Full article by Steven Yoder at Sacramento News & Review
The numbers on California’s housing crisis keep trending the wrong way.
The percentage of the state’s homebuyers who can afford a median-priced single family slid from 24% in first quarter 2022 to 16% in the second. Homelessness in Sacramento spiked 67%t between 2019 and 2022, a June count found. In an April poll Californians ranked housing affordability and homelessness No. 1 and No. 2 as the state’s most urgent issues.
Still, state legislative experts didn’t expect much of 2022 for housing after a breakthrough 2021. Last year, the legislature passed major laws — especially Senate Bills 9, 10 and 478 — that mostly eliminated single-family zoning and limited rules that had stymied housing production. “Everyone thought this would be a quiet year,” says Muhammad Alameldin, a policy associate at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.
Instead, the legislature passed three marquee housing bills — two opening up commercial zones for residential housing development and one eliminating parking requirements for new developments near transit — that had died the previous year. In the end it was, says Alameldin, an “amazing housing legislative year.”