Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle

Proudly engaged in a legal battle with the Trump administration over its phony border emergency, California has a real crisis that it has rarely treated as such. It’s the housing shortage, which has given the state the nation’s highest poverty rate and nearly a quarter of its homeless population.

Legislation introduced this week by state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, would begin to treat the housing crisis as the emergency that it is. Comparing the bill to measures designed to promote short-term housing construction after a fire, earthquake or other disaster, Skinner proposes to suspend many of the parochial impediments to development that have saddled California with the paltriest housing supply on the U.S. mainland.

Skinner’s bill, SB330, would prevent cities and counties with low supplies and high costs of housing from imposing several sorts of regulations that limit residential development. Until 2030, they would be prohibited from down-zoning to reduce the allowed density of housing in a given area, imposing more costly design standards, setting parking minimums, enforcing housing moratoriums, capping total housing permits, limiting total zoning variances or increasing housing fees.

The measure, dubbed the Housing Crisis Act of 2019, also attempts to limit the bureaucratic delays that often kill residential developments by allowing no more than three public hearings and one year for consideration of a given project. And it seeks to mitigate the potential for displacement of existing residents with safeguards against demolition of affordable housing.

While the bill is at the beginning of the long legislative process, it ranks alongside the most appropriately aggressive pro-housing proposals in Sacramento this year. Also among them is Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB50, the San Francisco Democrat’s reprise of a contentious measure to legalize high-density housing near mass transit regardless of local zoning restrictions. Like Wiener’s legislation, Skinner’s is bound to face staunch opposition from local officials in the Bay Area and beyond, too many of whom have treated apartment buildings as a plague to be avoided.

Experts broadly agree that local zoning and other regulatory restrictions on private development are the chief cause of California’s housing shortage and in turn its high housing prices and disproportionate homelessness. “The Legislature could help address housing affordability for middle-income households by removing the barriers to private development,” says a report this week by the nonpartisan researchers at the Legislative Analyst’s Office. “Local resistance, environmental protection policies, and competition among builders for limited development opportunities all hinder private housing development.”

The report, issued in response to the housing proposals in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget, notes that the average California home costs 2½ times the national average while the state’s renters pay a 50 percent premium, leading to excessive housing costs even for many middle-income residents. Given that the state’s capacity to subsidize affordable housing is insufficient to meet the needs of low-income homeowners, the report says, relaxing development restrictions remains the most efficient way to address the problem for the middle class.

Skinner’s bill recognizes that reality as well as the real urgency of the state’s housing shortage.

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