For many Californians, skyrocketing housing costs have become a constant strain on their finances.

It’s clear that the state is in the midst of a crushing housing crunch—over half of California renters pay at least a third of their income on rent. To address this affordable housing crisis, a coalition of rent control activists managed to get an initiative onto the November ballot: Proposition 10. Meant to grant local governments expanded power, it would have allowed them to implement rent control policies limiting how much rent tenants can be charged. But after over 61 percent of voters rejected the initiative, Prop. 10 was crushed on election night.

And for good reason. Although supporters claimed that Prop 10. would improve California’s housing crisis, they failed to consider that excessive local control over housing policy is actually one of the crisis’ major underlying causes.

At its core, this predicament is due to lack of supply. The Department of Housing and Development has estimated that California needs to build 180,000 new housing units per year to keep up with population growth, yet developers are building a mere average of less than 80,000 per year. This underdevelopment has been the norm for decades, resulting in an estimated state-wide shortage of approximately 4 million housing units.

One of the primary reasons, many housing experts say, is the effort by local governments to dissuade the construction of new housing. For instance, in a 2015 report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office, researchers found that more than two-thirds of coastal communities in California had adopted policies explicitly designed to limit the construction of new homes. This makes sense, given the incentives motivating homeowners — the lower the supply, the higher the value of their property.

Unfortunately for renters, each additional anti-development policy a community implemented was found to be associated with a three to five percent increase in housing costs.

When compared to the rest of the country, developers working in California face high costs and numerous delays. On average, California cities take two and a half months longer than a typical U.S. city to issue a building permit, and three months longer to approve a rezoning request.

Additionally, the average development fee charged by a local government in California was over $22,000 per single-family home — nearly four times the national average.

In an effort to bypass local government’s tendency to impede housing construction, the state government has made some attempts to improve the pace of new development. California law currently requires cities and counties to develop plans every eight years for how they will facilitate the construction of new homes. Yet the law itself is toothless, since it lacks the ability to hold cities accountable to their plans. As a result, these plans are frequently ignored.

A real solution to California’s affordable housing crisis can only be found in policies that help dramatically expand the supply of housing. Either the state can exert real pressure on local governments to increase the pace of development, or it can push to directly reduce local control over housing decisions. There is hope for the former, given Governor-elect Gavin Newsom’s support for holding local governments accountable to their development goals.

The proposal SB827 provided an attractive alternative, before it was shot down. Sponsored by State Sen. Scott Wiener, San Francisco, and introduced in January, the bill would have bypassed local regulations and allowed for the construction of apartment buildings up to five stories high near every high-frequency transit stop in the state.

Many local governments limit the height of apartment buildings, thereby restricting the ability of developers to increase housing density. For example, building heights for the majority of San Francisco are officially capped at four stories.

Yet, measures such as sunset zoning — which makes it illegal for a building to cast a shadow over a public park or public square for more than an hour after sunrise — have kept building heights low in many areas.

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Vote no on ballot-box-budgeting Measure J in L.A. County Even beyond the negative externalities of rent control, Prop. 10 was just a bad policy. Rather than push local governments to actually resolve California’s affordable housing crisis, the passage of Prop 10. would’ve simply given local communities more power over housing policy — power they have historically used to exacerbate our housing shortage.

Voters were wise to reject this ill-advised proposition. But now it’s up to us to call on legislators to implement policies that will truly and finally address the real cause of our housing crisis.

Jack Hipkins is a Young Voices contributor based in San Diego, California. He writes about U.S. foreign policy, taxes, and economic theory. He can be found on Twitter @J_Hipkins.