California’s critical housing shortage — and the poverty and misery that come with it — are at last beginning to get the attention they deserve. But in the list of causes that get the blame — the California Environmental Quality Act, NIMBYism; redundant state and local regulations — and in the proffered remedies, one culprit is often overlooked: the powerful impact of Proposition 13.

In effect, the initiative passed in 1978, skewed the tax structure to protect current homeowners and made it increasingly tough — and as we now know, often impossible — for prospective home buyers to buy a home.

Because it limited tax increases on any home or business to 2 percent a year until it changed ownership, Prop. 13 made commercial developments much more attractive to local leaders. Many commercial properties — auto malls, for example — generate sales taxes; none requires the new schools, parks and other public services that homes do. And in de-linking property taxes from current property values, Prop. 13 also reduced owners’ incentive to put under-used land and other property to its highest and best uses. At the same time, local governments imposed hefty fees on residential development to pay for the schools and infrastructure they required.

“The way California fails to tax land under Prop. 13,” said Lenny Goldberg, the former head of the California Tax Reform Association, “leads to the worst possible outcomes — low density sprawl, inflated land costs, and underutilized commercial strips in areas with tremendous potential for more beneficial development.

“The data shows the lowest taxes are being collected on parcels marginally used for parking lots, car dealers, gas stations, strip malls, warehouses, etc. California’s land-use patterns over the past 40 years are notorious for the combination of sprawling development and low-density housing.”

Notwithstanding the string of homeless encampments in California’s vacant spaces and under its freeway interchanges, the long delay in confronting the housing crisis — or even debating it — isn’t surprising.

In the long list of proposals now being offered in Sacramento, almost any remedy will hit deeply held values and entrenched interests. Probably the most common of those cherished values are neighborhood integrity and local control. And almost every bill now pending in the Legislature would curb the power of local governments to restrict or delay affordable housing development. Among the scores of housing bills:

Senate Bill 330, by Sen. Nancy Skinner of Berkeley, which would impose a 10-year moratorium on downzoning — lowering the number of units that can be built on a parcel — in cities and counties with high housing costs; prohibit housing moratoriums or caps on new housing construction; and suspend the collection of housing fees on affordable housing development.

Senate Bill 50, by Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco, which would ban the imposition of parking requirements and raise height limits to facilitate construction of apartments and condos near public transit stops and job centers.

Assembly Bill 1279, by Assemblyman Richard Bloom of Santa Monica, which would identify places with low housing density where developers could more easily build condos and apartments for low and middle-income families, and charge fees on expensive projects to subsidize affordable housing.

In the meantime, Gov. Gavin Newsom, who wants to have 3.5 million new homes built by 2025, is suing the city of Huntington Beach for violating state housing laws enacted during the Brown administration and has warned other cities that there will be more suits.

But, even if many of the pending bills were to pass and the state continues to subsidize affordable housing, unless the tax system is changed, the critical housing shortage is likely to persist.

And ironically the disincentives to new housing generated by Prop.13 could get worse if the initiative to roll back Prop. 13 and make businesses pay more while keeping the protections intact for homeowners passes in 2020. An otherwise worthy measure, the so-called “split (tax) roll” would tax only commercial property at current value, and not by the price when it was bought, as Proposition 13 now does. That will create new pressure on owners of underutilized high valuation commercial property to develop or sell that land. And it could generate as much as $10 billion a year in additional tax revenue for schools and local governments. But it may also put the incentive for local officials to favor commercial development on steroids.

“What would happen,” wrote Joel Fox, the former head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, in a piece for CALMatters, “when local governments choose between green-lighting a commercial venture that would bring in gobs of new revenue for government as opposed to approving a housing project?”

There’s double irony here: Fox, a longtime defender of Proposition 13, here implicitly concedes the stifling effect that it has long had on housing development. But the housing argument could also be a weapon for a “no” vote on the split roll initiative next year.

Conversely, it could also be, as Goldberg, argues, that the measure will bring much more property to better uses, housing included. Either way, the housing crisis may become a major element in the debate.

Peter Schrag, the former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee, is the author of the recently published “The World of Aufbau: Hitler’s Refugees in America.” To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.