This week in affordable housing news…:

State update:

• A growing number of vacant seats in the Legislature has begun to have an impact on some of this session’s highest-profile bills—a political challenge that could expand over the course of the year as a combination of redistricting and term limits change the face of the Capitol. A week after a single-payer health care proposal was pulled due to lack of support in the Assembly, an ambitious tenant protection bill authored by Asm. Alex Lee (D-San Jose) also died this week without a vote, in spite of support from a broad coalition of equity groups, YIMBYs, and tenants rights advocates. One major reason, says CalMatters?The recent departure of nearly a half-dozen key Assemblymembers who have narrowed the Democratic super-majority—including David Chiu, Jim Frazier, Ed Chau, Lorena Gonzalez, and (just this week) Jim Cooper, who has announced he will be running for Sacramento County Sheriff.

• “We would much rather be building this housing than winning this lawsuit,” Eden Housing CEO Linda Mandolini told the San Francisco Chronicle this week, after a state court rejected a lawsuit from a neighborhood group seeking to stop a long-delayed Eden development in downtown Livermore. The state court judge, Frank Roesch, said the claims made by Save Livermore Downtown were “almost utterly without merit” and that rejecting their arguments was “not a close call.” Mandolini told the Chronicle that the CEQA lawsuit, which came after years of review and city approval, had delayed the project by another year and forced Eden to return $68 million in low income housing tax credits. “It points out that there is a problem in the way this world works,” she said. “You can use CEQA to delay housing almost indefinitely.” The neighborhood group opposed to the project is expected to appeal the ruling.

• The City of Woodside’s brief stint as a sanctuary for mountain lions has come, at last, to an end. Only a few weeks after local officials sought to declare the entire city a protected mountain lion habitat—a none-too-subtle effort to avoid a new state law streamlining duplex conversions—the city backtracked this week in the face of social media ridicule, national media coverage, and a promised investigation from the state Attorney General. On Sunday, the town council released a statement saying they had been advised by Department of Fish and Wildfire “that the entire Town of Woodside cannot be considered habitat:” “As such, the Town Council has instructed staff to immediately begin accepting SB 9 applications.”

ICYMI – Top news stories:
L.A. voters are angry, think elected officials aren’t equipped to solve homelessness
Los Angeles Times
“The degradation of life in L.A. is exponential, and I don’t see an end. The politicians are doofuses,” one voter said. “California is the fifth-largest economy in the world. Why can’t we do anything?” said another. The comments came from voters in a series of diverse focus groups conducted in December by the Committee for Greater L.A., a coalition of civic leaders, to gauge public sentiment on homelessness heading into campaigns for Los Angeles mayor and county supervisor. The pollsters who led the conversations said they were stunned by the depth of feeling and unanimity across party affiliation, socioeconomic standing, race and ethnicity. “I’ve probably sat through, I don’t know, a couple hundred focus groups … and never in my entire career, which is many decades, have I ever seen this kind of result,” said longtime political strategist Darry Sragow.

Cities try to thwart state’s push for housing
CalMatters – Column by Dan Walters
The political and legal war over housing, pitting the state of California against its 400 cities, has become a version of Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” series—a perpetual duel between two comic strip warriors, who try constantly to outwit each other in a competition where neither can prevail. The state enacts laws and regulations aimed at compelling cities to accept more affordable housing construction. Cities counter with local laws and regulations to evade their housing quotas. Although the state might seem to have the upper hand, one would have to say that the cities have been remarkably successful in evading their civic and legal responsibilities because construction falls way short of the state’s goals.

San Diego County’s housing future: Building up, not out
San Diego Union Tribune – Column by Michael Smolens
Local governments are facing a new reality: Build more dense housing projects—it’s the law. Even before a pivotal state appellate court ruling last month thwarted an attempt to block a high-rise in San Diego’s Bankers Hill, some city officials around California essentially have said state laws are requiring them to approve bigger projects, even if they don’t want to. That trend is already well under way within the city of San Diego, where a political shift at City Hall in recent years has resulted in more aggressive policies to build bigger, taller housing projects than called for under previous plans—despite continued opposition from neighborhood groups.