Legislators should focus on SCA 2, not on SB 9, SB 10 and their like
John H. Welborne is the publisher and editor of the Larchmont Chronicle.
I agree with our columnist Marilyn Wells (The NIMBY Diaries, Page 10 of Section 2) that affordable housing needs to be built. However, the many current, developer-backed bills in Sacramento (such as SB 9 and SB 10) absolutely do not achieve that.
Those and most other “housing” bills in the legislature are written by, and for, real estate developers … to allow them to continue squeezing in as much expensive housing as the market will bear. But definitely not “affordable” housing.
The only way that I can see to get affordable housing built is for Sacramento politicians to allocate billions of our tax dollars to experienced affordable housing developers to construct exclusively affordable housing — for a broad range of lower-income occupants. To do that, however, it first seems necessary to amend a racist 1950s-era impediment that is in our California Constitution.
To that, not the developer’s favored bills like SB 9 and 10, is where our Sacramento legislators should be devoting their attention. They should be working to get Senate Constitutional Amendment 2 (SCA 2, whose sponsors include local state Sen. Ben Allen) on the November 2022 ballot. We need to eliminate an impediment to actually building affordable public housing.
Category: News
