In the first half of 2019, members of the California Legislature introduced roughly 200 bills that addressed the state’s worsening housing crisis. By the end of May, most of them had been nixed by the Byzantine nature of California politics.

When the May deadline for floor votes on new legislation passed, Curbed LA referred to it as the “May Massacre” and “the worst month in California’s housing policy history.”

Los Angeles Times writer Liam Dillon called the results “a bloodbath for California Housing.”

Speaking to Curbed SF, a Bay Area lawmaker’s aide, referencing one of Game of Thrones’ bloodiest scenes, referred to the session as “a red wedding.”

The casualties were widespread: Assembly Bill 1706, a proposal to provide incentives for developers to build middle-income housing in the Bay Area, vanished without a vote. Assembly Bill 36 would have expanded rent control throughout the state. It died in committee. Assembly Bill 1481 would have extended “just cause” protections preventing frivolous evictions to all California renters. It never made it to the floor.

South Bay Sen. Jim Beall’s SB 5, designed to “fill in the affordable housing gap created by the dissolution of redevelopment agencies,” escaped the massacre and made it all the way to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, only to end up vetoed.

And in the most high-profile blow for more housing in California, Senate Bill 50—which would have done away with some zoning limits to allow for taller, denser housing near mass transit and job centers—ended up banished to a phantom zone, ineligible for a vote until 2020.

The state remains stuck years-deep in a housing crisis that has dominated both California politics and the larger national discourse, with conservative and liberal voices sounding off on the issue.

Lawmakers from Gov. Gavin Newsom on down have made noise about fixing the state’s housing policy. Newsom declared in a May speech that “Housing is our great challenge” and called the crisis “a glaring headline” that must stop.

So why can’t California pass real housing reform?

Among members of the Bay Area caucus, the most common refrain was to emphasize the number of housing bills that escaped the massacre, many of which eventually reached the governor’s desk.

Newsom signed State Sen. Nancy Skinner of Berkeley’s SB 330, the “Housing Crisis Act of 2019,” in October.

SF-based Assemblymember David Chiu’s AB 1482, which caps annual rent increases at about seven percent in most cities, got the green light a week later, and Chiu even managed to resurrect AB 1481 by folding it into his bill.

Even SB 50 isn’t dead yet, although its opponents have unfairly treated its suspension as an excuse for an early wake.

“Progress hasn’t been as fast as I’d like it to be, but we have been making some headway,” Chiu tells Curbed.

Chiu points to recent history to bolster his claim. “I have introduced a tenant bill every year since 2014,” he says, referring to his “anti-rent gouging” measure AB 1482. “The vast majority of tenant bills either die or stall or dramatically during the process. That’s just a reality.”

But his bill passed, a feat that Chiu and his colleagues say would have been impossible a few years ago.

That passage did mean seriously compromising the measure’s substance, reducing its sunset period from 10 years to just three and raising the allowable rent hike before inflation from 5 percent to 7 percent.

But the governor later brokered agreement on a much more aggressive version of the bill. In any case, Chiu argues that’s the nature of bargaining in Sacramento; any rent cap is better than none.

SF-based State Sen. Scott Wiener, who received the hardest hit in the caucus when a single committee chair’s decision sent SB 50 into Limbo, also takes pains to highlight what he characterizes as a polar shift in how the state looks at housing.

“Over the last three of four years there’s been growing momentum, and we’ve passed legislation that would have been impossible five or 10 years ago around ADUs [accessory dwelling units], affordable housing, streamlining, and the housing accountability act,” Wiener tells Curbed SF.

Wiener’s SB 50—which, he insists, will eventually pass a floor vote next year—also qualifies as a moral victory to this line of thinking.

“Five or 10 years ago SB 50 wouldn’t have moved one inch,” says Wiener. “It would have been an impossible bill to even consider.”

Even Todd David, director of the outspoken San Francisco Housing Action Coalition, tells Curbed that it’s a kind of warped moral victory that “SB 50 had to be killed behind closed doors.”

“There’s a legit argument we’re failing at a less steep rate,” he says.

“It’s much easier to kill things.”

With rents and housing prices on the rise, many Californians have trouble seeing the glass as half full.

“A lot of people felt that once we all admitted what the problem was, once our leaders stated publicly that we’re somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 million homes short of what we need, then the solutions would be undeniable,” Laura Foote, executive director of San Francisco-based housing lobby YIMBY Action, tells Curbed.

“Well, the California State Legislature just denied those solutions, and I don’t see anyone forcing the legislature to act like adults this year,” she says. “The governor could be that leader, but it doesn’t seem to be happening.”

Newsom is in the awkward position of thanking Silicon Valley for pledging to help break California’s housing impasse after Google recently promised to develop 20,000 new homes in the Bay Area by 2030, mostly on land it owns. Apple and Facebook followed up with similar deals.

“Can you just do your job and get a housing package passed please—like the one that fell apart last month?” housing activist Kim Mai-Cutler said to Newsom after his comments about being “grateful for the leadership of Google.”

Part of the problem is that, for better or for worse, the legislature is working the way it was designed. Similar to the U.S. federal government model upon which California’s process is based, it’s difficult to create seismic shifts in state law all at once.

“There are many places for bills to be ambushed,” says Chiu, “it’s much easier to kill things in the state legislature than to move them forward.”

“We’re doing this in pieces,” says South Bay State Sen. Jim Beall, who argues that the way lawmaking works means incremental advances are simply the best most people can hope for.

Chiu also says that the problem specific to housing is a lack of consensus about fixes: “Rather than saying that everything needs to move forward, at the moment different interests are cutting the legs” out from under competing ideas.

“We all represent different communities, and different communities are tackling—or not tackling—this in different ways,” says Assemblymember Phil Ting, also of San Francisco.

“The biggest opposition to a lot of the reforms has been from suburban communities or small towns or cities. Even in the Bay Area, many of the reforms that we’ve been talking about get significant opposition from Marin and the Peninsula,” says Ting.

He offers an example of a kind of proverbial NIMBY dilemma: “If you’re a city council, the people who vote for you oppose the housing you’re creating, and you’re creating housing for the people who have yet to move in. And when they do move in, they fight the next project.”

But what about when even holdout regions sign on yet the bill still fails? SB 50 faced potential opposition from SB 4, a similar bill from North Bay Sen. Mike McGuire that applied a lighter touch to small communities that chafed at the idea of increased density.

Wiener’s solution was to merge much of that bill with his own, significantly altering SB 50’s scope but winning McGuire’s support—a textbook case of democracy through compromise.

After all that work, a single senator unilaterally quashed the bill: Curbed LA points out that Sen. Anthony Portantino, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee who put SB 50 into stasis, represents a district that “includes wealthy cities like La Cañada Flintridge, which, while he served as its mayor, did not build a single apartment.”

“I don’t know that any of us understand what happened,” Matthew Lewis, spokesperson for California YIMBY, a Sacramento-based lobbying group that co-sponsored SB 50, tells Curbed.

“We had wildly successful votes” in committees, says Lewis. “Up until that moment, it seemed like there was broad acclimation.”

Construction in the South Park area of downtown Los Angeles.

Photo by Shutterstock

YIMBY Action’s Laura Foote points out that Portantino probably did not act alone.

“He’s not a rogue agent; he’s been appointed to sit on that committee,” Foote tells Curbed, arguing that a chair who torpedoes ostensibly popular legislation without any backing would face catastrophic fallout.

“I think that what happened is a lot of legislators looked at a lot of the housing bills and would say out of one side of their mouths, ‘If it reaches the floor I’ll vote for it,’ [but] were begging leadership to not have to take tough votes.”

Portantino did not respond to Curbed SF’s requests for comment.

Publicly, Portantino told the Sacramento Bee in May, “I don’t think this particular effort was ready to go to the floor” and argued that “Making it a two-year bill allows [Wiener] to continue to work on an issue that, I think, there are challenges with it. There are legitimate questions that need to be asked,” though the senate chair was not specific about what those questions may be.

Despite this setback, Wiener still defends the Senate process.

“I am very frustrated by the slow pace of change around housing,” he told Curbed SF, but he adds, “I also understand why the process is designed to be cautious, because you can also pass very bad legislation without checks and balances.”

Sen. Jim Beall says the state still has the option of pulling out extra stops on housing if the political will exists, once again laying the bulk of the burden on the governor’s shoulders.

“We have a process. If the governor wants to declare a crisis he can call a special session about housing,” Beall tells Curbed SF, pointing out that former Gov. Jerry Brown did this several times, though never to address housing.

In a special session, legislators could only introduce laws particular to the matter at hand (housing in this case), and would suddenly have additional opportunities to introduce new bills. In California, only the governor can call for one.

“My feeling is he should ask sit down with the legislative leaders and talk about having a special session” is a comprehensive housing package doesn’t come together, adds Beall.

“We’re going to have our economy grind to a halt.”

When all other explanations fall short, both insiders and outsiders are quick to point fingers at NIMBYs, both real and proverbial.

“Every jurisdiction has people who benefit from the housing shortage,” says YIMBY Action’s Foote. “Homeowner are more likely to be deeply embedded in government, they’ve been in communities for longer periods, they can do the bread and butter politics.”

“Renters don’t vote the way they could,” says California YIMBY’s Matthew Lewis, arguing that if grassroots and lobbying groups motivated renters to be more involved, the game around housing would fundamentally change.

Lewis predicts that California’s business interests may start applying pressure first. “We’re probably within an economic cycle of starting to see the consequences of schools not attracting teachers, hospitals failing to attract nurses, even tech and banking failing to attract talent,” says Lewis.

If San Francisco is a bellwether for the rest of the state and the entire country, as the California governor so often boasts, the lay of the land is worrisome.

Rental site Apartment List estimated that San Francisco is the currently fourth least affordable city for teachers. Property Shark calculated that a median-priced home “earns” money faster than a nurse at median wages in SF. And according to Recode, Bay Area tech workers “average six-figure salaries but increasingly can’t afford to buy a house.”

“We’re going to have our economy grind to a halt” if nobody corrects the current course, Phil Ting predicts, adding that “in the parts of the state that want to add jobs they can’t because there’s nowhere for people to live.”

Business interests in the state could plausibly rival the NIMBY block. So far they haven’t proven as motivated to get involved directly in housing arguments, but that could change.

Despite crushing rents and soaring home prices, it’s possible that California power players have yet to realize how bad things are.

“We’re in the worst housing crisis in our state’s history, but that hasn’t sunk in for all of the stakeholders, and day by day the crisis is getting worse,” says Chiu.

One issue that few seem to want to talk about is the possibility that California’s system in its current form might not be well equipped to handle the crisis—in fact, it might be broken entirely.

From San Francisco up to the capitol, everyone sounds frustrated, disappointed, and anxious. But when asked, no caucus member was ready to seriously entertain whether structural changes might be in order.

Across the state, they still treat the situation as still a crisis of housing, not yet a crisis of governance.