How Harris Obstructed California Home Construction

Kamala Harris has a plan to help America’s struggling home buyers by increasing the supply of houses. Her recently released 82-page policy book, “A New Way Forward for the Middle Class,” calls for clearing away the “regulatory burden” and “red tape” that constrains new-home construction. Tim Walz promoted the “three million new houses proposed” under Ms. Harris’s “bold forward plan” during the vice-presidential debate.

Yet like Ms. Harris’s scripted reversals on fracking, immigration and Medicare, her push to build more single-family homes contradicts her past positions. As California’s attorney general, she wielded the state’s environmental laws against new residential developments, exacerbating the affordability crisis that her campaign plan aims to address.

Years of excessive housing regulations and legal attacks on developers have left much of California unaffordable today. Median house prices in the Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose metropolitan areas are more than 300% above the national average. In 2021 California had the nation’s second-lowest homeownership rate at 55.9%, slightly above New York.

California’s depressing homeownership rates are a direct result of the policies embraced by Ms. Harris and her fellow Golden State progressives. As attorney general, she put the interests of climate activists ahead of aspiring homeowners. She opposed regional plans that would have allowed for more growth on the suburban fringe, where housing is more affordable. In the end, restrictions on building on the periphery pushed millions of Californians to flee to more affordable states.

Shortly after taking office in 2011, Attorney General Harris issued a comment letter criticizing a plan to add 79,000 housing units in northern Los Angeles County’s Santa Clarita Valley. Rather than removing the regulatory burden around new-home construction, Ms. Harris directed the local planners to develop a “detailed” Climate Action Plan, set “binding emissions reduction targets,” and demonstrate that the plan would “curb low-density sprawl and increased driving.”

Ms. Harris also used litigation against planners. In 2012, the attorney general joined a lawsuit brought by two environmental groups against a plan to expand the highways around San Diego. The groups that initiated the litigation opposed the transit plan because it would “induce sprawl and reinforce the region’s dependence on car-oriented transportation.” Ms. Harris failed to convince the California Supreme Court that the climate assessment supporting the plan was unlawful, but the decision came six years after the suit was filed. It’s a familiar story in California. Developers face almost unlimited lawsuits from environmental and other interest groups, which can slow projects down for decades.

The biggest losers from the housing policies espoused by Ms. Harris have been millennials and minorities who aspire to own homes. Californian baby boomers and Gen Xers have homeownership rates closer to those in the rest of the country, but the rate is nearly half the national level for Californians under 35. Many of those now leaving the state are in their 30s and 40s—precisely the group that tends to buy houses. The African-American homeownership rate in California was roughly 36% in 2021—well below the national rate of 44% and nearly one-third lower than it was 20 years ago. California’s Latino homeownership rate ranks 41st nationwide.

Yet rather than support policies that have worked elsewhere, notably in Texas, Ms. Harris has embraced the Yimby, or “yes, in my backyard” movement, which seeks to nationalize progressive preferences for more rental and high-density living. The movement has a major problem: Public preference for single-family homes is “ubiquitous,” as Jessica Trounstine at the University of California, Merced recently found. Most Californians, according to a survey by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, oppose legislation that bans single-family zoning.

If Ms. Harris wins in November, young people and middle-income Americans may find their housing options, in contrast to her claims, ever more limited. It could be springtime for progressives but also for a greatly diminished American dream.

This piece first appeared at The Wall Street Journal.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Michael Toth is a founding partner at PNT Law, based in Austin, Texas.