This week in affordable housing news…:

Top news stories:

A new California housing law has done little to encourage building, report says
Los Angeles Times
Once seen as the death knell for single-family-home neighborhoods in California, a new law meant to create more duplexes has instead done little to encourage construction in some of the largest cities in the state, according to a new report published this week by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. SB 9 (Wiener) was introduced two years ago as a way to help solve California’s severe housing crunch by allowing homeowners to convert their homes into duplexes on a single-family lot or divide the parcel in half to build another duplex. The new Terner Center report finds, however, that in 13 cities across the state considered high-opportunity areas for duplexes SB 9 projects are “limited or nonexistent.”

Mayors: Affordable housing demand is crushing us
Politico
Red states, blue states, big cities, small towns—mayors from across the country this week are venting about their struggles to address a housing affordability crisis and increase in homelessness. “At the end of the day…people aren’t looking to their senators to solve homelessness,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed told mayors from across the country at this week’s gathering of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “They’re not looking to their state legislators to solve homelessness. They’re looking to their mayor.”

Editorial: Yes, it really will take billions of dollars a year to solve homelessness in California
Los Angeles Times
Gov. Gavin Newsom has said that addressing homelessness is his top priority. It should be. California has 30% of the country’s homeless population and 50% of those who sleep outside as opposed to in shelters or temporary housing. Certainly no California governor has responded to the humanitarian crisis the way Newsom has. He has invested in programs to prevent and reduce homelessness like no governor before him, and Newsom’s budget proposal for the 2023-24 fiscal year contains $3.4 billion in homelessness funding. The question is whether $3.4 billion is enough.

Q&A:  L.A. Mayor Karen Bass: “The city is demanding the tents go away”
Gimme Shelter Podcast – CalMatters and Los Angeles Times
When she was running for mayor of Los Angeles last year, Karen Bass spoke often about how the homelessness crisis is what prompted her to leave a safe seat in Congress and “come home.” Now, weeks into her tenure running the country’s second-largest city, she spoke about her views on a host of housing and homelessness issues. “Who knows what’s going to happen in 2025,” Bass said. “So I need to work as close as possible with the Biden administration, not knowing what’s going to happen in 2025, and I need to work immediately now on [Measure] ULA, even though the dollars aren’t available yet.”

How environmental law is misused to stop housing
CalMatters – Oped by Dan Walters
It’s well known that the California Environmental Quality Act, signed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970 and meant to protect the natural environment in public and private projects, is routinely misused to stop or delay much-needed housing construction. Anti-housing NIMBYs in affluent communities misuse it to stymie high-density, multi-family projects, arguing that their neighborhoods’ bucolic ambience would be altered. And construction unions misuse it to extract wage concessions from developers. Two recent state appellate court actions in the crowded San Francisco Bay Area—one expanding the use of CEQA by those who oppose housing projects and another that restricts its use—underscore the law’s chaotic role.