California lawmakers can’t resist writing performative legislation

California legislators introduce hundreds of bills during their biennial sessions. While some are serious efforts to address real issues, many are performative — offered to please political constituencies that their authors want to cultivate, align themselves with popular trends, or repay political debts.

The easiest species of performative legislation are resolutions that express support for some cause. Many hours of taxpayer-financed time are wasted on hearings and debate, even though such measures have absolutely no impact.

A cousin of the impotent resolution is legislation that purports to impact a situation ripped from the headlines, but is highly unlikely to be enacted, or if passed would probably be voided by the courts.

This week, for example, Democratic legislators are scrambling for measures that would, their authors say, repress or punish federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who are conducting abusive sweeps in major cities, supposedly seeking undocumented immigrants. The state Senate spent 90 minutes this week debating a bill that would supposedly make it easier for Californians to sue federal agents over civil rights violations, arising out of two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens by immigration authorities in Minneapolis.

The measure, Senate Bill 747, passed on a party-line vote. If it eventually becomes law, it’s doubtful that it would survive due to federal laws shielding federal officers from being prosecuted or sued in state courts, as a legislative staff analysis of the measure pointed out.

Thus, SB 747 and other anti-ICE measures unlikely to be enforceable, and are really just expressions of political opinion, however justified.

The most frustrating performative measures address real problems weakly but allow politicians to claim success. That brings us to Senate Bill 417, which was also passed by the Senate this week.

Carried by Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Napa Democrat, and backed by dozens of pro-housing groups and advocates for the poor, SB 417 would place a $10 billion bond issue on the November ballot for housing low-income families.

“California, over the last several years has enacted landmark housing policies to provide affordable housing developers with tools enabled to enable them to build hundreds of thousands of units across the state,” Cabaldon said. “But those homes don’t build themselves and it’s time to finish the job.

“So to unlock the full promise of these reforms requires cash. It requires sufficient capital, as it always has, to move these affordable housing projects from approval and permitting to construct.”

California’s housing shortage is real, especially for low-income families. The state has removed some procedural roadblocks, but the most resilient barrier is very high development costs.

A 2025 Rand Corp. study found that it costs between $500,000 and $1 million — and sometimes even more — to build a unit of low-income housing, the highest cost of any state.

Rand’s study also determined that it takes 22 months longer to produce housing in California than in Texas, local fees average $29,000 a unit in California but just $1,000 in Texas, and “substantially above-market wages and unusually large architectural and engineering fees, likely related to highly prescriptive design requirements” are “key drivers” of California’s extraordinarily high costs.

If, as Rand implies, it costs an average of about $750,000 per unit to build low-income housing in California, the $10 billion bond issue being proposed would finance about 13,000 apartments. It’s not nothing, but it’s tiny compared to the 180,000 units the state says we should be building each year.

The researchers argued that, were California to reduce costs to those in Colorado, it could build four times as much housing for the same money. The Legislature should be cutting costs, not just passing token bond issues that will have little real world impact.