Housing Near Transit Is More Important Than Local Control: A Response to Jim Newton
This piece critical of SB 79 on local control grounds makes an unusually clear and honest argument; so I want to give it a thoughtful response. Newton makes five main points:
It’s wrong for the state to override local zoning because it’s a violation of subsidiarity and local control comparable to Donald Trump sending troops into American cities to address crime.
SB 79 is inappropriate because it fails to consider local context and instead treats transit stations as “dots on a map,” around which housing can be built irrespective of neighborhood conditions and needs.
That said, state level intervention on housing is understandable and somewhat justified: LA is falling behind on housing, in large part because its local government makes it too hard to build.
LA should “commit to housing growth” by upzoning in places where it makes sense and “streamline permitting, remove delays and overly burdensome regulations.“
Building more market rate housing won’t address homelessness.
Newton begins by conceding that Los Angeles is failing on housing production, but insists that state legislation is not the answer because it violates the principle of subsidiarity:
SB 79 runs afoul of the principle of subsidiarity, which argues that problems should be solved at the most local level achievable. Families understand their problems better than neighbors, communities are better at directing their futures than cities, and so on.
This argument makes a lot of abstract conceptual sense: local governments are best equipped to consider local conditions while doing the block by block, parcel by parcel planning for housing growth.
At the close of his piece, Newton argues that the City of LA can “both maintain its authority and deter the state from unwise intervention” by upzoning in places where housing density makes sense, streamlining permitting, and reforming overly burdensome regulations.
The issue for housing advocates is that in spite of what they say, Los Angeles’ elected officials’ actions have made it clear that they do not actually want to do any of that.
Senator Wiener introduced similar transit-oriented development legislation in 2018, and again in 2019. The LA City Council opposed both bills explicitly on local-control grounds. Their message was clear: taking away our control over land use is inappropriate because we can solve our housing problems ourselves through local programs and plan updates.
How have they used their local control since then?
They have not planned for housing growth “in areas already suited for it.” In November 2021, the city updated its Housing Element, adopting a promising plan to broadly legalize more housing by rezoning throughout the city. When it came time to actually implement this plan, the Council did not follow through on its word: they failed to actually rezone and instead enacted a series of incentive programs that cannot be used on 72% of the city’s residentially-zoned land. Numerous rail stations remain surrounded by single family zoning.
They have not streamlined permitting or removed delays and overly burdensome regulations. Mayor Bass and the Council have repeatedly hacked away at the Mayor’s signature streamlining measure for 100% affordable projects; and they have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of public money illegally attempting to block these projects. Experienced developers describe Los Angeles’ Department of Building Safety as the worst public agency they have worked with anywhere in the country: fully completed buildings routinely sit empty for months while waiting for final inspections and utilities connections. Worse still, the adoption of Measure ULA, a poorly drafted transfer tax, has essentially halted new multifamily development in the city since its passage in 2022.
How has this worked out for everyday Angelenos looking for housing? Not well: fair market rent for a two bedroom apartment has climbed from $1,700 to $2,700. The price of the average single family home has risen from $638,000 in January 2018 to $1,025,000 this year. Los Angeles has the worst household overcrowding rates in the country. It has the worst homelessness crisis in the country. City leaders have no intention of changing course.
Given this record of inaction and failure—and similar failures elsewhere in the state—it’s clear that passing SB 79 is solving this problem at the most local level achievable.
All that said, while SB 79 will help build more housing overall, it is narrowly targeted to build more housing near our highest quality transit, which addresses a related but different problem.
As discussed earlier, California suffers from a general housing shortage. It also suffers from a transit funding crisis caused, in part, by transit agencies’ inability to develop their land and local governments’ refusal to zone for dense housing within walking distance of rail stations to provide ridership. SB 79 legalizes dense housing near these stations and gives transit agencies the authority to develop their land.
With regard to the former councilwoman’s pithy criticism, the idea that SB 79 is just “making policy” and not “solving a problem” only makes sense if you believe that local governments’ refusal to allow the kinds of housing densities that make transit work is not a problem. If you do think the fact that the state of California and the Federal government spent billions of dollars to build rail lines that have anemic ridership because they exclusively serve two million dollar single family homes is a problem, SB 79 is a sensible and targeted solution to that problem.
Further, SB 79 does not “substitute far-away authority for local insight” or “assume that Sacramento knows better than Los Angeles what is best for the city and its neighborhoods” at all. Far from treating neighborhoods like dots on a map, the bill gives local governments significant control over how to implement the required housing density near train stations. Specifically, Section 65912.161 outlines how local governments can adopt a “transit-oriented development alternative plan” that gives them the ability to direct density to appropriate parcels, subject to certain guardrails.
The major difference between President Trump’s deployment of federal troops to address purported a crime wave in Washington DC and a supposed immigration crisis in Los Angeles and Senator Wiener’s legislation to legalize housing near transit in California cities is that the President is responding to a fake crisis in cities where crime is falling while Senator Wiener is responding to a real crisis in a state where housing costs and homelessness are rising.
Finally, the idea that increasing market rate housing production will not benefit homeless people in any way is wrong. Homelessness is a housing problem, and abundant inexpensive housing makes solving it much easier because each public dollar goes much further: if Los Angeles produced new housing at the same rate as the 90th percentile metropolitan area for a decade, market rents would fall by 18.1 percent, and federal cost savings on the Section 8 housing voucher program would be enough to increase the number of assisted families by 23.8 percent.
I understand that city-level control over land use has historically been a “sacred power to shape California locally;” but it isn’t working. We need to change course. We should pass SB 79.