After the collapse of the California Senate’s 2020 Housing Package in November of last year, the seeds of a new attack on the will of Californians to determine their own local housing policy were planted at the end of the last session of the Legislature. The failure to pass SB902 was the third strike in Sen. Scott Wiener’s attempts to end single-family zoning in California as a means to punish single-family residents and enable developers to profit by meeting demand for market rate housing in California.
Wiener’s previous attempts with SB827 (2018) and SB50 (2019) also did not pass. But sure as weeds that shoot up in spring, a new Senate Housing Package for 2021 was crafted in December and now has taken root. Like a weed, the package is fronted with a pleasant bloom of beneficence and creative thinking, but that masks a root system whose effect, if not intention, is to undermine local planning and control (while not leading to any meaningful increase in needed affordable housi