Among those who didn’t treat state Sen. Scott Wiener’s transit-friendly housing bill as a latter-day Stamp Act warranting revolution, one popular tactic was to declare sympathy for it in “concept.” It was just the details, countless officials claimed — the precise building heights allowed, the level of affordable-housing set-asides, the strength of displacement protections — that kept them from offering full-throated support.

The bill’s first hearing Tuesday, which saw it ceremoniously dispatched by a Senate panel ironically known as the Transportation and Housing Committee, proved to be an exercise in bluff calling. Wiener, D-San Francisco, had welcomed compromise, amending the bill to reduce permitted heights, discourage demolition and displacement of existing housing and tenants, and increase affordability requirements.

But it wasn’t really the details of the bill that bothered his fellow lawmakers; it was the concept.

What distinguished and doomed Senate Bill 827 is that it would have overruled local officials’ use of planning, zoning and other barriers to block new housing, particularly high-density housing in existing neighborhoods, which they reliably do at the behest of incumbent residents. This local obstructionism is the essential ingredient of California’s multimillion-home shortage — accounting for half the nation’s housing deficit by one recent estimate — which won’t be solved without limiting cities’ and towns’ precious power to stifle even reasonable, environmentally responsible development. It’s why Senate Bill 827 had as much support among housing and urban planning experts as it lacked among politicians and self-appointed activists.

This was a remarkably unifying cause. Even as those claiming to represent the poor accused the bill of letting wealthy communities slide, officials from the likes of Marin County and Beverly Hills belied that by queueing up in staunch opposition. Candidates for governor and San Francisco mayor alike approached it as either fodder for demagoguery or a question to be artfully dodged.

Republican or Democratic, reactionary or progressive, urban or rural, northern or southern, the fear and loathing of new housing claims the broadest of California political coalitions, revealing exactly how we got the problem this legislation addressed. There will and should be more such efforts, but SB 827 demonstrated the depth and breadth of the state’s will to avoid its most pressing problem.

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