The state senators are probably making quite a bit of money off this housing shortage that they wouldn't make with an adequate housing supply on the market.
This decision is extremely frustrating coming from a legislature filled with landlords.
Not only do the people have the power to vote out legislators, in California they also have the power to bypass them and legislate directly. But, while there is broad consensus that housing is a problem, there isn't broad consensus on solutions among the public any more than there is among legislators.
The real problem is that when you incentivize and subsidize putting your net worth into a single large investment vehicle, and then let holders of that investment decide how much competition to it will be allowed nearby, it creates a vicious cycle of ever-increasing supply shortage.
Eventually, of course, this will reverse. When the boomers die, renters will be the ones voting. But not before an entire generation has their net worth leeched by a geriatric vampire class of rent-seeking housing supply hoarders.
When the Boomers die, their GenX and Millenial offspring will inherit their homes, oftentimes, in California, without a full-value tax assessment. And, as the relationships between wealth and voting propensity and wealth and homeownersip are both unlikely to switch directions, homeowners will still be overrepresented in the electorate, and there'll be a new generation of the geriatric vampire class of rent-seeking housing-supply hoarders, and a new generation complaining about them.
why so salty?
This would mean the inheritance in many cases will be the cash left over from the property sale.
You mean, what if big cities had higher commercial/industrial rents, higher taxes, higher minimum wages,and more regulation, while less crowded places give massive abatements of their already lower taxes in desperate bids to attract employers?
I think that's been tried.
https://sf.curbed.com/2019/5/17/18629809/sb-50-housing-trans...
Still, California has a 2.5 million housing unit deficit to repay by 2025 or it risks a further escalation of the homelessness epidemic.
California is one big vetocracy.
America doesn’t have a left wing in its political landscape, at least not one with any representation or power. Sanders might change that, but I doubt it.