Newsom stupid California's pro-housing laws have failed to raise new home numbers

California YIMBY, an organization founded eight years ago to promote 
housing construction in response to an ever-increasing gap between 
demand and supply, held a victory party in San Francisco recently.

“Welcome to the most victorious of California YIMBY’s victory parties,” 
Brian Hanlon, founder and CEO of the organization, told attendees.

Its acronym (Yes In My Backyard) symbolizes its years-long battle with 
NIMBYs (Not in My Backyard), people and groups who have long thwarted 
housing projects by pressuring local governments that control land use.

YIMBY’s party marked the passage of several pro-housing legislative 
measures this year, two of which have long been sought by housing 
advocates. Assembly Bill 130 exempts many urban housing projects from 
the California Environmental Quality Act, while Senate Bill 79 makes it 
easier to building high-density housing near transit stations in large 
cities.

“2025 was a year,” Hanlon gleefully declared.

The celebratory atmosphere was understandable because this year’s 
legislative actions capped a half-decade of ever-mounting state 
government activism on housing that followed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2017 
campaign pledge to build 3.5 million new units of housing if elected.

That goal was wildly unrealistic, as Newsom should have known, but he 
did push hard for legislation to remove barriers to housing development. 
His housing agency also ramped up pressure on local governments to 
remove arbitrary hurdles that YIMBY-influenced officials had erected and 
to meet quotas for identifying land that could be used for housing.

However, the celebration omitted one salient factor: Pro-housing 
legislative and administrative actions have failed to markedly increase 
housing production.

New housing starts were around 100,000 a year when Newsom took office in 
2019, and they are about that number today, with the net increase even 
lower.

As the Housing and Community Development Department admits in its 
statewide housing plan, “Not enough housing being built: During the last 
ten years, housing production averaged fewer than 80,000 new homes each 
year, and ongoing production continues to fall far below the projected 
need of 180,000 additional homes annually.”

The Census Bureau calculates that since Newsom took office, new housing 
permits in California ranged from a high of 120,780 units in 2022 to a 
low of 101,546 last year. Newsom’s own budget agrees with the Census 
Bureau’s data for the same period and projects future construction 
through 2028 at 100,000 to 104,000 units a year.

Those are the numbers. But how data on housing is collected and collated 
has been a somewhat murky process, and opponents of housing projects 
often challenge how they comport with quotas the state imposes on local 
communities.

Fortunately, the Census Bureau has unveiled a new statistical tool that 
should go a long way toward having complete data that includes not only 
conventional single- and multi-family projects, but alternative forms of 
housing such as backyard granny flats, officially known as Accessory 
Dwelling Units; basements or garages that are transformed into 
apartments; single-family homes converted into duplexes or apartments; 
mobile homes or office buildings that become housing.

The tool uses several sources of data but is heavily reliant on the 
Postal Service, which maintains a constantly updated roster of addresses 
that includes all housing types.

More accurate data should make it easier to overcome conflicts and may 
even reveal that California’s pro-housing actions have had positive 
effects that current methodology misses.

“The housing crisis has persisted in part because we haven’t been able 
to measure our progress accurately,” an article about the new tool 
published by the Niskanen Center, a think tank, concludes. “With the 
Census Bureau’s Address Count Listing File data, that excuse is gone. 
Now the question is whether policymakers will use this powerful new tool 
to finally build the housing America needs.”

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/11/california-housing-data-tool/