in-the-news – Page 2099

Affordable Housing Debate Pits California Cities Against Suburbs. Both Need Freer Markets.

Whatever one thinks of Sen. Scott Wiener’s controversial bill that would make it easier for developers to build high-density apartments and condos around bus and rail stations, this much is clear: It has jump-started a much-needed conversation about housing construction and the way that limited supply is driving up home prices.

It’s a close call, but I overall like the measure because, hey, it can’t hurt to make it easier to build any type of new housing. Unfortunately, Senate Bill 50 ladles on layers of new mandates in exchange for the regulatory rollback—and it promotes only the one particular type of housing that planners prefer. The measure only deals with a small portion of the problem: rules that restrict higher-density construction in many suburban areas.

My Southern California News Group colleague Susan Shelley encapsulated her opposition to the bill in her recent column: “So if your neighborhood has a community college and a bus stop, you could wake up one morning to find the house next door surrounded by a construction fence and about to become a four- or five-story apartment building with no parking spaces.”

I get the concern and rarely disagree with Shelley, but there’s nothing free market about current single-family zoning rules. The suburban landscape largely is a creation of subsidies and zoning rules, which mandate only one house per certain size of lot and require umpteen parking spaces for every new shopping center, restaurant, office and church. Everything is micromanaged in the planning department.

I’m on the building committee of our church and have closely examined many proposed construction projects. It is so hard to build, expand or try any new development ideas because these planning edicts—designed mainly to protect our suburban way of life, and backed by residents trying to bolster their property values—are costly and inflexible.

Many suburbanites are aghast at “New Urbanist” efforts to create walkable, transit-oriented communities in their backyard. They never bargained for this change in philosophy, but those who live by government rules need to be prepared to die by them. On the other hand, I’ve got nothing against what my urbanist friends decry as “urban sprawl,” and staunchly oppose their use of those same planning rules to force us to live like ants on a hill.

The debate over Wiener’s bill is, on the surface, about housing supply. As the Legislative Analyst’s Office has found, California is vastly underbuilding the number of houses needed to meet our population growth. It’s a supply and demand issue. Land-use regulations and fees, which account for as much as 40 percent of the cost of every home built, are artificially restricting supply. That’s why you need $800,000 for a modest home in Orange County.

But the underlying debate is about two visions of our California landscape. One side wants to protect our suburban model and the other side wants to urbanize. It’s a false choice driven by their own personal preferences. We need more apartments and condos. We need more single-family neighborhoods. We need to allow builders to provide the housing products people want, and different people want different things. The same people want different things at different stages of their lives. I live on an acreage, but now that we’re empty nesters, my wife and I plan to move into the city. That’s why I’m squarely on neither side.

After my housing column last week, I’ve heard from readers who oppose the legislation. Frankly, I’m frustrated by some of their arguments. To summarize some comments: If you can’t afford to live around here, then maybe move someplace else. There are too many people here already and too much traffic congestion. If your kids can’t afford California, they should consider less-costly states. Such views transcend political affiliation.

Obviously, home prices in California, and especially in picturesque coastal communities, are going to be pricier than in the Great Plains. But critics often miss this point: Those prices are much higher than they need to be because of building limits, backed by Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) attitudes. I’m sorry, but the “I like how things are now” argument does not make for sound public policy.

However, advocates for the SB 50 approach ignore how their own preferences, which have been guiding California land-use policy for at least two decades, are the main cause of the housing shortage. Housing markets are regional. Wiener is from San Francisco. You can build all the multi-family dwellings imaginable in that city and nearby Oakland and not make a dent in the Bay Area’s shortage. Earth to New Urbanists: By setting aside the bulk of that area’s land as open space, you’ve constricted supply more than the suburban advocates.

The Wiener bill’s flaw isn’t that it goes too far in allowing more construction, but that it doesn’t go nearly far enough. It’s time to open housing to market forces.

This column was first published by the Orange County Register.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director of the R Street Institute and was a Register editorial writer from 1998-2009. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

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Indian’s Prime Minister Plays the Fear Card After Botching Economic Reforms

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi led his party to a landslide victory five years ago by selling himself as the great reformer who’d turn India into a global economic power. It was a heady message for a country that feels cheated of greatness by decades of misrule. But Modi has so badly squandered that mandate that even he doesn’t think he can credibly re-up it for the elections currently underway. So he has switched to portraying himself as the “chowkidar”—the guardian angel—who’ll protect the nation from threats foreign and domestic.

It’s a campaign of fear—and if it sticks, it will be because his opposition has no message at all.

Indian elections are a rolling, month-long process whose results won’t be in till May 23. Close to 900 million people are expected to go to the polls, the largest exercise of franchise on the planet. But few people believe that Modi will be able to pull off the feat he did last time when his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 282 of the 543 seats in the lower house of Parliament, obtaining a clear majority to form a government without having to invite other parties. The country had not experienced anything like this since 1984, when a wave of sympathy following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi swept the Congress Party, led by her son, Rajiv Gandhi, into power.

But there was less to Modi’s victory than meets the eye.

India, like the United States, has a winner-takes-all system that allowed the BJP to win the Parliament decisively with only 31 percent of the popular vote. What’s more, 75 percent of its seats came from just eight northern states, all BJP strongholds. But last December, it narrowly lost three state elections to Congress (which has ruled the country for 49 of the 72 years since India gained independence from the British), suggesting that the Modi romance was over.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Milan Vaishnav notes that if BJP’s December performance is replicated at the national level, the party will lose at least 27 seats in just these three states (and far more across the eight states). This will be enough to deny it the 272 seats it needs in order to form a stand-alone government, especially since there is no sign that Modi has managed to make significant inroads in southern states that have historically been hostile to his party. The most plausible scenario, according to Vaishnav, is that the BJP will win the most number of seats of any party but not enough to avoid a coalition government. There is also a small but nontrivial chance that BJP might lose.

The main reason Modi is in trouble is that he has failed to deliver on any of his economic promises and usher his much-hyped “acche din” (good times).

Even if one buys the goosed up government figures, the Indian economy grew on average 7.3 percent annually over the last five years (compared to 6.7 percent at the tail end of the previous government). The actual figure is at least 1 to 2 percent lower than the official estimate. But even the rosy estimate is nowhere close to the 10 percent that India has the potential to grow every year. Meanwhile, Modi’s promise to create 10 million jobs every year to absorb the legions of young people annually entering the labor force—65 percent of the country’s population is under 35—was never close to being kept. In fact, government data that Modi tried to suppress shows that unemployment is at a 45-year high.

The reason for Modi’s economic failure is that the reforms he attempted were badly botched and the reforms that were sorely needed he didn’t attempt.

Sure, he improved India’s “ease of doing business” ranking and built roads and other infrastructure, although nowhere near what the country needs. But all that was nullified by Modi’s demonetization stunt, which without forewarning or forethought scrapped big denomination bills—80 percent of the national currency—overnight. The ostensive purpose of the exercise was to flush out “black money”illicitly hoarded by the rich and powerful. In fact, it wiped out poor farmers, the self-employed, and small mom-and-pop establishments that held their savings in cash. The fat cats were left unscathed.

Modi’s other big reform, replacing India’s myriad state taxes hampering the free flow of goods across the country with a unified goods and services tax, was in principle a good idea. But it was so poorly executed that far from giving businesses relief, it complicated compliance even more.

Meanwhile, Modi has done absolutely nothing to reform India’s daft labor laws that discourage factories from hiring more than 100 workers because then they need government permission to shut down even if they are losing money. As a consequence, Indian industry has remained trapped in small-scale, capital-intensive ventures, which has kept it from scaling up and absorbing young workers. Worse, Modi has actually rolled back the 1994 trade liberalization that jump-started India’s long moribund economy and lifted half the population out of poverty. President Donald Trump accurately called India the “tariff king” last year. As if to prove the point, Modi’s budget hiked the already high duties on all kinds of agricultural and manufacturing goods. India has the highest effective tariff rates on food items, automobiles, and industrial inputs among BRIC countries.

Modi, who promised “minimum government, maximum governance,” is trying to make up for his economic failure by resorting to the age-old trick of Indian politicos: throwing freebies such as free health coverage for 500 million poor families, among other things.

But the Congress Party is an old hand at the game of welfare populism and has countered with a universal basic income scheme that’ll guarantee every family about $2,500 income annually.

Modi can’t beat that offer, which is why he is also playing the fear card against India’s reviled and persecuted Muslim minority.

Modi and his Hindu nationalist brothers have long regarded Indian Muslims as a threat to Hindu interests—never mind that Muslims are a mere 14 percent of the population compared to Hindus who are 80 percent. Bloodletting of Muslims happens with disturbing regularity in India, including in 2002 when over 1,000 were killed in the state of Gujarat where Modi was the chief minister at that time. Since Modi became prime minister, lynchings of Muslims suspected of consuming or handling beef by Hindu vigilantes, who consider the cow a sacred animal, have become commonplace.

But now Hindu nationalists are going further and openly suggesting that Muslims are “anti-nationals” who don’t have the country’s best interests at heart—even though the architect of India’s nuclear program was a Muslim physicist. The recent suicide attack by a Pakistani-backed Muslim militant that killed a convoy of Indian soldiers in Kashmir, the northern Indian state that both countries have been fighting over for decades, played right into the Hindu nationalists’ hands.

It’s unclear if Modi’s retaliatory airstrikes against alleged terrorist camps in Pakistan accomplished anything beyond cheap symbolism. But they did allow him to pivot and position himself as the nation’s “chowkidar,” even changing his twitter handle to “chowkidarModi.” The diabolical brilliance of this campaign is that it draws an arc between the Muslim enemy outside and within and positions Modi as the decisive and tough leader who will protect India against both. (This is not a theoretical point. Modi sent shockwaves through the country last week when he named Hindu nationalist firebrand Pragya Thakur as the BJP’s candidate to contest a key seat in Bhopal, a central Indian city. Thakur’s big claim to fame is that she’s been accused of involvement in a 2008 bomb attack in a Muslim market, killing 10. Her first remark after being picked by Modi was that she would “defeat” anyone “working against the nation,” a thinly veiled reference to Indian Muslims.)

But that means he’s left economic reform on the table. A savvy opposition would pick it up and run with it. If India’s Hindu majority had a choice between promoting its identity interests versus its economic interests, it would opt for the latter. It is only choosing the former because that’s the only thing on offer right now. But Modi’s own first-term campaign is proof that if a strong leader proposes a program of liberalization and economic progress, everyone, Hindus included, would go for it.

India’s tragedy is that there is no such leader on the horizon. Modi turned out to be a false prophet. And the Congress Party’s Rahul Gandhi simply does not have the talent or the credibility to hold Modi to account, much less sell a coherent narrative of growth, even though it was his party that initiated India’s liberalization.

If Modi ends up forming a coalition government, as expected, the best that can be hoped for is that his political allies would check his worst sectarian impulses and let India’s minorities live in peace again.

Its economic aspirations, however, will have to wait—which is a sad, sad thing for a country where nearly 300 million people, almost the population of the United States, still live in poverty.

A version of this column originally appeared in The Week

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Movie Review: Avengers: Endgame

Rounding the bend into hour three of Avengers: Endgame, I heard a snurfling sound to my right. A discreet peek revealed that the guy next to me was semi-weeping, blotting away the odd tear with his shirt sleeve. Jeez, I thought. And then I realized…

Never mind. This is a superhero movie that delivers all the requisite action (and, unlike last year’s Avengers: Infinity War, doesn’t over-deliver it), but mainly takes aim at the heart—and scores again and again. The picture is also consistently funny, thanks largely to Chris Hemsworth’s Thor (by now a veritable riff machine), the trash-talking raccoon Rocket (again voiced by Bradley Cooper), and the incomparable Robert Downey Jr. (whose Tony Stark takes a squint at the quarrelsome quadruped and says, “For a second I thought you were a Build-A-Bear”).

There’s a lot going on, thus the movie’s length (although, honestly, it doesn’t register as overlong). Directors Anthony and Joe Russo and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely—all returning from Infinity War and all veterans of a pair of Captain America films as well—have done a splendid job of wrapping up 11 years’ worth of MCU storylines spread across 21 films (from the 2008 Iron Man right up to this year’s Captain Marvel). This has allowed them to bring back a sizable crowd of characters from the earlier films, and the fact that we’re already familiar with these people—that we don’t have to get to know them, and can just enjoy re-embracing them—is the reason the movie radiates so much warmth.

Not all of the Avengers are on hand initially. The picture begins at that moment at the end of Infinity War when the mad intergalactic environmentalist Thanos snapped his fingers and wiped out half of the inhabitants of the universe. So the first thing we see is a flashback to an idyllic country scene with the bow-and-arrow specialist Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) enjoying some off-duty downtime with his wife and kids. It’s a beautiful day. Then, suddenly, the wife and kids disappear, without so much as a poof! Next we look in on billionaire inventor Tony Stark, who’s drifting through space a thousand light years from Earth with Thanos’s disaffected cybernetic daughter, Nebula (Karen Gillan). They’re very nearly out of oxygen.

Five years pass. We discover that Stark somehow made it back to his home orb and is now living in a lake house in the Northern California countryside. Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans at peak charisma) and Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson in an interestingly shaded performance) arrive there one day with Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) in tow. Lang—Ant-Man!—was trapped in the “Quantum Realm,” as you may remember; but he’s back now, with a big idea: time travel. If the Avengers can just round up the six Infinity Stones that gave Thanos his world-wrecking power they could…well, it’s a pretty wild idea he’s got, but who knows. Stark, Rogers and Romanoff sign on, and soon they’re able to recruit three other former colleagues, all of whom have gone through some radical changes. Hawkeye, who may have seen The Deer Hunter one time too many, is battling katana-wielding killers on the rainy night streets of Tokyo. Hulk (Mark Ruffalo, getting some major screen time at last) has overcome his anger issues and now wears glasses and normal (if very large) clothes and poses for selfies with young fans. And Thor, now basically a beer sponge, has gone seriously to seed.

So that’s the setup. The Avengers split into three teams of two each and start scouring the universe. Along the way they encounter many familiar faces, some of them their own (the old time-travel thing). Deep thoughts are traded with the bald-headed Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), mentor of the late Dr. Strange. Chris Pratt does some geeky dance moves to an old ’70s Redbone hit. Chadwick Boseman makes a roaring entrance with a squad of Wakandans from Black Panther. Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie wings in for a moment, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki passes through, and even Red Skull—remember Red Skull?—floats around in a black cloak at one spooky point. The movie is so packed with marquee talent that there apparently wasn’t enough dialogue to go around: Natalie Portman’s onetime Thor squeeze Jane Foster gets very little to say, and Michael Douglas’s Hank Pym (the original Ant-Man) is left lineless entirely.

Endgame is the best of the Avengers movies, I think. Maybe the final confrontation with Thanos could have been trimmed (a minion here, a monster there), and maybe somebody could have had a talk with Brie Larson, whose Captain Marvel is an oddly sour presence. But overall there’s little not to like. The lack of a post-credits teaser scene feels strange after all these years—is this really the end? Will Disney really be putting this multi-billion-dollar franchise to bed now? Well, we know that Tom Holland’s Spider-Man is an ongoing proposition, and that Johansson’s Black Widow spinoff is still in some sort of endless pre-production; and judging by a comment that Captain America makes to Valkyrie here it seems likely she’ll be back in some bigger way. The first age of the Avengers may be over, but Marvel superheroes will surely continue assembling.

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Brickbat: Down Under

An Australian court has found James Cook University, a public university in Australia, unlawfully fired professor Peter Ridd for criticizing research on the impact of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef. Ridd had questioned whether photos which some scientists claimed show the deteriorating health of the Great Barrier Reef may be misleading.

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Institute for Justice Looking for Lawyers

The Institute for Justice, one of the public interest law firms that I most respect (it often wins cases that no-one expects it to win), is hiring lawyers with 2 to 6 years of experience; you can learn more about the two open positions here. A golden opportunity for young lawyers who love liberty.

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Anti-Semitic Attack on Jewish-Owned Restaurant Is Another Hate Crime Hoax, Cops Say

Last week, a restaurant in the Canadian city of Winnipeg was allegedly defaced by racist graffiti and swastikas. News outlets described it as one of the “most brazen” attacks on the Jewish community in recent memory. A prayer vigil was planned for today.

That event has been cancelled amidst revelations that the Winnipeg police now believe the hate crime was a hoax staged by the Jewish owners of the BerMax Caffe. All three were arrested and charged with “public mischief,” which is the Canadian equivalent of misleading police investigators.

According to the CBC:

Winnipeg police Chief Danny Smyth said Wednesday the attack was staged.

“The anti-Semitic graffiti and vandalism were also falsely reported as being done by outside suspects,” Smyth said.

“We found evidence of a crime. It just wasn’t a hate crime,” said Smyth, adding the police expended considerable resources investigating and took the report seriously.

Smyth said he is disappointed by the alleged staging and fears it will promote cynicism. The incident took place the night before the start of Passover, a significant Jewish holiday.

Alexander Berent, 56, Oxana Berent, 48, and Maxim Berent, 29, have all been charged with public mischief and were released after being arrested, police say. They are slated to appear in court in May.

Oxana Berent said she would never invent a story about an anti-Semitic crime, given her family’s experiences.

“My grandmother’s family, they died in the Holocaust. Just her and her little brother survived, the whole family. We don’t joke about that,” she said, through tears.

The Berents deserve every opportunity to prove their innocence, and should be treated as such unless the authorities make a compelling case. But this development serves as yet another reminder for the public to take hate crime news with a grain of salt.

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Check Out This New Database of Corrupt Cops

USA Today has partnered with its affiliate newsrooms and a nonprofit group in Chicago to launch an important new database that documents law enforcement officers with records of misconduct.

Part of that database is now available for public searches. USA Today has documented at least 85,000 cops who have been investigated or disciplined for misconduct across the past decade. But this initial document dump focuses just on 30,000 cops who have been “decertified” by various state agencies for misconduct.

There are 44 states that have an internal decertification process that is intended to try to make sure that bad cops can’t migrate to other cities or states to land new jobs at other agencies after they’ve been fired for misconduct. But as Anthony Fisher documented for Reason in 2016, there’s really no centralized tracking going on so that it’s easy to determine who is on any of those lists, and even decertified cops can go on to find new jobs in law enforcement agencies elsewhere. Several of these states require officers to actually be convicted of crimes before they’ll actually be decertified. And police unions have resisted any efforts to make a national decertification database.

So it’s possible that this USA Today database is a useful resource to other law enforcement agencies in states that don’t participate in the decertification process or are otherwise struggling to get the information.

But there are still huge gaps—California does not participate in this 44-state decertification program and they’ve got more police and deputies than anybody else. It was just with the start of this new year that California changed its record laws to unseal records of police misconduct that had been hidden from public view.

Of the cops who were decertified, USA Today notes that the greatest number of them had been banned for drug or alcohol issues (DUIs, for example) and for assaults or violence. But a good number of them (close to 2,000) had been banned for sexual misconduct. Another 2,777 had been banned for “dishonesty,” a category that covers behavior like perjury or tampering with evidence.

Also worth note: USA Today‘s data show that only 10 percent of officers in most police forces get investigated for misconduct. But among those who have been banned, nearly 2,500 had been investigated on 10 or more charges. A small group of them (20) had faced 100 or more allegations and were still serving. If it’s bad apples spoiling the bunch, some of them are really bad.

USA Today ends its piece by openly calling for cooperation from journalists at other media outlets, from members of the public, and even from law enforcement agencies and prosecutors to fill out this database. The opening of police records in California has prompted media outlets there to work together to track down decades’ worth of what had been secret details of police misconduct. Maybe they’ll add their work to what USA Today is doing.

Check out the database here.

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Massachusetts Judge Indicted for “Helping Defendant Avoid ICE Arrest”

MassLive (Melissa Hanson) reports, and you can read the indictment itself. An excerpt:

It was the object of the conspiracy to corruptly attempt to obstruct, influence, and impede an official proceeding, to wit, an ICE federal removal proceeding, by preventing the ICE Officer from taking custody of [Alien Subject] A.S. at the NDC Courthouse ….

It was a part of the conspiracy that defendant [court officer Wesley MacGregor] and the Defense Attorney agreed that defendant MacGregor would use his security access card to release A.S. out the rear-sally-port exit in order for A.S. to evade arrest by the ICE Officer ….

It was a part of the conspiracy that defendant [Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph] and the Defense Attorney agreed to create a pretext for A.S. to be brought back downstairs to the lockup so that A.S. could be released out the rear sally-port exit in order to evade arrest by the ICE Officer ….

[In furtherance of this,] Defendant Joseph ordered the Clerk to tum off the Courtroom recording device to conceal defendant Joseph’s conversation with the Defense Attorney.

With the recorder off, defendant Joseph and the Defense Attorney discussed devising a
way to have A.S. avoid being arrested by the ICE Officer.

Defendant JOSEPH ordered that the ICE Officer be prevented from entering the downstairs Courthouse lockup area.

After ordering A.S.’s release, defendant Joseph ordered that A.S. be returned downstairs
to the lockup for the Defense Attorney to “further interview” A.S., which, in reality, was a pretext to allow A.S. to access the rear sally-port exit in order to avoid the ICE Officer….

A.S. had been arrested for being a fugitive from justice from Pennsylvania and with narcotics possession. He had been earlier deported from the U.S. in 2003 and 2007, and was forbidden to reenter the U.S. until 2027.

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Williams College Students Claim ‘Free Speech Harms,’ Fight Efforts to Adopt the Chicago Principles

A group of faculty members at Williams College met to discuss a proposal for adopting the Chicago principles, a commitment to free speech that has now been accepted by some 60 institutions.

About 15 activist students attended the meeting, which occurred back in November, and brought signs that read “free speech harms.” These students continuously disrupted the meeting, and even instructed white male professors to “sit down,” according to an eyewitness, Dr. Luana Maroja.

“Students were just screaming that we were trying to ‘kill them,'” Maroja, chair of Williams biochemistry program, told Inside Higher Ed.

Maroja, who is working to muster support for bringing the Chicago principles to campus, wrote about the incident recently for the blog Why Evolution Is True. She writes:

I explained how censorship hurts the very cause they are fighting for, noting that because I am Hispanic, people often assume that is the reason I got into Cornell, got a job, and got grants, and that students of color will face the same fate in the outside world. Thus, I added, students need to be able to defend their positions with strong reason and argumentation, not by resorting to violence or name-calling. …

While most professors at the meeting were highly supportive of free speech and many sent me grateful emails, I was shocked at the behavior of some of my colleagues. For example, one professor turned to the students and said that they should read the names missing from our list of signatories, as “those were professors that were with the students” (an appalling tactic that created an “us vs them” atmosphere). Another professor stated that she was involved in creating violence in UC Berkeley for Milo Yiannopoulos’s disinvitation and would be ready to do the same at Williams.

The students’ reaction to the idea of adopting the Chicago principles had an immediate effect. Jana Sawicki, the chairwoman of Williams’ committee on free expression, initially signed the petition in support of adoption, but later took her name off the document due to student-led fury. “What needs to be bolstered here is trust in the institution, and the institution needs to deserve that,” she explained to Inside Higher Ed.

What really needs to be bolstered at Williams is support for freedom of speech. That activist students think speech they disagree with is actively harmful—akin to violence against them—is a worrying trend, and one I have chronicled extensively for my forthcoming book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump (pre-order here).

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California Housing Reform Bill Survives a Crucial Vote, But at What Cost?

California housing reform took a big step forward yesterday when a state Senate committee voted to advance a controversial upzoning bill that would allow the construction of four- and five-story apartment buildings in areas where only single-family housing is currently allowed.

In a 6-1 bipartisan vote, the California Senate’s Government and Finance committee approved SB 50. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), would upzone residential land near frequently serviced transit stops and job centers.

Zoning for more, denser housing, the bill’s proponents say, will spur new housing construction, and help arrest the state’s ever-climbing rents and home prices.

The bill “will help relieve California’s acute housing shortage…make housing more affordable, increase the supply of low-income housing, and reduce pressure to create more sprawl and build in wildfire zones,” reads a press release issued by Wiener’s office shortly after the vote.

Getting committee approval for the bill is a marginal step, but a significant one nonetheless. A very similar upzoning measure introduced last year by Wiener was killed in its first committee hearing.

Yesterday saw SB 50 survive, but only after a number of substantial amendments.

The bill will now allow fourplexes to be built throughout the state on vacant residential land by-right (meaning no discretionary government approval is required). This will pave the way for the construction of a lot more “missing middle” housing.

Aside from this fourplex provision, most of yesterday’s changes will limit the scope of SB 50. One amendment exempts coastal cities of less than 50,000 people from most of the bill’s upzoning provisions. Historical districts also got their own carveout, as did counties with fewer than 600,000 residents.

The definition of what counts as a high-frequency transit stop was also pared back.

All these amendments add complexity to an already complicated bill. Wednesday’s committee carveouts also come in addition to onerous demolition controls and affordable housing mandates already included in SB 50.

Wednesday’s changes are politically expedient, and probably necessary to ensure the bill’s continued progress through the legislature. With the exception of the fourplex amendment, however, they all water down the impact Weiner’s legislation can be expected to have on housing affordability.

As Steven Greenhut pointed out in a recent Reason column, SB 50 also does nothing to allow new housing on rural- and agricultural-zoned land at the fringes of California’s cities. That’s by design, as a major purpose of Weiner’s bill is to encourage more transit ridership and combat sprawl.

The result, however, is that a big opportunity to allow for the construction of cheaper suburban housing was missed.

By hacking away at some of California’s restrictive local zoning codes, SB 50 would be a net benefit to both the state and its hard-pressed renters. Nevertheless, as more and more carve-outs and exemptions are added, the bill starts to look less like a bold reform, and more like only a marginal improvement on the dreadful status quo.

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