If Assembly Housing Committee Chair Buffy Wicks is successful with her flagship housing bill, AB 2011, she’ll likely have to endure a new flurry of vampire slayer references. She’ll have earned them.
The State Building Trades and their leadership have blasted her with distorted ads and half-truths for her effort to find compromise in the state’s housing wars.
The truth is her legislation will enable the state to build more housing and help bring home prices down. With this bill, Assemblymember Wicks joins Senator Scott Wiener as one of the legislature's champions of true housing reform—something that has been all too rare over the last decade.
Housing in California has long been a moral and economic issue, but it has become an existential one. Our north star in housing policy is this: Will a given policy change lead to more housing being built?
AB 2011 leads us in the right direction. It is not perfect, but it streamlines approval processes that are too often project killers and allows access to both union and nonunion contractors.
Vampires are child's play compared to California housing politics. Chair Wicks is taking arrows from a host of special interests for her leadership on this bill. This is where advocates of the general interest need to show up. With your support, that is what we do.
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