Opinion: The problem with housing isn’t the cities, it’s the law

The reporters of Voice of San Diego have made a habit of this: framing North County’s coastal communities as the villains in California’s housing crisis — resistant, selfish, and obstinate in the face of reasonable state mandates.

The latest report on housing progress in Del Mar, Encinitas, and Oceanside follows the same script: cities are falling short of their targets, deadlines are approaching, and penalties await those who haven’t complied. The implication is clear: the cities are the problem.

But before we accept that framing, consider what this debate looks like from inside the neighborhoods being targeted. It looks like the home next door has been demolished and replaced with a multi-story structure that towers over yours.

Your backyard now sits in shadow. Your privacy is gone, streets that once had room don’t anymore. Emergency access gets tighter, less safe. And when the infrastructure buckles under the weight of mandates it was never designed to absorb, the burden doesn’t fall on the policymakers in Sacramento, it falls on the people who live there.

That story rarely makes it into the mainstream coverage, let alone the Voice of San Diego’s housing coverage. The data doesn’t either.

Here is what responsible reporting would include. Statewide, across all 539 California jurisdictions, the 6th Cycle RHNA is running at 15.8% overall completion. In the affordable categories — the ones that actually house teachers, nurses, firefighters, and working families — completion rates range from 4.4% to 12%.

The state’s own SB 423 requires 50% completion in each income tier by mid-cycle, which is now. This failure is not coastal. It is not confined to affluent communities or cities with reputations for resistance. It is universal. It is California. When a system fails everywhere, across every geography and every type of community, the system is the problem, not the communities.

But that story doesn’t fit the narrative. So it goes untold.

California has passed 275 so-called pro-housing laws since 2017. In this legislative session alone, there are 132 more pending. Let that sink in. At some point, the volume of legislation stops resembling policy and starts resembling institutional panic — a frantic attempt to fix, by force, what is not working by design. This is not governance. It is a government that has misdiagnosed the patient and keeps writing stronger prescriptions rather than reconsidering the diagnosis.

And here is the diagnosis failure that deserves to be on the front page of every paper in California: every RHNA housing allocation in this cycle was built on a 2019 California Department of Finance population forecast that projected significant growth.

That forecast has since been revised downward twice. By 2024, it reflected near-zero population growth through the decade. And that was before federal immigration enforcement began materially reducing inbound migration.

The demographic foundation on which these mandates were built has completely collapsed. Cities across California are being legally threatened, financially penalized, and publicly shamed for failing to meet targets derived from population projections that the state’s own demographers have since abandoned.

This is not policy, it’s a farce.

The Voice of San Diego’s framing that Del Mar, Encinitas, and Oceanside need to be pushed harder toward compliance ignores all of this. It ignores the statewide failure data. It ignores the collapsed demographic forecast. It ignores the infrastructure realities that local officials are actually elected to manage.

And it ignores the fundamental question that should be driving every housing story in this state: Why has nearly a decade of aggressive lawmaking produced a statewide affordable housing completion rate of 7.6%? Not 76%. Not 50%. 7.6%

If that number appeared in any other policy context in education, transportation or public health, it would be treated as a scandal. In housing, it is used to justify more of the same ridiculous lawmaking.

California does not need its 276th pro-housing law. What it needs is a genuine rethinking of the framework. That means basing future allocations on current demographic reality, not discarded projections from 2019. It means tying mandates to real infrastructure investment.

It means making room for innovative models already gaining traction, like adaptive reuse of commercial properties, modular construction and small-lot, mixed-use infill that respects neighborhood scale — solutions that can actually deliver affordability without hollowing out the communities they claim to serve.

Those solutions exist. But they will never get the oxygen they deserve as long as the conversation stays locked on compliance theater built from data the state itself no longer believes — and kept alive by coverage that refuses to ask harder questions.

Californians living inside these neighborhoods know what is being taken from them. It’s time the coverage reflected that reality, not just Sacramento’s talking points.

Mike Lewis
Encinitas