Video: the progressive YIMBY/NIMBY debate in California

LA city council member: "Instead of six stories, we got it down to three stories"

Housing is an issue that cuts across the usual left-right lines. On the left, housing divides younger and lower-income people, who are most exposed to high housing costs, from older environmentalists, who are wary of population growth and skeptical of market housing. On the right, housing divides businesses in general, who want growth, from older people who are small-c conservative and don’t want their neighbourhoods to change. Thus arguments against housing will take somewhat different forms, depending on whether the opponent is progressive or conservative.

In California, there’s currently a battle over state bill SB 79, which is a modest form of transit-oriented development, allowing six-storey buildings near rapid transit and bus stops. Explanation by Damien Newton.

Scott Wiener is a California state senator, and one of the key architects of the state-level push to override cities and allow more housing. He wrote SB 79.

Imelda Padilla is a member of Los Angeles city council. She opposes SB 79.

Both are Democrats. They went on the podcast Pod Save America recently, hosted by Jon Lovett (who supports SB 79).

This quote from Imelda Padilla, in which she talks about she successfully pressured a developer into shrinking a by-right affordable-housing project from six storeys down to three storeys, has been getting a lot of attention. Direct link.

There's also an ED1 [affordable housing being built by right] that's being built on Victory and Balboa. And going back to what you said, the neighbors didn't want it at all. They just didn't want the density. They wanted me to kill it, but by law, I really have no jurisdiction anymore because it's an ED1, right?

But we still as a team got together with the developer, the high school across the street, other stakeholders, and instead of building something that was potentially six stories, we got it down to three stories.

And we also got the developer to also work with us to make sure that it helps the families of the area. We also said, you know, instead of a ton of office space, we do want you to also incorporate a few more parking lots and EV chargers.

I was pretty impressed with Scott Wiener’s ability to maintain a poker face, while Jon Lovett’s shock was more obvious.

I was also somewhat surprised by his diplomatic approach:

I go out of my way not to demonize local elected officials. As a former local elected official [in San Francisco], I know how hard it is and how hard local elected officials work, and I know the council member works extremely hard to do right by her community and I admire that. And there has to be a partnership, and it's a balance, right?

I don't want complete state control. But I do think the state needs to set standards.

And I'm also a strong supporter of good investment in infrastructure, and I want to help cities invest in that.

He wraps up with his core arguments:

But I do want to say that we have had such a broken system for a long time, and I know at the local and state level, a lot of people are working to fix it. It was a system where we methodically decided not to zone for enough housing, and to downzone and ban apartment buildings and say you're only allowed to build single family homes.

And then we set up a permitting system where instead of doing things in a good-government way, which is to set the rules ahead of time and then if you check the boxes and meet the rules, you get your permit immediately. We decided that meeting all the rules just qualified you to go into the political mosh pit for every single permit. And so we've seen housing that's compliant with all the local rules get caught up in a five or 10-year process or get mutilated or killed. And that's government at its worst. And it's helped get us into this crisis.

And the the ramifications are the ones I talked about earlier - three teachers in a year for your kid, people getting pushed out, and so on and so forth.

Also in terms of when we look at the broad politics of this country right now, there was an amazing piece by Jerusalem Demsas called The Democrats are Committing Partycide, that blue states have done such a poor job building housing, whereas red states are have been building a lot of housing. And so we're seeing a population shift from California, New York and Illinois to places like Texas and Florida, North Carolina. In the census, we are projected to lose the big blue states about 10 seats in the House of Representatives to the red states. And that means 10 votes in the electoral college. And that means had Kamala Harris won the blue wall states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, that would not have been enough to win the presidency. So we’re strangling our economy. We’re also moving ourselves into a situation of being in the structural minority as blue states.

More

Matthew Yglesias on the story of Mayor Karen Bass and ED1:

Mayor Karen Bass was elected on, among other things, a promise to address the city’s homelessness crisis and lack of affordable housing. Shortly after taking office, she made a big splash with Executive Directive 1, an order that massively streamlined permitting requirements for new housing projects that consist of 100 percent “affordable” housing. ED 1 did not, however, provide any actual money for the construction of affordable projects. So when the order was issued, one interpretation was that Bass did not particularly intend this to make a big difference. She wanted to take a bold stand in favor of affordable housing but was counting on very little actually getting built. This turned out to be wrong, though. California attaches tons of requirements to affordable housing projects built with state money. And California localities also put tons of costly permitting delays in the way of all kinds of projects. But it turned out that Los Angeles is so acutely under-housed that if you combine the express permitting of ED1 with saving money on labor costs by not taking state money, lots of new 100 percent affordable, privately financed projects pencil out.

This was an unexpected result and naturally provoked elements of local controversy, in the face of which ED1 has been repeatedly revised, each time with measures that only make it harder and more expensive to build and ultimately serve to undermine the original idea of building more housing.

Ben Christopher explains how ED1 accidentally unleashed a lot of housing projects: Los Angeles’ One Weird Trick To Build Affordable Housing At No Public Cost. LAist, February 2024.

LA mayor bans duplexes in Palisades burn zone after getting permission from governor. David Wagner, LAist.

LA City Council narrowly votes to oppose state bill allowing more housing near public transit. David Wagner, LAist, August 2025.