Can Democrats make progress on housing? Two Californians will be key

Two Californians will be key test cases of whether Democrats can do more over the next year than just be performatively anti-Trump. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie both must show voters that they can actually make changes that improve people’s lives — and building housing is at the top of the list. While the government doesn’t directly build housing, developers and pro-housing advocates have long complained that the regulatory process is too burdensome and significantly slows the speed by which housing can be built.

Newsom and Lurie say focusing on improving the existing accountability systems is key — along with the hope that interest rates continue to fall — to building more units and hopefully lowering the costs of housing. 

Doing so would address a concern that affects Californians viscerally. 

More than 1 in 4 Californians (26%) say they worry every day about the cost of housing, according to a December Public Policy Institute of California survey. Four in 10 people making less than $40,000 annually say they worry about it daily. 

Yet, California has made little progress toward building more housing and is doing so far slower than Newsom promised. 

When he ran for governor in 2018, Newsom wrote in a Medium post that “As Governor, I will lead the effort to develop the 3.5 million new housing units we need by 2025 because our solutions must be as bold as the problem is.” 

He has tried to walk back that comment many times, frequently saying he was only referring to that housing target as a “stretch goal.” The state has not built more than 116,683 units annually since he took office. 

Newsom has since moved the goalposts. Now, the target is for California to plan for, not build, 2.5 million homes by 2030. Newsom has signed dozens of laws since taking office designed to make it easier to build housing and cut red tape associated with permitting, including 42 pieces of housing and homelessness-related California Environmental Quality Act reforms. The state has spent $24 billion on homeless services. 

Now entering his penultimate year in the governor’s office, Newsom wants to ensure local governments are held accountable for planning and building new units. The state’s Department of Housing and Community Development has sued several cities, including Anaheim, Elk Grove, Huntington Beach, Norwalk and La Cañada Flintridge for not complying with state housing laws. Expect more focus on enforcement in 2025 in the pursuit of building more units.  

“For the governor to start to push forward on his housing goals, he’s going to have to figure out what’s going on with the housing element process because it’s totally broken,” said Matthew Lewis, director of communications for California YIMBY, a pro-housing group, referring to the system that determines how many units each municipality in the state is required to plan for and build. Lewis said that when it comes to the many laws Newsom has signed, “getting them to work also includes enforcing them.” 

There’s a political urgency for Newsom to focus on getting more housing built as well as a collective one. He is termed out of the governor’s office in 2026 and is likely to start running for president soon thereafter. Putting a dent in California’s housing affordability crisis — the state’s “original sin” as he describes it — and homeless population are a must if he hopes to get any traction nationally.

“The original sin in this state is affordability, and the lack of urgency and delays that hold back housing. We’re turning up the heat on local communities to fix the imbalance of supply and demand,” said Bob Salladay, Newsom’s senior adviser for communications. He noted that Newsom “signed 32 pro-housing bills in September alone. We’re not leaving any gas in the tank on this.”

Look for a change in Newsom’s tactics and messaging, too. He has long bemoaned having to act as the “the mayor of California” — responsible for local crime and housing challenges across the state. He would prefer that local officials take more responsibility. 

When I asked him in November 2022, shortly before he was reelected, when California would see the benefit of the billions the state had spent on homeless programs during his tenure, Newsom replied: “I’m not the mayor of California. I’m not the mayor of 478 cities. We need to see accountability, housing accountability.”

Two years later, that still applies. And Newsom is running out of time. His progress next year will go a long way toward determining his future, the reputation of the Democratic Party and the economic fortunes of his home state. 

Democrats were roundly criticized in the wake of 2024 election losses for fostering a perception that they were not addressing kitchen table issues such as housing affordability. If Newsom shows that California, where the Legislature has a Democratic supermajority, can facilitate enough home-building to lower prices, he will go a long way toward dispelling those criticisms. 

Lurie faces a similar challenge in one of the nation’s hardest cities to get anything built. San Franciscans are expecting that something gets done. One of every 4 respondents to an August Chronicle poll said housing policy was the most important issue when deciding whom to support. 

Voters have seen how San Francisco’s housing approval process has ground to a near halt. In August, President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers singled out San Francisco’s sluggish approval process, noting that the median time that large projects spend in the permitting process in San Francisco in recent years is about 33 months — the longest of any other city it cited. For that and other reasons, the city has only built 4.4% of the 82,000 units it is required to plan for by 2031 under state housing mandates. 

Enter Lurie, who has never held elective office. 

“We are going to work collaboratively to address our affordability crisis,” Lurie said after the election. “Housing is essential infrastructure, and to get it built faster and more affordably I will hold our permitting system accountable by closing loopholes and cutting through red tape.” The task is daunting. San Francisco Supervisor-elect Bilal Mahmood found it took “at least 87 permits, enduring 1,000 days for meetings and paying more than $500,000 in fees on average for any residential project” when he investigated the process in March 2023. 

Pro-housing advocates don’t know what to expect from Lurie, given his lack of experience. But if he can increase the pace of housing construction in a city perceived as the epicenter of liberalism, it would send a message beyond state borders that Democrats can do more than bray at Trump. 

“Lurie is this clean slate, and I think he’s got potential to be transformative,” said California YIMBY’s Lewis.  

So the Lurie team, which takes office this month, is looking at holistic changes to the housing system. “I was elected with a clear mandate to focus on public safety, the drug crisis, affordability, and to ensure our economy comes roaring back. It’s not enough to talk about our values — we need to deliver on them for all San Franciscans,” Lurie said in a statement. 

Reach Joe Garofoli: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com; X: @joegarofoli