A housing development goes up in downtown Hayward in October. Local governments are under a state mandate to plan for 2.5 million new homes by 2031.
California has a lot to accomplish in the next decade.
Local governments are under a state mandate to plan for 2.5 million new homes by 2031. Meanwhile, cities may face permanent water restrictions, sea levels are rising and growing areas of the state face significant risks from wildfires and other climate threats, pushing California’s home insurance market to the point of combustion. The state also needs to overhaul its transportation, energy and building infrastructure to reach its ambitious goal of slashing greenhouse gas emissions 48% below 1990 levels by 2030.
Yet California doesn’t have a long-term land-use plan that accounts for and integrates all of these critically important factors. Instead, it has a byzantine, fragmented system of state and local agencies, each of which develops plans optimized for its own priorities — regardless of whether they directly conflict with other key objectives.
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This inefficient, overly complex system needs to change.
A new report published Tuesday by SPUR, and exclusively shared with me by the public policy research group, proposes 11 key reforms — with an emphasis on five at the state level — that policymakers should seriously consider.
In recent years, California has made it increasingly clear to local governments that they need to do their part to address the state’s housing shortage, with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s........