By Emily Hoeven : sfchronicle – excerpt (via email)

Following their devastating losses in the 2024 election, many Democrats have eagerly aligned themselves with the burgeoning “abundance” movement, which contends that blue states like California need to focus less on sluggish bureaucratic processes and more on tangible outcomes to win back voters.

But it’s one thing to embrace a slogan and another thing entirely to take action. Here in California, we’re about to see which side of that divide our leaders stand on.

 

Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, is pushing one of the biggest bills in recent memory, AB609, to exempt almost all infill housing development from California Environmental Quality Act review. And it’s just one of 20 bills in an ambitious, bipartisan package that aims to streamline and simplify the state’s housing approval process and make it easier to build the estimated 2.5 million homes California needs.

Actually passing these bills, however, will require that Democrats risk alienating some of their most influential constituencies, including labor unions and environmental justice groups — some of which have already come out swinging against Wicks’ bill and others.

It’s “a moment of truth for the Legislature,” Michael Lane, state policy director for the urbanist organization SPUR, told me.

Will lawmakers move forward with bold bills, or will they revert to the failed policies of the past?

One key lawmaker who will play a decisive role in answering that question is state Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Fremont, whom Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, recently appointed as leader of the Senate Housing Committee.

Committee leaders have significant sway in the Legislature. Not only can their stance on a bill meaningfully influence its chance of passage, but they also can decide whether to give a bill a hearing or kill it in cold blood.

Wahab isn’t the only committee leader or legislative power broker who will determine the fate of California’s “abundance” agenda, but she may be one of the biggest wild cards. In her first hearing as housing committee chair last month, she proclaimed that it’s time for California to “move away from development, development, development” and also stated “transit-oriented development doesn’t necessarily work.”

Those comments made many abundance devotees justifiably nervous. But where does Wahab really stand? I recently spoke to her for more than an hour to get some clues.

To start, she pledged to set a hearing for “every bill in my committee” — a welcome sign.

I followed up by asking if she supported aggressive CEQA streamlining after years of incremental carveouts. Although Wicks’ bill may seem revolutionary, it’s based on recommendations from the Little Hoover Commission, an independent, highly respected state oversight agency that isn’t known for taking outlandish stances.

“I do think there are ways we can streamline that further” to ensure “it’s not hijacked and abused for unnecessary reasons,” Wahab told me. As a former Hayward city council member, she’d been “very surprised” to learn that “one person can stall and drag out a development just because they wanted their own little utopia of how that development should look.”

At the same time, Wahab said, CEQA needs to be “protected” so residents can be shielded from environmental hazards such as floods and wildfires.

But that stance only reinforces the need for reforming CEQA. As the Little Hoover Commission noted, CEQA’s “strong bias toward the status quo means that it can be used to block projects that would help improve the environment,” such as dense infill housing that limits sprawl in high-risk areas and allows residents to rely less on cars.

Given Wahab’s comments about development, I was also curious to get her take on a February study from YIMBY Law that found recent state laws aimed at accelerating development have “had limited to no impact on the state’s housing supply to date.” One key reason, according to research conducted by UC Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf and Clayton Nall, a UC Santa Barbara associate professor of political science, is because they’re filled with loopholes, exceptions and costly requirements — while ADUs are popping up all over California because they’re subject to far simpler rules.

Did Wahab agree with this assessment?

Wahab said that “streamlining is incredibly important,” but “all the streamlining efforts haven’t necessarily translated to cost savings” or to “mass development.” She added that the quality of housing is just as important as the quantity.

No one disputes that people should have dignified places to live. But there’s ample evidence to suggest such places won’t become widely available without slashing red tape.

In a report issued last month, the California Assembly’s Select Committee on Permitting Reform found that the state’s “approach to permitting facilitates inaction, not action.” And the nonpartisan think tank RAND concluded in a study released this month that California “is the most expensive state for multifamily housing production in every cost category the authors considered,” due in part to excessively long completion timelines and “unusually large” fees — which in turn drive up rents.

I also asked Wahab to expand on her declaration that transit-oriented development doesn’t work. In the March committee hearing, she’d said, “The types of developments that are going up with zero parking and all these giveaways to developers have also not translated to housing that has dignity for people to raise their families in.”

Wahab told me she was skeptical of state laws that eliminated parking minimums at developments near major transit stops.

“Completely stripping away parking doesn’t make sense,” she said, adding that cars are often necessary for families, the elderly and the disabled.

That’s fair — but the law doesn’t prevent developers from building parking. It just stipulates that the government can’t force them to provide it — increasing project costs —when alternative transportation is just steps away.

I wrapped up by asking Wahab about her guiding principles for the committee.

“My core focus is making sure that we’re fair for all of California and not just one region or another,” Wahab told me. “I do believe in housing at all income levels, and I do believe in safeguards for communities and residents as the ultimate goal when we’re talking about housing policies.”… (more)