A win for housing inclusion

Read the bills. SB9 has an occupancy requirement.

As a long time home owner in an exclusionary zoned neighborhood, I for one welcome the increased flexibility for me and my neighbors beyond the options of building a mcmansion(TM) or selling and moving away. What about the empty nesters who want to live near grown children? What about the mom and pop landlords touted during the discussion of an eviction moratorium who want to build a quadplex on their property to make a reasonable income? When I moved to my neighborhood, I did not reserve a right for unlimited parking, no shadows from the buildings around me or traffic congestion (which hasn't really gotten worse over the years despite the protests of car loving retirees). If by "developers' you mean home owners who want to freedom of choice on how they want to employ contractors to work on their property, I see nothing wrong with property owner rights. Random ranting about Wall Street investor give aways with no facts to back up such claims aside; the status quo will do little to provide affordable housing or address it's environmental impact by taking no action; I'm glad our leaders are doing the right thing. Without an increase in supply, current housing demand will never reduce costs an only benefit a handful of long time residents.

The poll you're referring to was nonsense, it polled an unrepresentative sample. If you go into the crosstabs, you find:

Poll respondents: 53% white, 25% 65+, 27% renters

Actual California population, per census data: 36% white, 10% 65+, 45% renters

Furthermore, the questions in the poll included prompting people with objectively-false statements about the bill, to elicit the response that the lobbyists who commissioned the poll wanted.

Also, the idea that SB 9 is a "gift to developers" is just ignorant about how the business of development works. "Developers" do not do jobs on single lots. Like, ever. At all. They build entire single family subdivisions, or they build big apartment projects. And while if you knew nothing about SB 9, you might imagine a developer trying to buy up a whole bunch of adjacent lots, to convert all of them to duplexes, in fact SB 9 does not allow for this -- if ownership can be traced back to a single entity, then applying it to adjacent lots is illegal. And the lot-split provision in it requires the owner to commit to living on the property for the subsequent three years. This is a law that lets homeowners convert their own land. Full stop.

To the extent that single lot rebuilds happen as a business, they happen under the ownership of small business operators who we colloquially talk about as "flippers". Buy a house, improve it, and resell it. And for these folks, the existing business model, where they clean up the surfaces but ignore structural issues, to avoid triggering any kind of review for building code issues, will remain dominant. A flipper does not want to get bogged down in months of inspections, and they _certainly_ don't want to have to live in the property for three years. So again -- they will not use SB 9.

You really need to get your information from more reliable sources.