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.”