Published
5 years agoon
Jerry Brown is a hard act to follow but his successor as governor, Gavin Newsom, acquitted himself well – if very lengthily – in presenting his first state budget on Thursday.
While Newsom stressed the budget’s finances, it’s also a policy document whose most important segment deals with the state’s most pressing issue, a chronic and growing shortage of housing that has driven costs sky-high, discouraged private sector investment and caused the state to have the nation’s highest level of poverty.
Brown was only tangentially interested in housing, but Newsom is fully embracing the issue and is pledging vigorous, even coercive, action to deal with it, pointing out that since 2007, the state has built only 40 percent of the housing it needs.
While committing more money to low-income housing, Newsom also outlined a new response to the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) attitudes in many communities toward more construction.
He would replace the state’s toothless local housing quotas with regional quotas and penalties for not meeting them.
“Homelessness and housing have to be looked at on a regional basis,” he said. “We are going to establish real goals, break them down by regions and hold them accountable,” Newsom said, warning, “If you don’t meet the goals, we’re going to take (transportation) money from you.”
Newsom also wants corporate employers, especially those in Silicon Valley, to “step up and help us” increase housing supply. “We are doing our part and I will be asking them to do their part,” he said.
Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He has written more than 9,000 columns about the state and its politics and is the founding editor of the “California Political Almanac.” Dan has also been a frequent guest on national television news shows, commenting on California issues and policies.
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