patrick.net

Want a law to pass in CA? Make it say that it helps faggots, it’ll pass instantly. Everything else will be opposed.

To really understand it, you have to follow the money.

Maybe it was the auto industry and oil and the Saudis who defeated SB 50 to keep people trapped in their cars, and paying to be trapped.

It could have been people against having an insta-ghetto in their backyard. Everyone knew that these developments meant having a certain percentage devoted to affordable housing --- like 30%.

Just what everybody wants. The people you paid to get away from getting paid by the State to darken your doorstep.

California housing crisis is easily solvable by deporting all it's illegals.

My colleague Conor Dougherty followed the protracted debate over one of the most closely watched and polarizing fixes for California’s housing crisis, which played out in Sacramento this week. Here’s his dispatch:

Senate Bill 50 is dead. Or is it?

That question hovered over the California State Legislature the past two days while Senator Scott Wiener’s bill to allow mid-rise apartments and condominiums near transit stops made its way to a final floor vote.

The bill was voted down Wednesday — only to be brought back for another unsuccessful vote on Thursday.

In the end, after failing to muster a majority, Toni Atkins, the Senate president pro tem, gave a speech in which she declared that even though the bill is now gone, something like it will pass this year and called on senators to “step up” and hash out a compromise.

The final vote capped one of the most dramatic Senate sessions in recent years. During a two-hour debate on Wednesday, lawmakers alternated between statements about the gravity of California’s housing crisis and a reluctance to upend the state’s governance and low-density roots.

[Read the full story.]

One senator would talk about homelessness and three-hour super-commutes. The next would talk about the right of localities to set zoning policy.

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Virtually everyone in attendance agreed that something significant had to be done to ease California’s housing troubles, but, in an indication of just how conflicted the Legislature was about how to get there, one of the bill’s co-sponsors said the bill made him uncomfortable; another senator said she was voting for it despite opposition from cities in her district. Yet another, voting no, said that if the bill failed he wanted Mr. Wiener to simply reintroduce it so the debate would continue.

“The only thing that folks agree on is that we need housing,” said Andreas Borgeas, a Fresno Republican, who voted against it. “How we get there, everyone has a different theory.”

Throughout the session, opponents thanked Mr. Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, for forcing a tough debate. Where that debate goes is unclear. That it will continue is guaranteed.

“This is not the end of the story,” Ms. Atkins said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said he supported the bill’s intent but never endorsed it, followed up with his own statement in favor of new legislation to replace it: “California’s housing affordability crisis demands our state pass a historic housing production bill.”

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And Mr. Wiener himself tweeted that he had introduced two place-holder housing bills — the details of which are to be determined.

[Want more analysis? An editorial writer at The Los Angeles Times blamed L.A. lawmakers for killing the bill without a better plan. And in an opinion piece for The Mercury News, a councilman in Burlingame wrote that cities like his are building lots of housing — without Sacramento’s intervention.]