California’s housing crisis is getting worse.

In the latest sign that the pandemic has done nothing to mitigate California’s housing crisis, the median price for a single-family home in the state broke $800,000 for the first time last month, according to data released this week, while the Bay Area hit a record $1.3 million. The state’s median grew 7% over the previous month, also a record, and by a third over prices a year ago, reaching about 2½ times the national figure. Even seasoned observers of our perpetually overheated housing prices are using terms like “feeding frenzy” and “chaos.”

The figures are disturbing enough on their own and more so considering how little California policymakers have done to encourage alternatives to single-family homes, which are increasingly unreachable for most of the population and unsustainable as a means of closing one of the worst housing deficits in the country. Apartment and condominium construction plummeted 17% last year, nearly twice the drop in overall housing production, reaching an eight-year low.

The Legislature’s efforts to address this are continuing for the time being, if haltingly. A key state Senate committee on Thursday approved sensible measures by Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, to moderately relax highly exclusive single-family zoning statewide; and by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, to ease approval of small apartment buildings near transit and jobs in cities that choose to do so. The day before, an Assembly committee approved a bill to limit parking requirements that can block housing construction near public transportation. Also Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation by Atkins extending and expanding streamlining of environmental review for some affordable housing development.

Even these measures have encountered staunch resistance from the local governments, neighborhood groups and knee-jerk reactionaries who created and jealously guard the state’s housing shortage. One anti-growth group absurdly claimed that Atkins’ SB9, a reiteration of her killed bill to allow up to four units on single-family lots, would “end home ownership.” Scores of city governments in the Bay Area and beyond have registered their opposition.

A similarly overwrought outcry has surrounded Wiener’s SB10, which would facilitate approval of buildings with 10 or fewer units near jobs and transit. In contrast to SB50, Wiener’s repeatedly blocked legislation to legalize multifamily construction near jobs and transit regardless of local zoning, SB10 facilitates limited higher-density rezoning only in cities that choose to take advantage of the measure. But that hasn’t stopped a chorus of objections from local officials such as Palo Alto Mayor Tom DuBois, who has written that the bill would give the city “an anti-democratic power that no legislative branch of government should have, and which we ... do not want” — one characteristic “more of Russia than of California.”

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