Plain-Bagel Streamlining? Notes from the California Housing Wars

Abstract

In recent years, the California legislature has passed scores of bills addressing the state’s long-festering housing shortage. Many of them exemplify the type of supply-side policymaking that New York Times columnist Ezra Klein called “everything bagels.” A bill that’s nominally meant to enable the production of some socially valuable good or service imposes unnecessary regulatory requirements that substantially raise the cost of producing that very thing. In the California housing space, the typical bagel toppings consist of mandates that developers hire unionized workers and cross-subsidize the production of housing for lower-income families. However, a few of the recent California housing bills are “plainer bagels” that strip away barriers to housing production without imposing new regulatory costs, or else impose lower costs than prior legislative practice. This paper describes the variation in legislative practice and offers some tentative hypotheses about the factors that may enable plainer-bagel lawmaking notwithstanding the everything-bagel norm. We draw on recent public opinion research by ourselves and others, and we conclude by describing what we consider to be the major open questions about the political economy of housing-supply liberalization in heavily Democratic states like California.

Keywords: housing, land use, California, state politics, local politics