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IN THIS ISSUE – “The Landscape Has Shifted”
- Recall & Dem Legislators Rewrite the Newsom Agenda
- State Senate Republicans Elect “Very Civil, Throwback” Leader
- Texas Electricity Goes Down, But “California Isn’t in the Clear”; Grid Stability & Renewable Reliability Are Problems
- CalEPA to Evaluate Cap & Trade as Climate Change Tool
- Californians Hit the Emigrant Trail, Drive Up Housing Prices Nationwide
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week, tailored to your business and advocacy interests. Please feel free to forward.
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FOR THE WEEK ENDING FEB. 19, 2021
Recall & Dem Legislators Rewrite the Newsom Agenda
Politico & CalMatters
Whether or not Gov. Gavin Newsom survives a recall attempt, his political agenda is being rewritten.
The Democratic governor tends to trumpet his grandest ambitions as an affirmation of California’s progressive values and its status as a national model. Of course, what might be achievable in deeply Democratic California isn’t as viable in more conservative corners of the nation.
But with a landslide 2018 win in his pocket and the backing of legislative supermajorities and an overwhelmingly Democratic electorate, Newsom could once afford to reach for loftier goals with relatively less political risk.
That was then. The landscape has shifted.
If the recall drive garners enough signatures to trigger an election later this year, that could put Newsom on defense for the rest of the 2021 legislative year. If Newsom prevails, he will have to turn around and defend his seat again in a 2022 reelection campaign.
That ups the imperative for the governor to secure the support, or at least the neutrality, of centrist Democrats — and of the deep-pocketed donors who might feel inclined to spend against Newsom if they see him as weakened and overreaching. All of which could constrain his agenda.
And top Democratic lawmakers dealt a political blow to Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday by unveiling a school reopening package without his input — a move to which the governor did not take kindly.
The bold step suggests that Newsom and lawmakers have significantly different interpretations of what’s necessary to get kids back in the classroom, especially when it comes to vaccines. The package introduced by three Democratic Assemblymembers would require local public health departments to offer vaccines to on-site school employees, while Newsom’s plan, introduced in December, maintains vaccinations aren’t a prerequisite to reopening.
Lawmakers are planning to vote on the bill on Monday — which could force Newsom to choose between abandoning his own proposal or potentially slowing reopenings by vetoing the bill.
Fracking offers another case study. You may recall Newsom telling the Legislature back in September to send him a bill banning the fossil fuel extraction process, which environmentalists have long sought to curtail. At the time, a recall felt like a conservative pipe dream. But now that it’s becoming increasingly likely, Newsom’s call to halt fracking could go from a source of progressive plaudits to a liability.
A bill is set to drop, launching one of the year’s banner legislative battles, and POLITICO’s Debra Kahn and Colby Bermel write that it could spell trouble for the governor: “The bill is a political hot potato for Newsom, with the potential to alienate Republicans in the oil-rich Central Valley, labor unions representing oil and gas workers and Newsom’s progressive base.”
Or take the death penalty. Newsom has long opposed capital punishment, and he drew national headlines when he halted executions early in his tenure. But that’s a temporary solution.
A permanent prohibition would need to come from voters, who have turned back attempts to end the death penalty in both 2012 and 2016. Newsom asserted last week that he looked forward “to going back to the voters” to “end this practice once and for all in the state.”
He could throw his weight behind an existing Assembly constitutional amendment to do just that. But that would expend precious political capital when Newsom needs it the most — and he’s less likely to try and rally voters behind a contentious ballot item if he’s fighting for his own political life.
Adding to Newsom’s political challenges, the debate over single-payer health care is set to resume today when San Jose Democratic Assemblymember Ash Kalra introduces a bill to replace private health insurance with a Medicare-like system for everyone in the state.
When campaigning for governor in 2018, Newsom vowed to create a state-funded health program for all Californians — a promise that earned him the support of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing and the powerful California Nurses Association. With Democrats now in the White House, those groups want Newsom to make good on his promise — but with a potential recall election looming on the horizon, the governor will have to tread carefully.
We’ll know by April if a recall is happening. If proponents fall short, that would leave plenty of time for legislating. But if the rest of the legislative year unfolds under the shadow of an oxygen-sucking, agenda-dominating campaign, that would leave less space for tough bills that would force Newsom to wade into legislative fights or to make divisive signing decisions.
(E-newsletter posts)
State Senate Republicans Elect “Very Civil, Throwback” Leader
LA Times commentary
Sen. Scott Wilk, 61, of Santa Clarita is a throwback Republican lawmaker, the type needed by the GOP if it’s ever going to move forward and regain legislative relevancy.
He’s a self-described “practical conservative” who strives toward bipartisanship and often coauthors bills with Democrats.
“I don’t poke them in the eye,” he said. “I try to be very civil. That’s very much lacking in today’s world.”
Wilk’s brand of conservatism makes him a moderate by contemporary standards, in which politics are polarized into gridlock. What keeps Sacramento churning is one-party rule. Democrats are so dominant that they can enact anything they unite behind. Unfortunately, without ballast on the right, the majority party often veers too far left.
What remains of the weakened Senate Republican Caucus realized the need for change. And that’s a good sign for the GOP and for two-party democracy.
But there’s a sad history for moderate Republican leaders in the state Capitol. Here’s the pattern: When they’ve moved too far to the center — voted for tax increases, fought climate change or not shown enough partisanship — they’ve been dumped.
By contrast, Wilk’s predecessor was dumped partly because she’s too far on the right fringe.
Sen. Shannon Grove, 55, of Bakersfield probably would have been axed anyway, because she committed an unpardonable sin: Two Republican seats were lost in the November election, on her watch. When that happens, the leader is usually ousted.
Meanwhile, Republicans scored elsewhere in California. They picked up one Assembly seat and four in the U.S. House.
Republicans are down to nine state Senate seats. Democrats hold a supermajority of 30. In addition, there’s one vacancy that’s sure to be filled by a Democrat — the seat held by Holly Mitchell before she was elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
The last time Senate Republicans were close to this weak was in 1961, when there were only 10 of them. Long before that, in 1883, there were eight.
Assembly Republicans aren’t much better off. There are only 19 of them, against 59 Democrats. There’s a vacancy and one independent — former GOP leader Chad Mayes of Yucca Valley, who was considered too moderate and dumped. Then he dumped the party.
The current Assembly GOP leader is Marie Waldron of Escondido, who keeps a low profile.
By contrast, Grove’s profile was too high and too cringey for most Senate Republicans. She once described herself as a “gun-carrying, tongue-talking, spirit-filled believer.”
She was a vigorous follower of former President Trump, calling him “the greatest of all time.” Grove bought Trump’s lie that Democrats stole the election with voter fraud.
After being declared the winner by everyone except the booted president and his faithful, Joe Biden tweeted that Americans should “put away the harsh rhetoric.” Grove retweeted with a retort: “Oh, I don’t think so.”
The clincher for Senate Republicans came Jan. 6, when a deadly, Trump-crazed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol. Grove posted a tweet falsely claiming that the rioters were led by the leftist movement known as antifa, not by Trump supporters. She quickly deleted it, but not before it popped eyes throughout the California political world.
“This is an example of a Trumpian legislator who peddled conspiracy theories about the election paying the price and losing a leadership post,” veteran Republican consultant Rob Stutzman said. “Members of the caucus were hearing from the business community that if they expected business to fund Republican election efforts, they needed to make a change.”
In truth, major business donors have practically given up on the GOP in California and have been focusing on electing moderate Democrats to the Legislature.
“Wilk is a good example of the type of big-tent Republican that the California GOP needs to win,” said Marty Wilson, executive vice president of the state Chamber of Commerce and a longtime political player. “He’s a guy who knows how to win by talking about something other than Donald Trump.”
Wilk, the former owner of a public affairs firm who began his career as a legislative staffer, represents a purple district that covers the Santa Clarita, Antelope and Victor valleys. It’s a competitive district that slightly favors Democrats in voter registration, by about eight percentage points. Statewide, Democrats hold a whopping advantage over Republicans of nearly 22 points.
Biden beat Trump in the district by six percentage points, making it tough for down-ticket Republicans. Wilk won reelection by a mere 1.6 points. He’ll be termed out in 2024.
If asked, Wilk will tell you he voted for Trump because the alternative was Biden. What else can a Republican leader say? Six million Californians voted for Trump, even if 11.1 million supported Biden.
Wilk doesn’t think the election was stolen. He sounds like he wishes toxic Trump would get lost and leave the party alone.
Trump was “too much,” Wilk said. “He sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
“With Trump no longer there, hopefully people will start turning their attention to what’s going on in Sacramento,” he added. “Education, roads, water — all determined in Sacramento.”
Wilk turned down a request to co-chair the recall campaign against Gov. Gavin Newsom. If it qualifies for the ballot, “I’ll be supportive,” he said. But because the Democrat will face reelection next year anyway, that’s the proper time to oust him, the GOP leader contends.
Wilk is a turn in the right direction for the GOP — leadership rerouting toward the center.
Texas Electricity Goes Down, But “California Isn’t in the Clear”;
Grid Stability & Renewable Reliability Are Problems
Sacramento Bee
Blackouts were rolling through California, and conservative politicians in Texas were only too happy to pile on with criticism.
“California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz gleefully tweeted after two nights of blackouts left hundreds of thousands of Californians without electricity last August. Cruz and others said the power outages were proof of California’s foolish strategy of relying heavily on solar and wind power.
Now it’s Texas that’s been paralyzed by blackouts, far more widespread and longer-lasting than California’s, as a dangerous winter storm has plunged millions into darkness and freezing cold. The blackouts exposed deep flaws along Texas’ electricity grid — notably a casual, Wild West approach to planning for shortages that pales in comparison to California’s more structured approach.
“In Texas, they’ve sort of prided themselves on not planning,” said Severin Borenstein, a board member of the Independent System Operator, the agency that operates California’s energy grid. As for this week’s blackouts, “I would call it a bit of karma for some of the officials in Texas and elsewhere who were saying California doesn’t know how to run a grid,” said Borenstein, a UC Berkeley economist.
Yet California isn’t exactly in the clear.
The state’s power grid has its own fragility, and another potentially difficult summer is coming in 2021. State officials say they’re building redundancies into the grid to reduce the threat of more blackouts.
But vulnerabilities remain. While last summer’s blackouts were caused mainly by a ferocious heatwave, a major factor was a decline both nights in solar and wind power supplies. Long after the lights came back on, the blackouts raised troubling questions about the reliability of green energy.
California law says renewables must make up 60% of the California electricity supply by 2030 and 100% by 2045. Yet going green can create difficulties, especially when the sun goes down, the solar energy dries up but the demand for air conditioning persists deep into the night.
“We shouldn’t feel smug,” said Jim Bushnell, a member of the Independent System Operator’s market surveillance committee.
A UC Davis economist, Bushnell said the effects of climate change — and the efforts to combat it — are destabilizing California’s power grid. Rising temperatures are causing dramatic peaks in consumption, while the introduction of more renewable to reduce carbon emissions is making the California more dependent on wind, solar and other sources that sometimes aren’t as reliable as gas-fired generating plants.
“We have a much more unpredictable demand for electricity and much more unpredictable supply as well,” Bushnell said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has said California won’t retreat from its green-energy goals and can improve reliability by planning better for peaks in consumption. What’s more, the governor issued a directive saying the state will ban sales of new gas- and diesel-powered cars by 2035.
An all-electric motor vehicle fleet would mean California would have to install thousands of new charging stations across the state, said David Bodek, a senior director at S&P Global Ratings in New York.
“That could create more pressures on the grid,” he said.
With his state on its knees, the usually combative Cruz offered an apology of sorts for his comments about California and its green-energy crusade. “I got no defense,” the senator said on Twitter Tuesday.
Some of his fellow Texas Republicans weren’t willing to admit defeat, however. Congressman Dan Crenshaw tweeted that “Texas’s biggest mistake was learning too many renewable energy lessons from California.”
Crenshaw was falsely blaming Texas’ blackouts on failures of the state’s wind turbines. The turbines did freeze up. But about 60% of the energy loss in Texas was caused by weather-related problems with the state’s fleet of gas- and coal-fired plants, said S&P’s Scott Sagen.
This week’s blackouts weren’t limited to Texas; power grids were faltering in Louisiana, Virginia and elsewhere. But it wasn’t surprising that Texas officials were the ones sniping at California.
The two states are rivals — for political power, economic development and more. It was a major coup when Silicon Valley titans Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced they were moving their headquarters to Texas, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he was moving there, too.
And when it comes to blackouts, there’s a bit of uncomfortable history between California and Texas.
The energy crisis that gripped California in 2000 and 2001, replete with rolling blackouts and stunning spikes in wholesale power prices, was largely the work of unscrupulous power traders from Texas taking advantage of the state’s poorly designed deregulation system.
Leading the way was now-defunct Enron Corp., whose traders devised convoluted schemes to withhold electrons from California to jack up prices.
“This is the home of the late Enron,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston. “Enron schooled California on the shortcomings in the California market.”
Hirs suspects that some Enron-style gamesmanship is underway in Texas this week. He said it’s likely that some power generators “are dragging their feet” about ramping up electricity in order to raise electricity prices.
“I think we’ll be finding some evidence of that when we get to the postmortem of this catastrophe,” he said. The state has announced it will hold investigations into what went wrong at the power-grid agency, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
Borenstein said California and Texas have this in common: Their power grids have been made vulnerable by extreme swings in weather, “almost certainly climate change related.”
Last summer’s heatwave caused demand to spike all over California and the West. The winter storms eliminated more than 40,000 megawatts of Texas’ generating capacity; that’s nearly enough electricity to get California through a typical summer day.
There are major differences between the management of two states’ grids, however.
For one thing, Texas’ grid is mostly an island unto itself, largely cut off from other states. California’s grid is interconnected with other Western states and can easily import and export electricity. The California grid managers asked residents to conserve power this week to free up exports for Texas and other struggling states, but Hirs said it’s unlikely that much power would reach Texas.
Another big distinction: California utilities are required to line up excess power in advance, a 15% oversupply to act as a buffer against plant shutdowns or spikes in demand. As part of the California system, generators receive “capacity payments” for making their plants available on standby in case they’re needed on short notice.
Texas has no such system. The absence of capacity payments means there’s less incentive to build new generating plants, Sagen said.
In other words, the state can be woefully unprepared in a crisis. “We don’t compensate the generators to keep their equipment ready in the winter,” said Hirs, the Houston economist.
In the wake of last summer’s blackouts, California is requiring its utilities to do even more. The Public Utilities Commission last week ordered the big three utilities, PG&E Corp., Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, to line up additional supplies in advance of summer. The goal is to prevent blackouts “in the event of an extreme weather event in 2021,” the commission said.
Borenstein said California has to do more than simply bulk up. The state has to do a better job of planning for predictable declines in supply, as when solar power fades during the evening.
There’s nothing wrong with fighting global warming but “we’ve got to be ready for these events,” he said.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article249315325.html#storylink=cpy
CalEPA to Evaluate Cap & Trade as Climate Change Tool
CalMatters
Newsom administration officials said that they will evaluate the role of California’s landmark cap and trade program as the state examines its strategies for tackling climate change over the next decade.
At an oversight hearing earlier this week, Jared Blumenfeld, secretary for environmental protection, and Air Resources Board Chair Liane Randolph said the carbon trading program will be a key part of the conversation as California updates its climate roadmap, called a scoping plan, over the next two years.
Neither Blumenfeld nor Randolph, however, would say specifically what will be examined or how the program might change. “Any changes would need to be carefully thought through and accompanied by economic and environmental processes,” Blumenfeld said.
Launched in 2013, California’s cap and trade program is the nation’s first economy-wide carbon market. The program sets a declining cap on greenhouse gas emissions that polluters — including oil refineries, power plants and manufacturers — can meet by buying and trading carbon credits or updating their facilities.
Independent experts have raised concerns that the program might be too weak to achieve California’s ambitious climate goals.
In addition, environmental justice groups have long criticized California’s carbon market, saying that former air board chair Mary Nichols had done too little to protect vulnerable Californians living in the shadow of fossil fuel polluters such as oil refineries and power plants.
Randolph addressed those concerns at the hearing, but as market administrator of the cap and trade program, she was cautious about saying anything that might affect the market for carbon credits.
“This remains an important space for us to work directly with environmental justice and community organizations to ensure that their views are incorporated into our work,” Randolph said.
California in 2016 pledged to cut its climate-warming pollution 40% over the next ten years, and it is relying on the carbon trading program for nearly half of those reductions in 2030.
“We’re calling on all our existing climate policies to do more in the next decade. We have no choice but to accelerate the rate of emission reductions dramatically,” Blumenfeld said today.
No changes to the program would happen soon. The process will begin this spring, and the final plan is expected to be presented to the board in late 2022, Blumenfeld said.
“Opportunities to further strengthen the cap and trade program will begin as part of the public process to update the scoping plan. To do so now would be premature,” Blumenfeld said.
Today’s hearing was held by a Senate budget subcommittee chaired by Sen. Bob Wieckowski, a Democrat from Fremont. Wieckowski asked Randolph, who was appointed chair of the air board in December, whether she planned to revisit the weight of cap and trade in the new scoping plan.
“Yes, basically, the answer is yes,” Randolph said. “The scoping plan process will rely on analyzing the existing programs and authorities to determine how to achieve reductions and then to determine what additional reductions need to be addressed by cap and trade.”
The statements at the hearing reaffirm Blumenfeld’s commitment in a letter to Wieckowski over the summer to weigh “the extent to which the state’s climate strategy should rely on the cap-and-trade program reductions relative to other approaches.”
The discussion met resistance from oil and gas producers, but was welcomed by environmental justice groups.
“Changing this market-based system now would only create economic uncertainty for businesses and raise costs for consumers, all at a time when the state’s overall economy is in a precarious position,” said Rock Zierman, CEO of the California Independent Petroleum Association, which represents independent crude oil and natural gas producers.
Kevin Slagle, a spokesperson for the Western States Petroleum Association, said “cap-and-trade is doing exactly what it was intended to do — driving innovation — which has helped the state meet its climate goals almost four years earlier than anticipated.”
California’s environmental justice advocates have long opposed the program because they say it comes at the expense of climate policies that would benefit low-income communities of color that are disproportionately burdened by air pollution.
“The upcoming CARB scoping plan update is an opportunity to address the bifurcation of climate and air pollution, and move towards a mechanism that will allow for direct emissions reductions,” said Neena Mohan, climate justice associate at the California Environmental Justice Alliance.
In January, the program entered a new phase that adds new requirements through 2030. These include doubling the rate at which the emissions cap drops and adding a price ceiling for credits to prevent costs for industries from increasing past a certain point.
Ross Brown with the Legislative Analyst’s office said at the hearing that California’s 2020 greenhouse gas target, which the state reached four years early, required cutting emissions by about 1% each year. To meet the 2030 goals, California would need to increase those cuts to roughly 4% each year, he said.
“Just having the program in place is not sufficient to ensure that the program is achieving the goals,” Brown said. “Implementation of the program and design of the program matters a lot.”
One concern that Brown and others have raised is that companies may be banking unused pollution credits, called allowances, to use later.
“It’s possible that when you get out into the later years up to 2030, that large bank of allowances could be used to comply with the program,” Brown said. “And as a result, the state might not be close to its ambitious emission targets out to 2030.”
Wieckowski said that problem haunts him. “I lose sleep at night, knowing that we were told that we couldn’t amend that bill, when staff and you in particular were saying that this allowance problem was a very big problem,” he said. “And now we have to deal with it.”
The Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee, which is made up of researchers and academics appointed by the governor and leaders in the Legislature, has proposed metrics for tracking the bank of extra credits.
“I think we are going to see that the number of banked allowances is far in excess of what the board said in its previous rulemaking statement,” said Danny Cullenward, a lecturer at Stanford Law School and a member of the emissions advisory committee. He said an air board analysis of banked allowances is expected by the end of this year
The hearing comes one day before a cap and trade auction where companies and others can bid to purchase pollution credits. The timing raised red flags for oil companies covered by cap and trade.
“Our concern is that the hearing may unnecessarily create uncertainty about the cap-and-trade program that could affect the auction,” Slagle said.
Cullenward questioned, however, whether those concerns were justified. “Why is it not appropriate to ask questions about the performance of the program? If not now, when is it okay?” he said. “Neither the legislature nor the administration did anything in a way that would prejudice people’s behavior at the auction tomorrow.”
Californians Hit the Emigrant Trail, Drive Up Housing Prices Nationwide
NY Times
Statistically speaking, Idaho is one of America’s greatest economic success stories. The state has low unemployment and high income growth. It has expanded education spending while managing to shore up budget reserves. Brad Little, the state’s Republican governor, has attributed this run of prosperity to the mix of low taxes and minimal regulation that conservatives call “the business climate.”
But there is another factor at play: Californians, fleeing high home prices, are moving to Idaho in droves. For the past several years, Idaho has been one of the fastest-growing states, with the largest share of new residents coming from California. This fact can be illustrated with census data, moving vans — or resentment.
Home prices rose 20 percent in 2020, according to Zillow, and in Boise, “Go Back to California” graffiti has been sprayed along the highways. The last election cycle was a referendum on growth and housing, and included a fringe mayoral candidate who campaigned on a promise to keep Californians out. The dichotomy between growth and its discontents has fused the city’s politics and collective consciousness with a question that city leaders around the country were asking even before the pandemic and remote work trends accelerated relocation: Is it possible to import California’s growth without also importing its housing problems?
“I can’t point to a city that has done it right,” said Lauren McLean, Boise’s Democratic mayor.
That’s because as bad as California’s affordable housing problem is, it isn’t really a California problem. It is a national one. From rising homelessness to anti-development sentiment to frustration among middle-class workers who’ve been locked out of the housing market, the same set of housing issues has bubbled up in cities across the country. They’ve already visited Boise, Nashville, Denver and Austin, Texas, and many other high-growth cities. And they will become even more widespread as remote workers move around.
Housing costs are relative, of course, so anyone leaving Los Angeles or San Francisco will find almost any other city to have a bountiful selection of homes that seem unbelievably large and cheap. But for those tethered to the local economy, the influx of wealthier outsiders pushes housing costs further out of reach.
According to a recent study by Redfin, the national real estate brokerage, the budget for out-of-town home buyers moving to Boise is 50 percent higher than locals’ — $738,000 versus $494,000. In Nashville, out-of-towners also have a budget that is 50 percent higher than locals. In Austin it’s 32 percent, Denver 26 percent and Phoenix 23 percent.
Frustrating as this is for prospective home buyers, the real pain is felt among low-income tenants, a quarter of whom — about 11 million U.S. households — are already spending more than halftheir pretax income on rent. As rising costs filter through the market and the rent burden gets more severe, food budgets get squeezed, families double up and the most vulnerable end up on the streets.
In city after city, studies have shown that homelessness has a distinct financial tipping point. As soon as the local rent burden reaches the point where renters on average spend more than a third of their income on housing, the number of people on the streets starts to rise sharply, according to researchers at Zillow and elsewhere.
Cities are built around jobs, and the nation’s inequality reflects that. In a trend that has been exhaustively documented by economists and journalists, over the past four decades the U.S. economy has bifurcated into high-paying jobs in fields like tech and finance and low-paying jobs in retail and personal services. It could be described as two separate societies, but in U.S. metropolitan areas these societies are intertwined.
This is as true in Boise as it is in San Francisco. Some work has to be done in person. No matter how high housing costs get, there is not, as of yet, a way to telecommute to a cleaning job. So unless the hordes of expatriate Californians flocking to cheaper cities expect their children to be in remote school forever, to never again eat at a restaurant, to always tidy their own homes — and unless companies leaving California expect to do without the services of janitors and security guards — the underlying problem will persist in every next city that has the misfortune of becoming desirable.
Scholars started documenting California’s affordable housing crisis in the mid-1970s, and since then liberal and conservative economists have identified stringent zoning regulations and not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) politics as leading causes of the nation’s housing problem. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have taken up the NIMBY issue. Jack Kemp, the secretary of housing and urban development for the first President George Bush, convened a housing advisory commission whose 1991 reportwas called “Not in My Back Yard: Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing.”
President Barack Obama spoke against “rules that stand in the way of building new housing” in a speech in 2016, and President Donald J. Trump, echoing Mr. Bush, signed an executive order in 2019 establishing a White House council on affordable housing. (Mr. Trump reversed course a year later, ending an Obama-era program intended to combat racial segregation in the suburbs.)
The problem is that opposition to new housing also has bipartisan agreement. Blue cities full of people who say they want a more equitable society consistently vote to push housing costs onto others. They will vote for higher taxes to fund social programs, but also make sure that whatever affordable housing does get built is built far away from them. Red suburbs full of people who say regulation should be minimal and property rights protected insist that their local governments legislate a million little rules that dictate what can be built where. What does it mean to respect property rights? In zoning fights, it gets fuzzy.
“Normally we think of ownership as determining who has a right to use a piece of property in a certain way,” said Emily Hamilton, an economist and director of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. But when a city tries to add density, she said, it’s common to see this framed “as harming the property rights of people who could experience changes in their neighborhood.”
It’s a distant memory now, but in the weeks before the pandemic shut down the economy, housing policy was having a minor political moment. The field of Democratic presidential candidates, including President Biden, had released a flurry of federal housing proposals that varied in their particulars but revolved around a series of tax breaks, affordable housing funds and promises to encourage intransigent local governments to make it easier to build.
The track record of previous administrations suggests that the federal government can accomplish only so much. That’s why Dr. Hamilton, who closely follows local housing policies, is encouraged that there are also a flurry of proposals coming out of state and local governments.
In 2018 the City Council in Minneapolis voted to outlaw the practice of declaring some neighborhoods off limits for apartment buildings — what’s known as single-family zoning — becoming the first major U.S. city to do so. Since then, a half-dozen states have introduced bills to limit single-family zoning. Various others have passed laws to prevent cities from banning backyard cottages and require them to permit more apartments. Ms. McLean, the mayor of Boise, recently started an effort to rewrite the city’s zoning code.