The gallery owner, Collier Gwin, semi-apologized later, telling a television interviewer, “I totally understand what an awful thing that is to do, but I also understand what an awful thing it is to leave her on the streets.”

Gwin said he and other business owners complained to police about her blocking the sidewalks and business entrances. Efforts had been made to help her get off the streets, but nothing has worked.

“We called the police. There must be at least 25 calls to police,” Gwin said. “It’s two days in a homeless shelter, it’s two days in jail, and then they drop them right back on the street.”

Finally, after the woman once again refused to move, in frustration Gwin sprayed her down.

Gwin obviously did the wrong thing, but the incident dramatized the frustration that millions of Californians feel about the squalid encampments of homeless people that have become the defining feature of urban California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged the growing resentment as he introduced his new state budget last week. “People have just had it,” he told reporters. “They want the encampments cleaned up.”

“People are dying on the streets all across this state,” Newsom said. “The encampments, we’ve got to clean them up, we’ve got to take ownership, we’ve got to take responsibility.”

In the last two state budgets, Newsom and the Legislature have committed $17.5 billion for housing and services to the estimated 170,000 homeless Californians – about $100,000 each. However, as Newsom’s new budget acknowledges, “Despite unprecedented resources from the state and record numbers of people being served by the homelessness response system, the population of unhoused individuals grows faster than the population exiting homelessness.”

The new budget adds several more billion dollars, but suggests that local governments are still not doing enough – a theme that Newsom has pursued in recent months.

Last year, he rejected all of the plans that local governments had submitted, saying they fell well short of actually making real progress on reducing the upward trend. After a showdown meeting with local officials, he agreed to release more state aid.

“The first iteration of these plans made clear that more ambition is required – and more direction from the state is necessary,” the budget declares. “Accordingly, the administration plans to work with the Legislature this year to advance homeless accountability legislation.”

The budget suggests that cities failing to meet their state quotas for zoning land for new housing might lose state financing for homelessness programs.

“If we can’t clean up the encampments and address what’s happening chronically on our streets, I’m going to be hard-pressed to make a case to the Legislature to provide them one dollar more,” Newsom told reporters.

That threat doesn’t sit well with local government officials. The League of California Cities issued a sharp reaction, saying, “one-time investments will not solve the crisis” and adding, “We need ongoing state funding and a coordinated approach with clearly defined roles and responsibilities for all levels of government that supports long-term solutions.”

The exchanges suggest there is still no consensus on what combination of actions would have a visible impact and all of the politicians involved are engaged in some blame-shifting as the voting public’s patience with the squalor wears thin.

Newsom knows that if the crisis is not resolved, it will leave an indelible mark on his governorship and haunt whatever future political career moves he might make.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s penchant for braggadocio was in full flower eight months ago when he declared that California had a $97.5 billion budget surplus and boasted that “no other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this.”

He and the Legislature then wrote a 2022-23 budget with major increases in education, medical care and social services, plus a multi-billion-dollar cash rebate to taxpayers and other one-time expenditures.

On Tuesday, a more subdued Newsom acknowledged that the projected surplus had morphed into a $22.5 billion shortfall. He proposed a $297 billion 2023-24 budget that throttles back some of the additional spending and indirectly borrows billions of dollars to close the gap.

Moreover, Newsom warned that if the Federal Reserve System’s interest rate increases trigger a recession, the deficit could become much worse.

The situation is another reminder that California’s public finances are at the mercy of an extremely volatile revenue system, one dominated by personal income taxes, especially those paid by high-income Californians on their stocks and other capital investments.

As he began his presentation to reporters, Newsom displayed a chart demonstrating the ups and downs of capital gains as a percentage of personal income – reaching a peak of 9.7% in 2021 and now expected to decline to 5% by 2025.

Newsom said it “sums up California’s tax structure, sums up boom and bust.”

The decline in investment earnings, Newsom said, is the primary reason for a $29 billion reduction in projected income. His estimate of revenue declines and the resulting $22.5 deficit is a bit more optimistic than a November forecast from the Legislature’s budget analyst, Gabe Petek.

The situation rekindles a decades-old debate in political, academic and media circles about the state budget’s volatile dependence on the investment earnings of a relative handful of affluent taxpayers.

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders created a blue-ribbon commission to recommend tax system changes that would lessen volatility. The badly divided commission proposed to reduce the reliance on the income tax by flattening it to just two brackets, eliminating sales and corporate income taxes, and creating a new “net business receipts tax.”

When the “Parsky Commission,” so dubbed for its chairman, businessman Gerald Parsky, finally released its report in 2009, it was quickly consigned to oblivion. When Jerry Brown returned to the governorship in 2011, he proposed to deal with volatility by creating a “rainy day” reserve financed by windfall revenues.

That fund and other reserves now total $35.6 billion, which would easily cover the current deficit, but Newsom – agreeing with Patek – is not tapping them, citing the danger of recession.

“We’re not touching these reserves,” he said. “We’re in a very volatile moment.”

As hefty as the reserves appear, it’s questionable whether they would be enough to counter even a moderate recession.

Petek, who pegged the current shortfall at $24 billion without a recession, warned in his November forecast that “Based on historical experience, should a recession occur soon, revenues could be $30 billion to $50 billion below our revenue outlook in the budget window.”

In other words, a recession could have as much as a $74 billion negative impact on the budget, more than twice the state’s reserves. In relative terms, the state has faced deficits of that magnitude in past recessions.

“What’s consistent is the inconsistency of our tax structure,” Newsom acknowledged.

Ideally, California would alter that structure to make it less dependent on a narrow base of taxable income – but as the fate of the Parsky Commission’s report indicates, there’s little political appetite for such reform.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Anti-housing NIMBYs in affluent communities misuse it to stymie high-density, multi-family projects, arguing that their neighborhoods’ bucolic ambience would be altered. And construction unions misuse it to extract wage concessions from developers.

It’s a long-running civic scandal and a major factor in California’s chronic inability to reduce its severe housing shortage, one that cries out for CEQA reform, which former Gov. Jerry Brown once described as “the Lord’s work.” But neither Brown or any other recent governor has been willing to take on the task, which would mean confronting environmental groups and unions, two of the Democratic Party’s major allies.

In the absence of comprehensive reform, governors and legislators sometimes grant CEQA exemptions for particular projects, such as sports arenas, or narrow categories of housing. However, CEQA misuse continues and the courts have become venues for battles over its application.

Two recent state appellate court actions in the crowded San Francisco Bay Area – one expanding the use of CEQA by those who oppose housing projects and another that restricts its use – underscore the law’s chaotic role.

Just before Christmas, one panel of the First District Court of Appeal issued a preliminary ruling that could open a new avenue for using CEQA to halt projects. It declares that a University of California student housing development in Berkeley violates the law because UC didn’t consider the impact of having more people – 1,100 students – in the neighborhood, citing the potential of late-night parties and other gatherings that could worsen a “persistent problem with student-generated noise.”

In other words, the court said that the presence of more people is an environmental impact – a novel theory that could hand anti-housing groups everywhere a potent weapon.

As UC law professor Chris Elmendorf tweeted about the draft decision, “The court’s reasoning is devastating ammunition for racist white homeowners who would leverage CEQA to keep poor people and minorities out of their neighborhoods.”

For example, he continued, “using the court’s statistical-associations logic, white homeowners could argue that CEQA requires affordable housing developers to analyze and mitigate putative ‘gun violence impacts’ from any lower-income housing project in an affluent neighborhood. The homeowners would point to statistics showing that poor people, and African Americans and Hispanics, are statistically more likely than affluent people and whites to be victims of gun violence.”

A few days later, another panel of the same appellate court rejected efforts by a group opposing a 130-unit project in downtown Livermore, called Save Livermore Downtown, to employ CEQA. Attorney General Rob Bonta had interceded in the case, supporting the city’s approval of the project and its win in Superior Court.

“Timing is critical for affordable housing projects, which often rely on time-sensitive funding sources like tax credits to finance development,” Bonta said while intervening, adding, “Our state is continuing to face a housing shortage and affordability crisis of epic proportions. CEQA plays a critical role in protecting the environment and public health here in California. We won’t stand by when it is used to thwart new development, rather than to protect Californians and our environment.”

After the appellate court action, Bonta tweeted, “CA’s housing crisis is dire. We won’t stand by and let people misuse our laws to avoid being part of the solution.”

The outcomes of both cases underscore the need for a fundamental CEQA overhaul to reinstate its original purpose, rather than continuing wasteful project-by-project skirmishes.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

The initiative, and several followup measures, imposed a direct cap on property taxes, created voting thresholds that made it more difficult to enact other taxes, and curbed the use of tax-like fees.

Although voters have rejected direct assaults on Proposition 13, politicians and pro-tax interest groups such as public employee unions have fought legal and political skirmishes with the anti-tax movement over what kinds of revenue-increasing instruments can be used to skirt constitutional restraints.

One potential clash this year is Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed financial penalties on oil companies that exceed still-to-be-specified limits on their profits. He initially proposed a tax on those profits, but a tax would require a two-thirds legislative vote, so Newsom substituted financial penalties which, at least theoretically, would require only a simple majority vote.

However, the petroleum industry is branding the penalties as a tax, hinting that if Newsom’s measure becomes law, a legal challenge will be mounted on its constitutionality.

“A fee imposed on the industry as a commodity going to the government, that is going to look and act like a tax,” Kevin Slagle, spokesperson for the Western States Petroleum Association, said. “We know windfall taxes have been tried nationally and don’t work. What we need to do is focus on better public policy.”

A couple of years ago, the state Supreme Court handed pro-tax groups a major victory, declaring that although special purpose taxes proposed by local governments require two-thirds approval by voters, such taxes proposed by initiative ballot measure need just simple majority support from voters.

Writing the 5-2 majority opinion, Supreme Court Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar declared, “Multiple provisions of the state constitution explicitly constrain the power of local governments to raise taxes. But we will not lightly apply such restrictions on local governments to voter initiatives.”

The decision validated some local initiative tax measures that had failed to get two-thirds votes and touched off a flurry of new tax proposals using the initiative process, one of them being a highly controversial tax on property transfers of $5 million or more in Los Angeles.

In November, Los Angeles voters approved Proposition ULA by a nearly 3-to-2 margin – a clear majority but short of a two-thirds vote. It would generate between $600 million and $1.1 billion a year for low-cost housing, rent relief and programs to battle homelessness.

The city’s newly elected mayor, Karen Bass, is counting on the funds to help fulfill her pledge to alleviate the nation’s worst urban homelessness crisis.

However, if the tax is to take effect, its advocates must prevail in a lawsuit filed last month by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association – named for Proposition 13’s late author – and local real estate interests, contending that the tax is prohibited by the state constitution and Los Angeles’ city charter.

The suit argues that “great and irreparable harm will result to plaintiffs, and to all Los Angeles property owners in being required to pay unconstitutionally imposed taxes,” adding, “Similar harm will occur to all Los Angeles residents in the form of increased rent and consumer prices resulting from the tax increase on all property sold (or value transferred) above $5 million.”

Given the huge amounts of money involved, it’s likely that the legality of the transfer tax will eventually reach the state Supreme Court and it could wind up on the same docket as a challenge to Newsom’s oil profits penalties.

Thus the never-ending saga of Proposition 13 enters a new phase.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Despite some damage and at least one death from local flooding and tree-toppling high winds, the storm and the predictions of more to come are welcome relief from what had appeared to be a prolonged drought.

There are lessons to be learned from this watery wave, if Californians and the politicians they have elected pay attention, to wit:

• Despite great advances in technology and data collection, weather forecasting is still an imperfect science. Until the storm hit, meteorologists had expected that a phenomenon known as La Niña would continue to block Pacific fronts from reaching the state and thus continue the drought.

That said, there’s no guarantee that the 2022-23 season will be a wet one. A year ago we had a similar spurt of precipitation, but it did not continue into the spring.

• Erratic precipitation makes it very difficult for reservoir managers to decide how much water to release and how much to retain for future use. For example, Folsom Lake near Sacramento was scarcely a third full when the storm hit, but the Bureau of Reclamation tripled releases to 24,000 cubic feet a second, worried about the reservoir’s ability to absorb runoff in the American River’s Sierra watershed.

• Folsom’s increased releases are another indication that California lacks enough water storage to cope with precipitation cycles that are becoming less predictable due to climate change. If we had built the additional storage that water managers had long proposed – Auburn Dam upstream from Folsom, for example – it would have meant less guesswork when opportunities arose to capture water from heavy storms•.

Preliminary construction had begun on Auburn Dam when, during the 1970s, it was abruptly halted. Other storage projects have been on the drawing board for decades, such as Sites Reservoir on the west side of the Sacramento Valley. Were Sites a reality today, it would be absorbing excess flow from the Sacramento River, banking water for when it would be needed in the future.

• The “atmospheric river” now watering California underscores the state’s vulnerability to catastrophic flooding.

Last year, a massive study was released, suggesting that climate change creates an ever-increasing risk of megafloods that would cause untold death and destruction.

It is the latest update to studies that originated from the historic flooding that struck California during the winter of 1861-62, when California had been a state for scarcely a decade.

As the study noted: “This event, which was characterized by weeks-long sequences of winter storms, produced widespread catastrophic flooding across virtually all of California’s lowlands – transforming the interior Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys into a temporary but vast inland sea nearly 300 miles in length and inundating much of the now densely populated coastal plain in present-day Los Angeles and Orange counties.”

If such a prolonged deluge occurred again, researchers Xingying Huang and Daniel Swain, wrote, it “would likely produce widespread, catastrophic flooding and subsequently lead to the displacement of millions of people, the long-term closure of critical transportation corridors and ultimately to nearly $1 trillion in overall economic losses.”

Again, the American River’s situation illustrates the threat. Officials say that Folsom Lake’s capacity, nearly one million acre-feet, is too small to protect Sacramento from such a disaster. One rationale for Auburn Dam had been to provide another layer of flood protection.

Will politicians heed the lessons from the current period of prolonged precipitation or continue disengaged business as usual?

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Despite a fairly wet winter – so far – California is still coping with a multi-year drought that’s devastating the nation’s most productive agricultural industry, the electrical grid struggles to meet demand, public school students are struggling with learning losses from COVID-19 school shutdowns, and the state’s chronic housing shortage underlies the nation’s highest rates of poverty and homelessness.

Any one of these crises could be labeled as existential – something that threatens California’s economic and societal future – and collectively they should tell the state’s politicians, including the recently re-elected Gov. Gavin Newsom, that it’s time to stop promising effective responses and start delivering them.

Just before 2022 ended, the state received two statistical jolts that should be wake-up calls on the need for decisive action.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported that California’s population declined for the third straight year, largely due to hundreds of thousands of Californians voting with their feet, giving up on the state and seeking more welcoming, stable and less expensive places to live.

California used to be the place where people went to make better lives for themselves, but now we’ve become one of those places that people leave because we make it too difficult for them to prosper. Newsom often disparages states such as Texas and Florida, but they are gaining population while California is losing it.

The second negative data point came from the federal Department of Housing and Community Development, revealing anew that California has the nation’s worst homelessness problem.

The first “point-in-time” count of people sleeping in shelters and cars or living on the street since 2019 found an estimated 172,000 in California, or 44 of every 10,000 people in the state – the nation’s highest rate.

It’s widely acknowledged that the official tally of homelessness probably understates the numbers, too, and it’s also evident that it’s worsened even as federal, state and local governments were spending countless billions of dollars to reverse the trend.

It’s also evident, as a recent article in The Atlantic explained, that the most important factor in California’s embarrassingly high homelessness rate is the state’s failure to build enough housing to meet demand. The shortage of housing drives up costs for both renters and would-be homeowners, thereby pushing some people into the streets and others to pack up and leave the state.

The state is at least a million housing units short and some estimates run as high as 3.5 million. The state’s official goal is adding 2.5 million units by the end of the decade, but that would require tripling the current rate of construction.

The simple fact is that building housing, particularly for low- and middle-income families, is immensely difficult, and therefore immensely expensive, in California.

Local governments tend to make construction difficult because their voters tend to not want the traffic and other impacts of development. The state has adopted some pro-housing policies, but has added to construction costs by imposing its own design mandates.

The Capitol’s politicians have made some efforts to make development easier but they have been unwilling to take big steps, such as reforming the California Environmental Quality Act, which is often misused by anti-development activists and labor unions.

The Democrats’ dominance in the Capitol should make it easier for them to do what’s necessary to address housing, homelessness and other major issues. However, the lack of effective political competition also makes it easy for them to avoid making hard decisions.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom did a foolish thing last summer when he persuaded the Legislature to pass Senate Bill 1327, which would have subjected makers of guns prohibited by state law to civil lawsuits. It essentially stripped them of their right to defend themselves by making them liable for court fees.

It was patterned on a 2021 Texas law (Senate Bill 8) that made anyone who “who aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy subject to private lawsuits with similar restrictions on mounting a defense.

Newsom more or less admitted that SB 1327 was a stunt aimed at marshalling opposition to the Texas law. The bill even has language that repeals itself if and when the Texas law is overturned in court.

Litigation on the Texas law is underway. This month, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that a lawsuit challenging the law can proceed.

Meanwhile, however, California gun rights groups mounted a legal challenge to SB 1327, and this week, U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez, who has issued other pro-gun rights decisions in recent years, blocked the law’s enforcement. His order came with some sharp criticism for making it virtually impossible for targets of lawsuits to defend themselves.

“This court concludes that the purpose and effect of (SB 1327) is to trench on a citizen’s right of access to the courts and to discourage the peaceful vindication of an enumerated constitutional right,” he wrote. “Because the state fee-shifting statute undermines a citizen’s constitutional rights, it is this court’s role to declare its invalidity and enjoin its threat.”

Newsom had once described Benitez as a “wholly-owned subsidiary of the gun lobby and the National Rifle Association” after one of the judge’s previous gun control rulings, but after this week’s decision, he effusively praised Benitez.

“I want to thank Judge Benitez,” Newsom said in a statement. “We have been saying all along that Texas’ anti-abortion law is outrageous. Judge Benitez just confirmed it is also unconstitutional. The provision in California’s law that he struck down is a replica of what Texas did, and his explanation of why this part of SB 1327 unfairly blocks access to the courts applies equally to Texas’ SB 8. There is no longer any doubt that Texas’ cruel anti-abortion law should also be struck down.”

It should be struck down for the same reasons – that it unconstitutionally limits the right to defend oneself against a lawsuit. But whether it will be is not certain.

There are a few differences in the two laws and one big difference in the underlying issues of abortion rights and gun rights. The Supreme Court, in overturning Roe v. Wade, explicitly declared that there is no constitutional right to abortion while the “right to bear arms” is specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights.

Given that difference, and the Supreme Court’s obvious distaste for severely restrictive gun laws, it’s entirely possible that California’s law will be permanently blocked while the Texas law survives, at least in some form.

Whatever the outcome, however, the SB 1327 saga is an exercise in political oneupsmanship that makes a mockery of the legislative process. Passing a law in California with the declared intent of shaming a law in Texas while putting Californians in legal jeopardy is political malpractice.

Newsom and the legislators who voted for SB 1327 should be ashamed of themselves. They should be spending their time on California’s many serious problems, not trying to tell Texas what it should be doing.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

The Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers drain a watershed of mountains and hills that stretches about 400 miles from Mount Shasta, near the Oregon border, to the Sierra southeast of Fresno. After meandering through the dozens of channels and sloughs of the Delta, their combined waters flow into San Francisco Bay and thence to the Pacific Ocean – minus whatever has been diverted into cities and farms along the way.

And that’s the rub.

For decades, in political and legal forums, there’s been a great debate over how much water can be taken from the two rivers, their many tributaries and the Delta itself without destroying its natural function as habitat for fish and other wildlife.

Environmental groups and state water quality authorities, occasionally backed up by federal court decrees, contend that too much is being diverted, particularly by farmers. But the latter say that the water is needed to maintain California’s largest-in-the-nation agricultural industry.

For years, the state Water Resources Control Board has been on the verge of mandating sharp cuts in the diversions by raising Delta water quality standards. However, it has delayed what could be a high-stakes showdown over water rights, many of which stretch back more than a century, in hopes that satisfactory “voluntary agreements” could be reached.

Last week, a new chapter in the saga opened when environmental justice groups and Indian tribes filed a civil rights complaint with the federal Environmental Protection Agency against the board. It alleges that failure to issue those water quality standards gives preference to agricultural interests and violates the federal Clean Water Act.

Last spring, the same coalition submitted a 169-page petition to the water board, demanding that it issue new Delta water standards, but the board denied it, saying that updating was already underway.

The semi-permanent drought that’s plagued California adds urgency to the debate over the Delta because it reduces the overall supply of water to be divvied up among the various demands. Farmers and cities have experienced sharp cutbacks in deliveries from the federal and state canals that pump water from the Delta’s southern edge. Farmers also face new restrictions on how much they can draw from depleted underground aquifers to offset reductions in surface water.

The Public Policy Institute of California has estimated that the looming restriction on tapping underground water supplies alone will require at least 500,000 acres of farmland to be taken out of production. Permanent reductions in surface water that would result from higher water quality standards in the Delta would cause more farmland to be fallowed.

As the water quality clash plays itself out, another conflict over the Delta’s future looms –whether to bore a tunnel that would transport some Sacramento River water to the head of the California Aqueduct near Tracy, bypassing the Delta altogether. In one form or another, what’s now called the “Delta conveyance” has kicked around for six decades, first as a “peripheral canal,” later as twin tunnels and, since Gavin Newsom became governor, a single tunnel.

Advocates say such a bypass would solve some Delta water flow problems while providing more reliability in supplying water to Southern California, a central point of the environmental impact report issued by the Department of Water Resources a few months ago. However, critics contend that it would undercut efforts to increase flows through the Delta by reducing upstream diversions.

As the drought continues, how – or when – these intertwined Delta issues will be resolved remains the biggest mystery of California’s water supply conundrum.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

As the Legislature convened this month for a new biennial session, Wiener reintroduced a new version of legislation that had stalled in past sessions – making it much easier for churches and colleges to build housing for non-affluent renters on their own land.

However, that worthy goal is complicated by the renewal of a squabble between two construction union organizations over language governing pay and other factors for workers who would build the envisioned projects. No matter how that conflict is resolved – if it is resolved – it will add costs that could make such projects financially infeasible.

Wiener’s Senate Bill 4, therefore, encapsulates the difficulties that make California’s chronic housing shortage – and therefore its homelessness crisis – very tough nuts to crack.

As written, SB 4 would require contractors on projects generated by the legislation to pay “prevailing wages,” similar to what’s required on state and local government construction. That alone furthers the recent notion that privately financed construction of projects made possible by state law should be treated as public works with all their attendant costs.

The language satisfies the California Conference of Carpenters, but draws opposition from the state Building and Construction Trades Council, which wants tighter language that, in essence, would allow only unionized contractors to work on the projects by specifying that projects must have apprenticeship and training programs.

Andrew Meredith, president of the trades council, said, “We should not have to sacrifice the training and protection of construction workers to provide incentives to developers to build affordable housing. We need to ensure that California workers are employed on projects being built in California.”

The two union groups clashed earlier this year over two other bills aimed at making it easier to build housing on unused or underused shopping center sites. That conflict was resolved by enacting two similar bills with slightly different labor language, giving developers and contractors a choice of which to employ.

SB 4 is the third attempt by Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, to free up church and college land for housing. He lost a 2020 version due to squabbling over labor requirements. Would-be sponsors of projects on church and college property complained that requiring them to pay high union wages would raise costs and make some projects infeasible.

Wiener acknowledges the conflict that could doom SB 4 but says he hopes to “thread the needle” with compromise language that would allow the legislation to pass.

“SB 4 will unlock an enormous, and I’m not exaggerating, an enormous amount of land for 100% affordable housing,” Wiener told a news conference announcing the proposal. He cited a 2020 study by UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation that found nearly 40,000 acres currently used for religious purposes could be developed.

Such land, the study found, is largely concentrated in a few urban counties where the need for affordable housing is particularly acute and jobs and transit access are most likely available.

“As faith-based organizations grapple with the best uses for underutilized land, interventions at the state and local levels in the form of regulatory reform and new financial tools can provide important support,” the study concluded.

So there it is – an old California syndrome of making it easier to build vital new housing on one hand and saddling projects with higher costs on the other. It goes to the core of the state’s housing crisis.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

The reasons often offered include a moderate climate, the availability of generous welfare benefits, mental health and drug abuse. However, a lengthy and meticulously sourced article in the current issue of Atlantic magazine demolishes all of those supposed causes.

Rather, the article argues persuasively, California and other left-leaning states tend to have the nation’s most egregious levels of homelessness because they have made it extraordinarily difficult to build enough housing to meet demands.

Author Jerusalem Demsas contends that the progressive politics of California and other states are “largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue.

“Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups … But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.”

Demsas singles out Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area as examples of how environmentalists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups and left-leaning organizations joined hands to enact a thicket of difficult procedural hurdles that became “veto points” to thwart efforts to build the new housing needed in prosperous “superstar cities.”

While thriving economies drew workers to these regions, their lack of housing manifested itself in soaring rents and home prices that drove those on the lower rungs of the economy into homelessness.

“The small-c conservative belief that people who already live in a community should have veto power over changes to it has wormed its way into liberal ideology,” Demsas writes. “This pervasive localism is the key to understanding why officials who seem genuinely shaken by the homelessness crisis too rarely take serious action to address it.”

The syndrome that Demsas details is well known in California political circles and Newsom and the Legislature have taken some steps to reduce – or bypass – the procedural hurdles to increasing construction of new housing, particularly projects to serve the working class families most in danger of being priced out of the market and therefore becoming homeless.

The state is finally enforcing the quotas it sets on regional and local governments for zoning enough land for needed housing. It has also exempted some forms of housing from local zoning rules, and has talked about cracking down on cities that impose impossible land use or design criteria on developers. However, the state’s mostly Democratic politicians have largely been unwilling to put their ideological brethren and allies, such as environmental groups, on the hot seat.

That reluctance is symbolized by their persistent reluctance to make a much-needed overhaul of the California Environmental Quality Act, which is often misused by anti-growth activists and labor unions to tie up housing projects.

It should be embarrassing to California officials that while their state deals with a seemingly intractable homelessness crisis, red states, as Demsas points out, don’t have similar problems because they don’t have structural aversion to construction and therefore don’t have the high housing costs that drive people into streets.

The governor, legislators and others who profess commitment to ending homelessness in California should begin by reading the message of truth to power provided by Atlantic, whose own ideological bent is also to the left

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.