CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 9, 2025 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WINTER FIRESTORMS CAN GIVE HOUSING BILLS A FRESH START”
By almost any
measure, the spate of housing bills adopted by California lawmakers over the
last five years has failed.
But the January
firestorm that swept through large parts of Los Angeles County may give them
new life. Those fires, ranging across portions of a 40-mile stretch on the
south slope of the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains, destroyed more homes
and apartments than any fire California had seen before.
The preeminent
goal of the new laws is to make housing in this state more dense. They have not
done that on a large scale. But the fires essentially created large new blank
canvasses where the aims of the new housing laws may receive a definitive test.
If the sudden appearance of thousands of acres of eminently buildable land
doesn’t create denser housing than ever before, it’s hard to see what might.
Taken together,
the destruction of at least 10,000 homes and apartments across the heart of
California’s largest urban area thus represents an ultimate test for the social
engineering attempted since 2020. If the area isn’t densified now, proponents
of that kind of housing will probably have to change their tactics.
Their aim has
long been, as Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco puts it, to
“end single-family zoning as we’ve known it.”
Noplace in
California and possibly the nation was more devoted to sprawling single-family
homes than the pre-January Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles city. The
new state laws barely touched it.
No large new
apartment buildings or condominiums ever rose along the area’s main street, the
storied Sunset Boulevard. The largest apartment buildings there had two floors,
with a few higher-rise condos slotted in spots invisible from that street.
Almost no new multi-family buildings went up in the Palisades, no matter what
requirements might have been imposed by new laws.
Here's the record
to date of some of two such laws: The 2021 SB 9 allows homeowners to split
their lots and build at least four units where formerly there was one. By
mid-2024, the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley found that
fewer than 500 homeowners had successfully applied for such lot splits.
The 2022 AB 2011
was supposed to let developers easily convert empty office parks and unused
parking lots into housing, but by the end of 2024, very few such projects had
been approved.
Similarly, the
2021 SB 10, allowing for multi-unit development near rapid transit stops had
produced very little.
So it looked as
if Californians are not eager to densify, even if that’s what some Democrats
who dominate in Sacramento want.
Now an entirely
new urban opportunity exists. Yes, the majority of single-family homeowners
will rebuild. But many homes in both Pacific Palisades and Altadena, the other
January fire focus, had been owned by folks who purchased their properties in
the 1960s and 1970s. Many are now well past 70 years old with little desire to
rebuild, as most of their younger neighbors plan.
Significant
numbers of former single-family properties are available to new buyers,
including developers. Some fire-vacated lots have already been sold. They are
eligible for at least four units each under SB 9.
Some two-floor
apartment buildings in Pacific Palisades also burned. Many fronted on Sunset,
where transit stops abound, so those properties could see multi-story
development, despite an SB 10 provision letting local officials decide whether
or not to upzone fire areas.
If such
development does not happen there, it may never happen anywhere, as huge
profits seem likely for opportunistic developers. If the January fires were
truly 100-year firestorms, no similarly sized fire is likely there for many
years.
This sets up a
litmus test for major housing laws Sacramento has pushed on the rest of
California, complete with demands for dense new building in every city as part
of an attempt to meet the state’s housing shortage.
If it doesn’t
happen in the January fire zones, lawmakers should change their priorities and
begin paying attention to more rural vacant areas in deserts and other areas
where land is cheaper even if it means commutes would be longer.
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Email Thomas Elias at
tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising
Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now
available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net