California lawmakers are on the threshold of their first serious response to the housing crisis, with final votes on loosening building restrictions and funding affordable units expected as soon as Friday. Not even the bills’ champions portray them as the answer to a problem decades in the making, but they could mark the start of a crucial effort to revive housing construction in a state that has regulated it into woeful inadequacy.

Recent negotiations in Sacramento have focused on the size of an affordable-housing bond issue to be put to voters — it grew from $3 billion to $4 billion — as well as the prospect of a real-estate transaction fee raising about $200 million a year for the same purpose. While Californians certainly need every unit of affordable housing they can get, the subsidies wouldn’t close a year’s worth of the continuing 100,000-unit gap between housing demand and supply, let alone the standing deficit of 2 million dwellings.

A greater breakthrough would be SB35, state Sen. Scott Wiener’s bill to speed private residential development in cities that aren’t meeting housing needs. The measure requires projects to meet a host of conditions that make its impact hard to predict, but it has the virtue of beginning to take on the local obstructionism at the heart of the housing shortage.

Wiener, D-San Francisco, called the emerging legislative package “a healthy down payment” on a solution. “We have years of work ahead of us,” he said. “It took us 50 years to dig this hole.” It’s time to stop digging and start building.

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