra Club hat here. That's a big climate change win. Absolutely. That's a big impact on emissions or vehicle miles traveled, which is
00:17:48
Speaker
Another reason why we fight for this stuff, but yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry. So 827 did not get far. In retrospect, it was kind of a message bill. It was getting the word out that the state could be doing so much more about allowing housing. It did not get out of its first committee. So not far. But then it came back. And it came back in the much bigger form of SB 50.
00:18:18
Speaker
So that was submitted the next legislative session in 2019. So two years later, because we have that two years. I think A27 might have failed in 2018. Is that right? Well, I don't know. I'm not sure when. Yeah, well, the next two-year legislative session, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it, got it, got it. Whatever it is. I always get confused with that stuff, but that's why I love that you understand it. And.
00:18:47
Speaker
SB 50 was also quite aggressive. It did try to address some of the concerns of critics that it was going to focus on disadvantaged areas in practice. I'm not going to go into all the details, but it did exempt certain areas or allow them to come up with alternative plans that would have achieved similar new housing.
00:19:17
Speaker
because there were a lot of what are often called the equity groups, like the Western Center for Law and Policy, which are really, really focused around this on the equity impact, which is not a ridiculous thing to do. There is this history that people are familiar with of apartment buildings targeting disadvantaged areas and skipping the high-income areas.
00:19:47
Speaker
I would venture to say that developers prefer to build in high income areas and the reasons they haven't is because they are must the laws prevent them much more thoroughly in high income areas. But that's that's a much bigger debate. I mean, I would agree with that. I mean, the way the lens that I would see that through is that.
00:20:07
Speaker
high-income areas are much more likely to have people with the resources and free time to leverage the local legislation to stop new construction, right? Folks in those disadvantaged areas basically don't, can't show up to a council planning meeting at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday with their PDF of, you know, their plan or their counter proposal, you know what I mean? I mean, I've definitely seen that happen. I think that's real. So SB 50,
00:20:37
Speaker
also failed. However, it got a lot farther. It got out of its committees and it got to the Senate floor. And the Senate floor, unfortunately, is where it failed. And that comes to the very annoying aspect of voting, that you can keep your fingerprints off killing a bill by not casting a vote. This is more a gripe of mine.
00:21:07
Speaker
But if you go to the votes for SB 50, the final vote, I'm looking at this on legendfo.legislature.ca.gov. January 30th, 2020, Senate floor, ayes 18, nos 15, no vote six, result fail. Right.
00:21:32
Speaker
Although, okay, is it fair? I mean, I think the story of any political activism is always a slow one, right? I think there is a very strong status quo bias, right? Like it is hard to make change. In America, we have a system that is engineered, designed to make change hard for better and for worse. And I think that is kind of the story of housing activism here, right? And I guess I would be interested in your take on this.
00:22:03
Speaker
Is it not in a way a small victory that the people who
00:22:11
Speaker
didn't want it to pass felt like they had to keep their fingerprints off off of it because they didn't want to like at least they weren't proud to vote no right yeah yeah you know uh you could say uh it has it has been pointed out in the era of trump that there is in fact a virtue in hypocrisy because it shows that you know what this you know that there are standards sure hypocrisy meaning like changing your mind about something
00:22:41
Speaker
No, meaning hypocrisy in the sense of covering up the bad things you do because the alternative to hypocrisy is impunity is doing bad things and not caring what people see or think.
00:22:58
Speaker
Right. Right. Right. Right. And hey, you know, I would say us activists, we are kind of making it something that tells our elected representatives that we are watching. Right. Yeah. They at least know they've got eyes on them, which is good. That's like, you know, arguably how representative democracy is supposed to work. Right. So, hey. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, certainly it did not have enough. It did not have enough support and, you know,
00:23:26
Speaker
I was describing about the more procedural fact that the Senate has 40 seats. To pass anything out of the Senate, you need 21 votes. Doesn't matter if the other votes are no votes. If someone is missing, if someone chooses not to vote, if 10 people choose not to vote, then you can't win with a majority of 30. You still need a majority of 40. Yeah.
00:23:55
Speaker
Or so on the hypocrisy thing, that of course goes to a much older line from the Bon-Moe artist of the 17th century, La Rochefoucault. Obviously, it was on the tip of my tongue. Who said, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. The tribute that vice pays to virtue. Yeah. That's fair. So like, if I am a person of vice,
00:24:24
Speaker
I am a hypocrite because I know virtue is there and that I have the respect. You have the decency to hide it. Yeah. That's the tribute. Awesome. I dare say our listeners probably did not. Well, if anybody knows you, they knew to expect Foucault, but maybe others didn't know that we were going to throw that at them in here. Okay, cool. So SP50, are there... Okay, that gets us to what, three years ago?
Streamlining Affordable Housing: Senate Bill 35
00:24:50
Speaker
Yeah, but let me back up a little bit because there was another really important one in Scott Wiener's early years that succeeded. Okay. Yeah. And that also set the stage for some of the later debates. And that is Senate Bill 35, which passed in 2018. So this was a big one, and it was specifically for building affordable housing in the sense of
00:25:16
Speaker
income restricted affordable housing. The rent will be tied to the area median income via a formula. Was SB 35 the one that gave Rina teeth? It was one of them, yes. And just to go back to the... Spelling everything out, I mentioned it last episode, but Rina is the regional housing needs allocation.
00:25:44
Speaker
And what SB 35 said was, if you have not been meeting your allocation or your arena goals, it should be much harder for you to deny affordable housing in your jurisdiction. So specifically, if you are somewhat behind under SB 35, you normally have to approve apartment buildings
00:26:14
Speaker
that are 50% affordable. In some cases, when you're doing really badly, you have to approve them if they're 10% affordable. Importantly, two important things. It still had to fit the zoning. The developer still had to find the place in the city that is zoned for apartment buildings.
00:26:39
Speaker
but you couldn't get the discretionary standards. It had to only follow the objective standards, the ones where it's written down, you can tell, you can draw it with a ruler, you can figure out on the plans, does it meet the standards? You can't apply standards like does it fit the neighborhood, yes? So two questions here, a question and a statement. First question, is SB 35 the one that Huntington Beach got in trouble over?
00:27:09
Speaker
You know what I'm talking about? The state government- Huntington Beach has gotten in trouble over a lot of things. I don't remember if SB 35 is one of those. That's fair. Basically, SB 35 is like, if you're a city that has really gone out of its way to not allow new housing, especially affordable housing, it sets up rules that have consequences. It's like, if you've been really bad about this for X number of years, it's going to be easier for folks to build new stuff in your jurisdiction.
00:27:36
Speaker
There aren't it's not bulletproof. There are still ways to kind of thwart that housing. If you're Beverly Hills and you really want to stop that, you'll figure something out. But it does make it harder. Right. It is kind of a blow in the right direction, I would say. Yeah. Right.
00:27:51
Speaker
The second thing I would say about this is in terms of stuff, giving Rina teeth, I want to shout out East Bay for everyone because we had a lot of really sharp folks that Cisco agrees. Sorry for the listeners, Cisco is John's adorable, amazing cat. Giving Rina teeth. We had some awesome folks at East Bay for everyone, yourself included, who were working on this project of
00:28:21
Speaker
basically calling cities on their BS when they were trying to pretend to meet Rina goals. Maybe it's not quite as aggressive as that, but we had some smart folks who were going through public documents and saying like, no, actually, you're not allowed to say that this gas station could potentially be a four story building and therefore you meet your Rina goals. This is getting a little bit of the weeds, but I want to shout out East Bay for everyone, for you and a lot of really smart people over there.
00:28:48
Speaker
who were really doing meaningful work. And I think making it better for affordable housing to get built. So, dear listener, if you are not already a supporter of East Bay for Everyone, eastbayforeveryone.org, go check them out. John's an amazing leader of that group. Go, go, go see it. Okay. See it. Yes. I have mixed feelings on our level of success there, but yes, we have accomplished some things. Oh, okay. Well, let's put a pin in that. I would love to hear more about that.
00:29:15
Speaker
The other thing about SB 35 is I saw this before I was deeply involved in East Bay for Everyone at an endorsement meeting of the East Bay Young Democrats. And it was a really good microcosm of some of the forces involved. Because SB 35 was about saying approvals should be as automatic as possible.
00:29:39
Speaker
It should be straightforward. It should be quick. If the city wants to reject, it needs to have very clear, very firm grounds. And there were actually people coming to that endorsement meeting who made what seemed like a plausible case that that was bad. And their argument focused on negotiations, community benefits.
00:30:02
Speaker
They felt that the discretionary system meant that when a developer came to build something, they could negotiate things, you know, benefits that were specific to the community and responsive to the community. East Bay Young Democrats, the group this was the endorsement of, did end up voting for SB 35 and SB 35 ended up passing into law.
00:30:28
Speaker
And since 2017, SB35 has been used to build an estimated 18,000 units, which is not a lot compared to need, but it is a lot more than we were getting before. And it has almost become the go-to of nonprofit affordable developers, because it is so much better than going through all the different rigmarole you need to build when you need rezoning.
00:30:58
Speaker
Yeah. So there's some real concrete achievement there. Which is amazing. And also worth shouting out, right, Senator Skinner, right, Nancy Skinner? Yes, Nancy Skinner, Berkeley elected 2016, has also been a huge champion. And then following that, assembly member Buffy Wicks, also out of Berkeley. Rockstar, Rockstar, Buffy Wicks. Yes, Rockstar. And you might not have this at your fingertips,
00:31:27
Speaker
Two because I do I the East Bay young Dems who I was not involved with because I'm too old The the the counter argument that you heard there the argument that getting concessions out of developers is an important part of what is
00:31:46
Speaker
a community can do or what can make a good community, right? Like if you're running, I don't know, Scottsville in California and a developer wants to come and build some land where I'm the mayor and I can say, no, no, no, you need to revamp the park because it really needs revamping. And I'd say I don't have the tax base to get that done, but the developer wants to build there because it's right on Caltrans, I don't know, whatever.
00:32:11
Speaker
You know, I do think right in a sense that argument makes sense. Right. So have we have we seen any data or do we have like of those? I think you said 18000 units built. Do we are approved at least? Yeah. Fair, fair, fair. Do we do we have an idea of the kind of concessions that those developers gave or contributed to the community? Well, the really big one.
00:32:39
Speaker
I don't know. I don't think so. If you mean funding a park or funding a bike lane or something, probably not. But in the case of SB 35, they don't really have to. Of course, the benefit they are giving to a large extent is the affordable housing. Right. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Because for reasons we will eventually get into,
00:33:04
Speaker
A whole lot of the housing build has actually been 100% affordable at low incomes. Not 10 or 50, but 100. Okay. Yeah. Seems good. I'm a fan. Okay. So moving on. So that it was January 30th, 2020 that SB 50 died.
00:33:30
Speaker
And it's been, wow, it's been almost exactly four years since then. We're recording this on January 28th, 2024. And things got really hectic and not a lot of bills got passed in the rest of the 2020 year because of the pandemic. It got edited way down. But
00:33:53
Speaker
Another of the two big more bills that got passed in the couple in the remaining session. Let me correct myself here. Yeah, yeah, in the in the in 2021 or 2022. One really big bill that was passed was Senate Bill 9.
The Duplex Bill: SB9's Zoning Impact
00:34:20
Speaker
Okay, that was the duplex bill.
00:34:25
Speaker
And that was building on the ADU work, and it was saying, wherever you can build a single-family home, you should be able to build two single-family homes. Whether that's by literally building a duplex, or taking a building and splitting it into two, or enlarging it enough to make two, or simply splitting the lot so it can be sold separately, and building a house on the remaining half, or the remaining down to 40%.
00:34:58
Speaker
And that was, that got a lot of headlines because it was about, you know, literally ending single-family zoning in an even bigger way than the ADU bills had. Is this the one that kind of got national traction? There was a hot moment where I think it was, you know, he should not be named Donald Trump, right? Said like the Democrats are trying to destroy, I don't know if you tried to say trying to destroy suburbia.
00:35:29
Speaker
Yeah, the American suburb, the suburban lifestyle dream, I think was his words. Yeah. I don't know if it was about this about the duplexes. It was more about before it was more about desegregation action, as I recall that that that tracks that would make him more mad. But but that's I mean, I think SB nine, like the reason that one is such a big win and probably it's such a big deal is yeah, I mean, we're talking about kind of potentially,
00:35:57
Speaker
changing the way suburbia looks and feels and works. That's a big deal. That's a really big deal. Yeah. And it's going up against this philosophical idea that single-family housing is the only dignified way to live that I think pervades a lot of America.
00:36:17
Speaker
There's a lot of like moral coding around some of the family zoning, you know what I mean? Which is like beyond my level of expertise, but it's there. It's definitely there. And politically, to me, the thing that distinguished the debate on SB 9 was it did not just get city opposition, the usual suspects. It also got organized ideological nimbis in opposition.
00:36:41
Speaker
like livable California, people who had started noticing all the pro-housing stuff and getting independently mad about it, not from any particular interest, except perhaps their home value, but really their ideological sense that this was bad. Yeah. There are those who try to, you know, I would charitably call these folks usually like neighborhood defenders, right? That is a common word for them. Yeah. Yeah. These are folks who really like the way their neighborhood
00:37:10
Speaker
feels and they really like the way it's configured and they feel like they want to exert their political political sway to keep it the way it is. And, you know, I. I got to be real, I have empathy for those people, you know, like I get it. In a sense, I get it. And I don't. That's not my political stance because I think making more room for more people is a is a is a more important issue.
00:37:36
Speaker
But I don't think those folks are evil, honestly. I just think they see the world and weight their facts differently. Yeah. Except maybe the oil executive organizer among them, but most of them not, yes. Yeah. And especially not the average people who are just like, gee, I don't know what's happening to the neighborhood. The more active people get about shouting down apartment buildings, the less highly I think of them.
00:38:06
Speaker
A whole lot of people have this baseline sense of, well, isn't this how the neighborhood should be? And yeah, I want to be gentle with them. Yeah. And you know what I'll say? If you're someone who listens to political, if you're listening to this, you are probably someone who listens to political podcasts, which is to say you are probably someone who informs themselves about policy. And you're probably aware that most people don't do that. Most people don't really dig deep on policy issues at the national level.
00:38:36
Speaker
which is to say that an even smaller number of people, I think, dig in on local policy stuff. But the silver lining there, and John, let me know if you would agree here, but I would say the silver lining there is that with so few people weighing in on issues like housing and like transportation, your voice, not that this is meant to like be proselytizing or recruiting or whatever, but honestly, like anyone's voice, what's that?
00:39:02
Speaker
It can be. It can be. OK, yeah, like honestly, everyone's voice counts for so much. It really is possible to move the needle on this stuff. It's not easy, but it's very possible because there are just so few people on both sides of it.
00:39:17
Speaker
And the neighborhood defenders, the NIMBYs, as we sometimes call them, but these neighborhood defenders, there are a handful of them, I think, that are very loud, and that oil executive is certainly well-resourced. But there aren't that many of them. Even the folks who are benefiting, and you say to them, well, actually, we want to take your neighbors home and actually put two front doors on it and make it so you can have two families there instead of just one. I think most folks would be like, ah, cool.
00:39:45
Speaker
Like, you know, it doesn't bug them that much, you know, most folks. And I don't know, that's been my experience is the opposition is loud, but there aren't actually that many of them. Yeah. That's what I got. Yeah. And I don't remember, I don't have the full list of 2021 bills in front of me.
00:40:11
Speaker
But you do sometimes get this thing when they are focusing so harshly on the big headline thing, like ending single family zoning, that they don't have as much time for the flurry of other bills that are out there in the year. Yeah.
00:40:30
Speaker
What do you think of that as a strategy for this movement? Do you think we are consciously running a big blocker bill? We were talking about this a little earlier. Do you think we are consciously running a big chunky bill and a bunch of smaller ones that we think are going to sneak by? Or is that just an effect of how the movement works? I think you could say that we actually have too many bills.
00:40:55
Speaker
Because you know, we have like, I don't know, over two years, we often have like 2000 bills that are submitted. Well, and most of them don't get through, but a whole lot of them do. And each of them is trying to do some kind of signature idea that a legislator has. Some of them are more complex. But
00:41:20
Speaker
I don't think it's an entire strategy. I think it partially reflects that you have a lot of legislators trying to do good things, trying to come up with good ideas and they just throw a lot of stuff at the wall. Yeah, that's fair. That said, the bigger, the bigger bills often are kind of shooting for the moon and yeah, sometimes they pass like SB nine and sometimes they don't pass and either way,
00:41:47
Speaker
they can help other stuff get through that might have a positive impact. But sometimes those other things get through without a blocker. Which is to say, when you say those things, even if they don't pass, can have a positive impact, I would love to put a pin in that. I would love to hear you talk maybe on a future episode about how something that doesn't pass actually still kind of strikes a blow for the movement or moves things in the right direction. Yeah. Because that, to me, seems confusing.
00:42:17
Speaker
And over this whole time, you know, the persuasive work has been going on. The legislature has had elections and turnover in 2018 and 2020 and 2022 and this year, you know, every assembly member has to be reelected every two years, every senator every four years.
00:42:36
Speaker
So over time, these these debates have further influenced the elections and the candidates. And we have gotten more pro-housing legislature than we had in 2017. Yeah. And so I'm no longer in San Francisco. And I would be interested to hear if you think this is correct. But like my general sense in San Francisco is that if you are a San Francisco county, so if you're a local level county supervisor and you have ambitions of moving up,
00:43:05
Speaker
like the sort of political food chain, you sort of become more pro-housing as you move up the chain. The leaders who either don't want to or aren't able to sort of ascend to mayor or assembly or Senate, those folks stay neighborhood defenders. They don't take on housing stuff. And I'm not sure what exactly drives that. I'm sure it's a response to constituents
00:43:34
Speaker
activism or constituent will, or I don't know, I don't know exactly what, but I, and I think that's more recent too, that we've seen, that we've seen people really pay attention to this movement, which again, I think is really in large part because of like the grassroots activism, like the people like you, who are doing this work and saying, hey, this matters, let's organize, and let's let's let our leaders know that this matters, you know? Yeah.
00:44:02
Speaker
Okay. We're over on time, I'm so sorry. No, no, this is a good talk. So a few more of the things, my list is starting to move to more successes, but let me just finish up on SB 9. I should say about SB 9, that has not been nearly as productive as the ADU bills. Oh, interesting. And that's because it got a couple of amendments near the end that were necessary for it to pass,
00:44:33
Speaker
but which still made it a lot less productive. A really big one was an owner occupancy requirement, meaning that you cannot build a duplex unless you own the existing home and you live in it. Got it. And this was out of the idea that it is bad for someone to buy a home in order to build something bigger on it.
00:45:00
Speaker
And to some extent, this bogeyman of bulldozing neighborhoods and so forth. And again, I can see why some people saw the need for it, but I still respectfully don't agree with it. And then also it only breaks local zoning to the extent necessary to build two 800 square foot units. And that is not actually that big.
00:45:30
Speaker
especially if you're building detached homes, people usually want more than that. So you can only take an existing single family home and split it into, and make it a duplex if each resulting home is 800 square feet or less? Unfortunately, a little more complicated than that. Ah, of course it is. It's like, if you need to
00:45:59
Speaker
reduce the setbacks. You know, if you need to go closer to the lot line in order to build two units, you can only relax that setback enough to, as necessary to build 800 square feet each. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So you need a room in some places, maybe there's a single family home that, uh, there are a single family zone.
00:46:26
Speaker
that allows for you to build 1,500 square foot units or 3,000. And in those cases, maybe it is pretty easy to build a duplex. But often you have lot coverage rules, height rules. I guess SP9 did allow two stories. But you have lot coverage, setbacks, a whole lot of rules.
00:46:49
Speaker
And again, people who are buying detached homes are usually thinking about families usually want more than 800 square feet. Right. So it's not as marketable. It's not been as interesting to people. Okay. So SB9 turns out doesn't apply in quite as many cases as we were hoping. And there are more ways for cities to monkey with it than ADUs, but I'll move on now. Interesting. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Parking.
Parking Reforms Near Transit
00:47:18
Speaker
So parking succeeded in 2022. And by parking, I mean eliminating off-street parking requirements, eliminating the need for housing if it's near transit to build any parking alongside the units. And this was a pretty big fight too, because parking is a big way that development is constrained even in multifamily zones.
00:47:46
Speaker
And it comes back to the idea that housing cars is more important than housing people, basically, that people have a right to drive for it to be convenient, not just possible, but convenient to drive, that everything should have a parking space alongside it. And anything less, you know, having to walk 10 minutes from your parking space is an affront and an indignity.
00:48:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, people get really spun up about parking, man. People get really cranky about it. You know, I guess I get it. I live in Los Angeles now, so I definitely get it. Yeah. But yeah, I know if you know parking is one of those things where like if we're going to move towards a future where we are moving away from vehicle miles traveled and are moving away from fossil fuel burning cars or even like electric cars, right? It's still just like an energetically, I think inefficient way.
00:48:44
Speaker
I have lovely friends who work at these companies who are going to yell at me about this. But like, I do think I do kind of want us ultimately to get to where we can walk, where we need to go and hop on trains to go far away. Because to me, that just seems like selfishly a cool option. But I think as far as I understand, that's the right way to go for us to be responsible about climate change. Yeah. And alongside the
00:49:13
Speaker
Alongside the environmental argument, there really is an economic argument that parking is a really bad use of space. Yeah. Like a car sits immobile 90% or 95% of the hours in the day. Yeah. Whereas a train picks people up and keeps on going. Yeah. So does a bus. Yeah.
00:49:38
Speaker
And really getting closer to a place where you get on transit or where you walk more, just geometrically, means that you are getting to a more prosperous community. There's an argument that parking is a huge drag on the economy because it is saddling the cost of everything we do, the cost of every home, the cost of our groceries,
00:50:08
Speaker
with the cost of building and maintaining all that land and concrete as parking. Yeah. And in some places, that land is very expensive. Yes. And here I would be remiss if I did not plug the classic book, The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup, which changed so many minds about this.
00:50:32
Speaker
Shoop was very intellectually persuasive, but it was a huge goat choker of a book. A goat choker? What is it? What? You know, big enough to choke, thick enough to choke a goat. I have not heard that before. Okay. Yeah, I have to cop. I have not read that. I learned that kind of stuff through osmosis by making sure that I'm in the room with very smart people. But I will also recommend the much
00:51:00
Speaker
the much shorter and snappier book, Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar, published last year. I love it. That is fantastic. Yeah, that is a fantastic book. So the parking bill actually had to take two iterations. The first one was AB 1401, and that died because it was held in committee.
00:51:27
Speaker
And that is something that is going to keep coming up. So it's one of the reasons I wanted to mention it, is that appropriations committees, there's one in the assembly, one in the Senate, they will see any bill that involves spending more than a minimal amount. And really, it's not about spending. Frankly, it's about power. Being on the Appropriations Committee puts you in a position of power. And there is a protocol
00:51:53
Speaker
where at a certain point in the year, everything in the appropriations committee gets held under submission, essentially paused. And then they announce which got out. If it didn't get out, then it's called held in committee. But when it gets held in committee, it didn't have a vote. It just means in practice that the committee chair decided not to let it advance.
00:52:21
Speaker
So the culprit in this case was Anthony Portantino from, I think somewhere, it's like North LA. Oh, San Fernando, San Gabriel Valleys. La Kenyatta Flint Ridge, yeah. La Kenyatta Flint Ridge is the center, yeah. But he has been getting a bit better, but yes, that was a black mark for him.
00:52:44
Speaker
Do we know why? Okay, this is getting really inside baseball and if the listeners still with us, love you guys, amazing.
Appropriations Committee's Influence on Housing Bills
00:52:51
Speaker
Let me explain this back to you and you can tell me where I'm wrong.
00:52:56
Speaker
The Appropriations Committee is a powerful committee. You get put here, I don't know, I assume through having good connections and doing politicking and that kind of stuff, but you get a seat on the Appropriations Committee and you get to say, it sounds like you have to say it publicly, but maybe not publicly, but you get to say basically any bill that's trying to spend any amount of money, which is a lot of bills.
00:53:18
Speaker
Any bill that's doing that, you get to sort of give it the thumbs up or thumbs down to find out whether or not it even gets voted on later, which is a ton of power, no? Yeah. I'm not sure how much the other committee members are involved. I think they are to some extent, but I think the committee chair is the most powerful. Okay. So if you're committee chair, you can kind of give thumbs up, thumbs down to like a lot of stuff. Yeah. Do we have any, like that to me just seems like
00:53:43
Speaker
Like it would be ripe for corruption. Like this is somebody who you have to like butter up or like make sure they're in their, in their good graces. I don't know. Like what, what checks are there on how that power is used? Do you know? I think ultimately it's the majority, it's the caucus, you know, it's the, it's the majority leader or the speaker who actually appoints the committee members and leadership did just change. Although that was in the assembly.
00:54:14
Speaker
Leadership changes every several years because there's still term limits. So yeah, unfortunately, the main answer is if they are so unaccountable or making such, if they're making decisions that are so out of touch with the party as a whole, that the speaker or majority leader gets mad at them or incentives the president pro tempore.
00:54:40
Speaker
then they could be leaned on or they could even lose their chairmanship. That's fair. Okay. So the first time this one goes through, it gets killed in appropriations. Yes. And then the next year it came back and this time it succeeded. It took a bunch of amendments from Portantino, which maybe weakened it a bit, but not too much. And it got through. Okay. And that was 2097.
00:55:12
Speaker
So that was gratifying. So you know what? I have several more on my list, and the stories just keep getting longer because they happened within the past year or two. So I think we might cut it off here and meet again next
Future of California Housing Legislation
00:55:30
Speaker
week. What do you think? Let's do it. Leave the audience on a cliffhanger to be continued.
00:55:38
Speaker
As we've got a lot, we've got the three things that I want to get to are Senate Bill 423, which expanded on SB 35. So more affordable housing approved automatically or semi-automatically. Yeah. AB 2011, which is up zoning on commercial streets. Awesome.
00:56:04
Speaker
And the new AB 68, confusingly got the same number as the ADU one from back in 2018, but the Affordable Housing and Climate Solutions Act, the one that would have started to focus development on the climate safe infill areas instead of the fire hazard areas on the outskirts. Yeah.
00:56:30
Speaker
Well, yeah, let's put a pin in all that. I'm excited to talk about so many stories to tell. It brings it brings in the whole thing about union labor and this skilled and trained. So a lot of stuff. Awesome.
00:56:44
Speaker
To wrap up, John, I just want to say I have told you this all one to one, but I am super excited that you're doing this. I think this is a really cool thing. I think this movement is is greatly benefited by you and folks like you who can keep up with how this stuff is happening and the details on because those details really, really matter. And I think finding a way to let fellow houses tune in and like get up to speed on what's going on and keep up with what's going on is a really, really good thing. So I'm really excited for this. And so thank you for doing this.
00:57:14
Speaker
I really appreciate you coming on here and yeah, hope to have you here again in the future. Dude, anytime. Let me know. Okay. Okay. That's all for now from John nerds out on California housing legislation. And until next time, keep on warning. And this is John from
00:57:37
Speaker
the future of that recording you just listened to. Doing my editing, I was looking at my notes and I realized that I was intending to let Scott plug his wonderful podcast at the end of mine, and I neglected to do so. So I'm just going to say quickly, please, if you have any interest in modern dating from a straight man's perspective, please check out Scott Simmons, wish you all the best available wherever fine podcasts are downloaded.
00:58:06
Speaker
See you next time.