97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

This is worth considering.

I find it despicable that otherwise liberal, progressive people are willing to immediately discard democratic results simply because they dislike them.

There is nothing unconstitutional (CA) or unlawful about "NIMBY policies". However you may feel about them, they are valid, lawful policy goals in a democracy.

If you don't like them, you should organize to defeat them democratically.

So, how does driving through the interior with apparently zero knowledge of what the relevant goals are do anything to inform you of whether cities are meeting them.

> When I stop for lunch or a break I like to check out the local real estate scene and its often the case in these cities that there are many houses and other living accommodations available at modest prices.

Modest for you, perhaps. Modest for the incomes in the area? Probsbly less so. In any case, does this tell you anything about whether they are meeting the needs assessments that look at availability in multiple levels? Probably not.

> Hard to imagine a city like Mojave not meeting it "goal".

Mojave is a “census-designated place” in unincorporated Kern County; it not a city or other jurisdiction of its own subject to the targets; Kern County is (the headline about cities is wrong, jurisdictions subject to the targets include both cities and counties, the latter for their unincorporated areas.)

Kern County is among those not meeting targets, though only in the Above Moderate income Regional Housing Needs Assessment, not the Low or Very Low income assessments.

What this means is that a family making $100k/yr can spend dramatically more than one making $50k/yr, and making $200k can spend more on housing their the other two families make in a year.

In most cities, this plays out by having islands of expensive neighborhoods in desirable areas. And housing decreases proportional to desirability as you get out. The problem in some cities in California is that there are so many extremely wealthy families, that the island of desirability has become so large that there are no affordable housing anywhere close to where the good jobs are, so lower income people are forced to commute for longer and longer.

Most other cities do not have the same numbers of extremely wealthy people. But in every city where a large number of disproportionately wealthy people move in, a housing crisis seems to follow.

It used to be, living closer to the city meant a compromise in some other area. Maybe you lived in an apartment and took the bus everywhere because you couldn't afford to have a house and a car in the neighborhood you want to be in. But now, people can afford to have a single family home with a garage in areas that really should be limited to large apartments.

I spend my free time doing some advocacy in this space. Heres a few things you might not know.

1) Nimby's dont derive power from the ballot box, they derive power from distinctly undemocratic processes like courts and arbitrary middle of the day planning meetings. The biggest NIMBY tool is CEQA, the "california environmental quality act" which allows anyone to sue a project for "environmental" reasons. The reasons are spurious at best (project would increase traffic at an intersection). Nearly all CEQA law suits are filed by neighbors who want to kill the project, or by unions on projects that aren't using union labor. The law suits are rarely won by the plaintiff, but they are nearly always successful because they delay projects long enough to get them canceled. The second tool is the design review meeting, which often occurs around 2pm on some random mid week day, when most people are at work and unable to leave their job. A single project may go through 5 design review meetings where retired nimbys with nothing better to do with their time berate new developments for arbitrary reasons (make it smaller, its out of character etc). In this system, its not "one person one vote" but rather "your power in this process is proportional to how much time you can spend at city hall during normal working hours on a recurring basis and grind it out over months and months of meetings"

2) Nimby policies are being defeated democratically. Our elected officials are realizing the harm that these policies are causing and seeing that an anti-nimby constituency is forming. SB 827 is a democratic solution to this problem.

3) Hyperlocal control (aka, cities deciding their own land use policies) is undemocratic, and essentially feudal. It limits the voices heard in democracy to the people who are able to afford living in the city in question, but excludes the voices of those who stakeholders in the city in some other way, say by working in the city, or commuting through the city. Local control allows cities to capture outsized benefits of development while forcing other cities to absorb the negative externalities. For instance, cupertino built the new apple campus for 12k workers, but didn't build any new housing for them. Now the rest of the bay area needs to deal with the reality of these 12k new highly paid residents looking for housing. Another example is Atherton suing to block caltrain electrifiction within its city limits. A single city is blocking an expansion of public transit that serves 60k riders per day. Why is this city allowed to delay the project and create a negative impact on all of these commuters? Why are they not beholden to a larger set of stakeholders than just the people that live within their boarders?