Say, remember how Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass promised victims of the wildfires in Los Angeles that they would clear away all the red tape to allow them to rebuild ASAP? No worries, they claimed.
Perhaps they may ultimately follow through on that promise, but worries there are already. Two county supervisors have asked Newsom to follow through on his promise by waiving a number of requirements that favor high-density housing. And progressive advocates are having none of that, the LA Times reports today:
At the meeting, housing advocates contended that the county‘s waiver proposal would slash too many restrictions, bypassing laws aimed at solving the region’s affordable housing crisis.
“This is just totally going in the wrong direction,” said Nolan Gray, senior director of legislation and research for California YIMBY, noting that the laws have spurred the construction of thousands of affordable units across the state. “There’s so much in here that has nothing to do with helping people rebuild.”
Chris Elmendorf, a law professor at UC Davis who studies California housing law, said the county was too broad in requesting a waiver in undefined “fire impacted communities.”
“If the goal is to get people back to their communities as fast as possible, shouldn’t the goal be to build as much housing in those communities as fast as possible?” he said.
Lest one miss the nuance of this moment, people objected in a public hearing to allow victims of a wildfire to rebuild the homes they lost. They want to apply new rules and regulations to force property owners to replace the single-family Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods with multi-family dwellings, while the victims remain displaced. Or at the very least, they want these victims to run a gauntlet of bureaucrats for years just to restore what was lost — at least in part by progressive incompetence and policies that kneecapped fire prevention and firefighting.
They’re taking a page out of the Rahm Emanuel playbook: Never let a crisis go to waste.
This isn’t a YIMBY issue; it’s an MYOB issue. These properties belong to the victims and they have made proper use of these lots for decades. The laws that these advocates want applied to the firezones are more or less non-sequiturs:
That included an ask to Gov. Gavin Newsom to temporarily exempt the county from some of the state’s most significant housing laws intended to speed up the creation of affordable housing, including parts of Senate Bill 330, aimed at preserving affordable housing, and the Density Bonus Law, which encourages developers to build new units.
There was no “affordable housing” in Palisades to “preserve.” Like it or not, the Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena have become attractive areas for upscale homeowners over the decades, and many if not all of the residents have their entire capital wealth in the homes and properties there. To force displaced families to build low-income apartments rather than restore their properties to the condition before the fire is not just unjust, it’s absurd. It’s practically a parody of mindless bureaucrats operating as commissars rather than as public servants.
Many of us warned that the promises made by Newsom and Bass were worth less than the air that carried them, and not just because they lack the requisite intestinal fortitude. California has constructed a massive structure of unaccountable bureaucrats to impede development of any kind, which is one reason why Southern California has a housing crisis in the first place. Even if Newsom and Bass attempt to follow through on those promises — and I suspect those were mainly deflection strategies while the media is still paying attention — these agencies will tie up any efforts to rebuild in any number of ways, especially through collusion with activist groups in lawsuits intending to obstruct rebuilding efforts.
Perhaps heightened scrutiny will force California into really removing roadblocks and getting the homes rebuilt as is. One can certainly hope that the public has had enough of the petty bureaucracy after watching their communities overrun by flames while reservoirs sat empty and ‘leadership’ partied in Ghana. Donald Trump might force them into the light as they demand federal aid for the region. But as this report makes clear, the progressive elites have no intention of allowing people to make their own decisions — even victims of a catastrophe.
