California is facing the WORST housing crisis in the United States
Visible homelessness is out of control.
One of the reason California is in this mess? Most cities use zoning to require single family homes. Multi-story housing is significantly cheaper to build than single family homes. Yet most California cities ban multifamily housing.
Take for instance Los Angeles. The pink area is single-family homes ONLY:
That's right. The second biggest US city doesn't allow multi-story housing in a majority of its land.
Texas is run by a bunch of religious weirdos. Yet they don't have a housing crisis. You know why? Because these religious weirdos are building housing at over twice the rate of California:
In 2020, a California state senator named Senator Scott Wiener introduced a bill to change zoning rules
His bill would have automatically allowed multi-story housing near train stations, metro stations, bus lines and schools. This is not a radical proposal. This is common sense.
California politicians killed the bill.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/business/economy/sb50-california-housing.html
Today, he is trying again.
Bill SB-79 will make it legal to build more multi-family housing near rail stations and rapid bus lines, including in areas where such homes are currently illegal.
https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb79
Housing experts support the bill 🏘️
Transit agencies support the bill 🚍
Amtrak supports the bill 🚆
Yet some angry homeowners are now calling their politicians, urging them to kill this bill again 🤦
Take for instance columnist Steve Williams:
Recently, powerful Senator Josh Becker - who represents Menlo Park, Mountain View and Palo Alto - said he changed his mind. His constituents want to kill affordable housing:
Why is LA spending money to build metro stations in the middle of fucking nowhere 🤨?!
More housing near transit is a great idea.
If bill SB-79 is killed, this will be a huge defeat from the transit system and affordable housing.
https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/04/committee-chairs-housing-policy/
There is a fucking housing WAR happening right now. If you don't fight this war, young people, renters, transit users, and new home buyers will lose.
Please call your representatives. Tell them to support Bill-S79:
Is this a weird kind of "war" where there are only two choices?
It seems like a lazy solution to pass a bill at the state level which overrides local zoning ordinances instead of actually handling city planning on a case by case basis.
Why wouldn't California just incentivize building homes in the central valley? Or inland from Los Angeles on all of the completely open land? What is keeping homeless people at the city center, and will that cause actually be changed if the buildings around them are 3 or more stories tall?
People who live near the areas affected by state-level bills like this will be pretty upset that their local layer of democracy was circumvented by voters from out of town.
Meanwhile, people who move into the new high rises are not necessarily going to come out of the pool if unhoused Californians who were sleeping on the streets nearby. Does the bill control who is allowed to live in these new units? Does the bill account for housing the unhoused during the multi-year period while high rise construction is underway?
Because nobody wants to live there.
You may as well say: why not move all these people to Nevada and live in all the nice open land there?
The housing crises has never been about total quantity of housing, it's about housing in the right places.
Oh, if this is just about what people want and not about shelter for the unhoused, then that really changes things. I may have misunderstood, as that's a totally different spirit behind the bill.
If that's the case, then it just comes down to which group of people have the political power to mandate what they want.
The central valley does have some of the highest rates of housing expansion in the country though, so I wouldn't count it out. There's a lot of opportunity there, it's just not directly on the ocean.
Perhaps, but that's still sprawl. California is really not-dense. There's a lot we can improve before having to shift to the farmlands. And the most in demand places are often the worst.