San Francisco’s Wiener and other Bay Area lawmakers comprise the core of the Legislature’s housing-focused cohort. The state has more leverage over counties and cities because the Legislature has passed a stream of housing laws. California has backed Breed on fourplexes and warned San Francisco on project rejections. The state’s challenge that Anaheim violated housing law collided with a broader corruption scandal. Attorney General Rob Bonta has defended a hard-fought law allowing four units on single-home lots against local lawsuits and attempts to hide behind mountain lions he weighed in on a local housing review dispute yesterday. Newsom had scarcely taken office when he announced California would sue Huntington Beach over affordable housing requirements (the Orange County enclave sued the state and lost over separate housing laws). Assembly member Matt Haney pledged his support.īut the dramatic intervention by the Bay fits with a more muscular state role on housing law compliance. Scott Wiener lauded a review of the city’s “broken, illegal housing policy” after having urged the state to sue. Breed welcomed the state’s probe, as did San Francisco’s state legislators: Sen. San Francisco Mayor London Breed ran on accelerating housing construction and has repeatedly clashed with the supervisors over both individual projects and broader policies to accelerate development, which has spilled into a legal clash over dueling ballot measures. It was the focal point of an expensive Assembly race between two Democrats who agreed on pretty much everything else. Housing has come to dominate San Francisco politics. Specifically, HCD Director Gustavo Velasquez said the agency would examine “processes and political decision-making in San Francisco that delay and impede the creation of housing.” Velasquez also brandished a hammer, promising to sniff out and penalize violations of state housing law. California’s Department of Housing and Community Development announced yesterday that San Francisco would be the target of a first-of-its-kind review of housing policy. Gavin Newsom wanted to make an example of his home city. That confluence of forces is a microcosm of a broader affordability crisis that two-thirds of Californians see as a big problem. That shortfall has helped push rents to prohibitive levels, squeezing a shrinking middle class and exacerbating homelessness. A protracted, expensive and byzantine process has helped dig a housing chasm that has the city facing a state mandate to plan for some 82,000 new units in the next decade. San Francisco is a notoriously difficult place to permit and build homes. THE BUZZ: The Newsom administration just hurled a lightning bolt into the epicenter of California’s housing crisis.
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