Volume 47 (2020) - Issue 4

Inadequate housing supply in California’s most expensive metro areas drives a statewide housing crisis that challenges climate policy implementation, fair housing goals, and poverty reduction. Many scholars and policy makers agree that increasing dense infill transit-oriented residential development (TOD) in high-cost metro areas could address this housing crisis while also mitigating the impacts of climate change. But some advocates and scholars liken state policy that promotes TOD to twentieth century urban renewal—contending that state-incentivized TOD disproportionately displaces lower income communities. To explore this issue, and to examine the relative influence of both state law promoting TOD and local law regulating land use in generating inequitable outcomes like displacement, we collected land use and housing data from high- cost cities across California. 

As part of their role as anchor institutions rooted in place, hospitals have invested in communities for decades. While past efforts have been piecemeal, hospitals are now driving strategies to finance, build, and preserve affordable housing. This article looks at why and how hospitals have contributed to housing preservation strategies in order to highlight new opportunities to address California’s worsening housing crisis.

Since 1980, California has had an ambitious planning framework on the books to make local governments accommodate their fair share of regionally needed housing. The framework long relied, however, on a rickety and complicated conveyor belt for converting regional housing targets into actual production. Superintending the conveyor belt was an administrative entity, the Department of Housing and Community Development, whose rules had no legal effect, and whose judgments about the adequacy of a local government’s housing plan received virtually no deference from the courts. This Article contends that the Department’s position has been fundamentally transformed by a series of individually modest but complementary bills enacted from 2017 to 2019.