So how big is CA’s housing shortage, anyway?

At the state Capitol this year, lawmakers, policy experts, housing advocates and others said the term “housing shortage” at least 30 times in committee hearings and floor speeches — underscoring how California’s housing crisis remains one of the state’s top issues.

But what exactly is a housing shortage, and how bad is it in California? The answer depends on who you ask, writes CalMatters’ Ben Christopher.

One analyst told Ben that a housing shortage is “the gap between the housing you have and the housing you need.” But calculating the “housing you need” is based on various factors that not everyone agrees on.

This has led to estimates on California’s housing crunch ranging between a mere 56,000 units to as much as 8.2 million.

A decade ago, in one of the first attempts to put a hard number to the state’s housing problem, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office calculated that California would have had to construct 2.7 million additional units over the prior 30 years to keep the state’s housing cost inflation on par with the rest of the U.S.

A year later, consulting firm McKinsey & Company reported that it would take 3.5 million homes to close California’s housing gap — a figure then-Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom used when he campaigned for governor, pledging to build that many units by 2025. (Spoiler alert: That didn’t happen.)

Despite the imperfect science, Daniel McCue of Harvard University said that it’s worth noting that the general consensus around California’s housing crisis is that it’s huge.

• McCue, a researcher at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies: “Whether it’s one-and-a-half million or five-and-a-half million, these are big numbers. … There’s so much to do. There’s so far to go.”

Read more here.

A recidivism analysis on California’s resentencing policies implemented over the last decade sheds new light on the effectiveness of the state’s efforts to reshape its criminal justice system and reduce its prison population, writes CalMatters’ Cayla Mihalovich. 

The report, released Wednesday, details recidivism rates for five notable resentencing policies that were implemented under Govs. Jerry Brown and Newsom from 2012 and 2022. Under all five policies, about 12,000 people were resentenced and 9,500 were released, with Black and Latino people making up the majority of those released.

It’s important to note that the report includes one-year recidivism outcomes. The standard timeline to determine recidivism is three years, which only two of the five policies are old enough to measure.

The state agency’s legal director says the report shows how the policies are successful for decreasing the prison population without increasing risks to the public. But some district attorneys critical of the agency argue that the policies harm victims, law enforcement and public safety.

Read more here.

The country’s two largest reservoirs are about 31% full — furthering tensions among the states in the Colorado River basin that must agree on new river management standards. CalMatters’ Rachel Becker and video strategy director Robert Meeks have a video segment on what this means for California’s water supply as part of our partnership with PBS SoCal. Watch it here.

And check out another video from CalMatters’ Deborah Brennan and Robert about an Inland Empire non-profit that is helping local residents manage extreme heat in the hottest parts of the desert. Watch it here.

SoCalMatters airs at 5:58 p.m. weekdays on PBS SoCal.