Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty

Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty

Author:Conor Dougherty
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-17T16:00:00+00:00


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THE YEAR BEFORE Scott Wiener arrived in Sacramento, Governor Jerry Brown, who in terms of housing was right back where he was in the ’70s, proposed a failed piece of legislation that left a blueprint of what he wanted from the legislature on housing. What Brown proposed was that he would sign a budget that replenished some of the affordable housing money he had cut in the lean years after the Great Recession, but only if the legislature approved a streamlining measure that would allow projects that conformed to local zoning codes and had 10 to 20 percent of their units reserved for people making below the median income to sidestep city councils and planning commissions. Such projects would also be immunized from environmental lawsuits. (This was the idea Steve Falk wrote a memo in favor of, leading neighbors to call for his ouster.)

As the proposal made its way through the capitol, cities, environmental groups, and construction unions all rose up against it. Each of these groups wanted different things—cities wanted more say over what could be built where, environmentalists wanted more environmental reviews, and unions wanted a prevailing wage guarantee that favored their workers—but what united them was a fear that if building was easier, they would lose their leverage over projects. That was why housing law was so hard to streamline: A complicated process was full of political profit. Negotiations broke down, and the governor’s proposal died. Nevertheless, Brown had established the framework of a potential housing deal: legislative Democrats could get back some of the affordable housing money he had cut if they delivered him some kind of streamlining bill.

The next year California legislators introduced something like 130 housing bills. Disasters always created bills. There were water bills during droughts and fire bills after fires and earthquake bills after earthquakes. Now housing costs were a state disaster. Given how many housing bills the legislature had introduced, it was all but guaranteed that by the end of the session it would end up passing something having something to do with housing. The question was which bill or bills would be signed. Democrats were already writing various affordable housing funding bills, which legislators like David Chiu had been pushing for years. But Jerry Brown had made it clear that he wasn’t giving out money until someone gave him a streamlining bill, otherwise the state would just be throwing new taxes at a broken and expensive process.

Scott Wiener introduced just such a bill on the day he was sworn into office, and in doing so had put himself in the enviable position of having written a piece of legislation that his colleagues would have to pass to get the money they wanted. Wiener’s first draft of the bill was just a couple sentences of streamlining language combined with some stipulations that would guarantee higher wages for the unions who had killed Brown’s attempt from a year earlier. He still had to write an actual real-live bill that could



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