Early Friday morning near downtown Oakland, almost 200 apartments approaching completion went up in flames, the latest in a series of suspicious construction-site fires. The day before in Sacramento, state lawmakers showed that there’s more than one way to incinerate new housing.

The Legislature is famously considering more than 100 bills to ease the housing crisis; it has now passed one to aggravate it. Approved by the state Senate Thursday and sent to Gov. Jerry Brown — who should not sign it — Senate Bill 106 includes a provision exempting Marin County from housing-density standards affecting the rest of the Bay Area for more than a decade.

Amid a deepening housing shortage rooted in parochial policies that stifle all kinds of development, it’s difficult to imagine a clearer legislative endorsement of the state’s prevailing not-in-my-backyard ideology.

“Is it the NIMBY concept? Absolutely,” state Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber (Tehama County), said before voting against the bill.

State Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco was the only Bay Area lawmaker and the only Democrat to vote against the bill. “People are being evicted,” he said. “People cannot afford homes. We need more housing, not less housing.”

The bill would extend a similar 2014 law that excuses the state’s wealthiest county, including its largest cities, San Rafael and Novato, from high-density housing developments prescribed for metropolitan areas. The exemption, now set to expire in 2023, would be continued until 2028.

Marin County Democratic Assemblyman Marc Levine and other supporters of the bill have argued that lowering the density requirement enables more of the suburban-style development the county’s residents would welcome and thereby increases overall housing production. But state Sen. Nancy Skinner, a Berkeley Democrat who abstained from Thursday’s vote, noted that the earlier legislation provided for an evaluation of the county’s affordable-housing production as of 2019. SB106 doubles down on the policy without the benefit of that report, suggesting its supporters don’t really care about its housing impact.

The Legislature’s ruling Democrats introduced the exemption as part of a budget-related bill addressing a variety of unrelated issues, allowing it to escape the level of public scrutiny applied to most legislation. The Assembly passed it last month.

Soaring prices, rising homelessness, and tensions over development and gentrification, which may have found their worst expression in the rash of East Bay fires, can all be traced to the state’s failure to produce sorely needed housing. Judging by this legislation, Sacramento is still fiddling while Oakland burns.