A bill that would revive redevelopment as a tool for local governments passed the state Legislature in the final days of the summer session on party-line votes.

Now the question is whether a so-far noncommittal Gov. Gavin Newsom will accept the claims that Senate Bill 5 by Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, has enough safeguards to prevent redevelopment from going as astray as the version that Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature killed in 2011.

That version allowed local redevelopment agencies to divert a slice of property taxes to use on projects meant to spur the economies of “blighted” neighborhoods. If the projects boosted property tax revenue, the additional increment would go to the agencies for new projects. In 2010, some 400 redevelopment agencies diverted 12 percent of all California property taxes for their use.

‘Scams providing windfalls to cronies’

But by 2011, many investigations had found that redevelopment funds were routinely diverted to pay for City Hall salaries and that many of the projects that did get funding were those pitched by politically connected developers. Then-state Controller John Chiang said many redevelopment projects were “scams providing windfalls to political cronies.”

Many healthy businesses with prime locations had been declared “blighted” so cities could use eminent domain to seize them and hand them over to car dealerships or big-box stores which would generate the sales taxes that are a key source of revenue for city coffers.

And on top of these issues, the Legislative Analyst’s Office said there was “no reliable evidence” that redevelopment helped the economy. Instead, it attracted businesses that would have opened elsewhere without subsidies offered by local government – shuffling economic activity around, not spurring it.

New version would emphasize housing

In interviews and committee meetings, Beall has argued that a much-more focused version of redevelopment that gives at least half of diverted funds to subsidized low-income housing – up from the previous 20 percent – can help California with its housing shortage. The new program would also fund transit-oriented projects and play its old role of helping poor neighborhoods boost their economies. 

To prevent past problems with cronyism, a state oversight group would have to certify projects met basic standards before funding could be diverted.

The bill would initially allow $200 million in property taxes to be diverted annually with a phased-in upper limit of $2 billion a year. About $5 billion a year was being diverted when redevelopment was shelved by the state in 2011.

While running for governor in 2018, Newsom was supportive of reviving some form of redevelopment. But he included no funds for a new program in his initial state budget and has told reporters that his budget already includes record funding for affordable housing.

Meanwhile, while it didn’t get as many headlines as some other problems did, redevelopment’s record with creating affordable housing in California was also poor to mixed.

Old version often generated no new units

In 2010, the Los Angeles Times reported that, “At least 120 municipalities – nearly one in three with active redevelopment agencies – spent a combined $700 million in housing funds from 2000 to 2008 without constructing a single new unit … .  Nor did most of them add to the housing stock by rehabilitating existing units.”

Where did the money go? The Times cited many examples of redevelopment agencies buying property that was never subsequently developed.

It also found that “nearly three dozen cities, including Monterey Park and Pismo Beach, reported spending most of their affordable housing money over the decade on ‘planning and administration’ – but never built a single unit.”

Beall’s bill passed the Senate 29-9 and the Assembly 55-19.

The state’s lawsuit – filed in Orange County Superior Court by Attorney General Xavier Becerra on Jan. 25 at Newsom’s behest – is the first to be filed under a 2017 law that allows the state to pursue legal action against local governments that don’t comply with their housing requirements.

The state wants to compel Huntington Beach to build 533 low-income housing units by Dec. 31, 2021, to meet its state quota. The city has only approved about 100 such units, according to the Southern California News Group.

City attorney sees H.B. singled out for its politics

Huntington Beach City Attorney Michael Gates maintains that as a charter city, his city should be able to set its own housing policies. He also hinted that there were political motives driving the actions of Democrats Newsom and Becerra. “It is noteworthy that Sacramento is suing only the city of Huntington Beach, while over 50 other cities in California have not yet met” their targets, he wrote in a statement. Huntington Beach has been a Republican redoubt for decades.

But state officials said they were motivated by Huntington Beach’s bad faith. Not only did the city refuse to provide a housing plan in compliance with state rules, in 2015, the City Council revised zoning rules to reduce by 2,400 the number of homes allowed in a neighborhood on the eastern edge of the city near Interstate 405.

While the state’s suit got far more attention, Huntington Beach’s suit – filed Jan. 17 in Orange County Superior Court – also involves high stakes. The city is targeting Senate Bill 35, the high-profile 2017 state law crafted by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, that limits the ability of local governments to block housing projects that meet certain conditions, such as using union labor and including a portion of affordable units.

“It’s one thing to have more basic housing laws come out of Sacramento; it’s another to have Sacramento try to micromanage cities’ zoning and attempt to approve development projects in spite of the city,” Gates told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s really nothing more than the city trying to maintain its local control.”

Can charter cities defy state’s housing edicts?

Wiener blasted Huntington Beach in a statement given to his hometown paper. “Huntington Beach’s dismissive approach to housing – claiming there is no problem and that the state should just mind its own business – is Exhibit A for why we have a crisis in this state.”

When SB35 was discussed in 2017, there is no indication from a Nexis news search that Wiener or any lawmaker saw charter cities as being exempt from the bill’s requirements.

But lawyers for the League of California Cities have used language similar to that in Huntington Beach’s lawsuit to assert that there are limits to state power over charter cities. “The benefit of becoming a charter city is that charter cities have supreme authority over ‘municipal affairs,’” states the league’s legal primer on the topic. “In other words, a charter city’s law concerning a municipal affair will trump a state law governing the same topic.”

About one-quarter of California’s 478 cities have charter status. If Huntington Beach wins its challenge to SB35, general law cities that want to regain greater control over local planning could craft proposed charters and ask their voters to approve them under a process laid out in the state Constitution.

It’s been two and a half years since Gov. Jerry Brown jolted the debate on California’s housing crisis by saying much more private-sector construction was the only realistic way to address the crisis, not the old Democratic recipe of building a relative handful of subsidized housing units that help a small percentage of those in need. “We’ve got to bring down the cost structure of housing and not just find ways to subsidize it,” he said in January 2017 in criticizing previous state policies.

Brown sought to make it much easier for home-builders to clear regulatory hurdles. In September 2017, Senate Bill 35 by Sen. Scott Weiner, D-San Francisco – which reflected the governor’s priorities – was enacted. It holds that cities could not put up new obstacles to projects with proper zoning so long as they contained at least 20 percent of units at lower price levels.

And in the last two months, Brown has signed a series of new housing measures with similar goals – most notably Assembly Bill 2923, which will make it much easier for the Bay Area Rapid Transit authority to follow through with its plan to build 20,000 new housing units by 2040 on 250 acres BART owns nears its transit stations.

Legislature renews emphasis on subsidized housing

But when it comes to Tuesday’s election and major housing initiatives, it’s back to the old Democratic playbook. Both the key measures meant to increase housing – placed directly on the ballot by votes of the Legislature – involve government-subsidized construction.

Proposition 1 authorizes the issuance of $4 billion in general obligation bonds. The biggest chunk – $1.8 billion – would go toward building apartment-type residences. $1 billion would go to loans to veterans. Both infrastructure and homeownership programs would receive $450 million each. And $300 million would go to build housing for farm workers.

The official state voting guide’s analysis estimates that this will create access to housing for 55,500 families.

Proposition 2 would allow the state to divert funds from 2004’s Measure 63 – which generates about $2 billion a year for mental health programs from an income tax surcharge on the very wealthy – to pay back over 30 years up to $2 billion in bonds to build housing for the homeless and those at risk of being homeless.

The official state voting guide’s analysis doesn’t estimate how many people would gain housing as a result. But based on Proposition 1’s estimate that $1.8 billion could create about 30,000 apartment units, $2 billion should be able to provide around 33,000 units.

Bonds would fund 88,500 units; 2 million needed

The combined net effects of the two measures: providing housing to about 88,500 families over the life of the two bond measures in a state that a 2016 McKinsey consulting group report said has a shortage of 2 million housing units.

The small increases in housing that Proposition 1 and 2 would create are consistent with the criticisms that have been made of California’s state housing policies since at least 2003. That’s when the Public Policy Institute of California released a report that said affordable housing programs focused much more on establishing a process for such housing than on actual results. It said it was “unrealistic” to think such an approach could have a significant effect in increasing affordable housing.

No recent polling has been done on Propositions 1 and 2, but they’re widely expected to pass easily. That’s in keeping with the record of bonds placed directly on the ballot by the Legislature.

Silicon Valley is the epicenter of the state’s housing crisis, with even run-down older homes routinely selling for nearly $1 million and with apartment rent averaging over $3,400 in communities within a 10-mile radius of Mountain View. With some exceptions, local leaders generally say the right things about the urgent need to add more housing units.

But a new report about the region’s largest city, San Jose, shows the city has made little progress on its goal of adding 10,000 affordable housing units by 2022. According to a new report issued by city housing officials, 64 units were completed in the 2017-18 fiscal year. While 594 units are now being built and 270 are approved for construction, even if these units are counted, that means the city is on track to achieve less than 10 percent of its target by mid-2019.

Adding to this bad news is a recent San Jose Mercury-News report in which city officials expressed frustration on several fronts. Among the complaints:

• While Mayor Sam Liccardo has been consistent in pushing affordable housing, the head of the city’s housing department – Jacky Morales-Ferrand – sees an overall lack of focus at City Hall (pictured). One week, City Council members are touting rent-control ordinances, then they push the “tiny homes” concept, then it’s on to other issues.
• Morales-Ferrand also expressed disappointment that the state government has never provided cities with a new tool and new funding source to replace redevelopment, which Gov. Jerry Brown convinced the Legislature to gut in 2011.
• Councilman Johnny Khamis also has a complaint. He believes that the series of crime-reform initiatives touted by Brown and state lawmakers have complicated San Jose’s efforts to address housing and homeless issues. “I feel that the state just dumped a whole mess of people out of our prison system, and now we’re just having to deal with them,” he said.

Congress ‘0 for 115’ in approving helpful housing bills

Frustration with a lack of progress locally and in the state Legislature has led the influential, well-funded Silicon Valley Leadership Group to look for relief in a new place: Congress. While CEO Carl Guardino said the Silicon Valley and Bay Area congressional delegation had been helpful on major regional issues such as electrifying CalTrain and expanding the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system to San Jose, he told the Mercury-News that there had been little help on housing from Washington.

Housing experts say ultimately, local and state land-use policies, fees, taxes and regulations are most crucial in whether new units can be built. But federal agencies regulate mortgages, enforce fair-housing laws and have provided billions of dollars over the years to develop housing projects and to subsidize low-income housing.

According to the Apartment List group, in its current session, which began in January 2017, Congress is “roughly batting 0 for 115” in approving housing legislation introduced by federal lawmakers. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, has by herself introduced 11 bills that focus on creating affordable housing. In a March speech, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara, said, “I don’t want to live in the Silicon Valley that only has Facebook or Google engineers able to live here.”

But the Trump administration and the Republicans who control the House and Senate have shown little enthusiasm not only for bold new plans but for continuing policies that have led to 3 million affordable homes being built since the late 1980s. The Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act, which would provide developers of low-income housing with a substantial tax credit, has languished in House and Senate committees since it was introduced in March 2017.

Members of the California Poor People’s Campaign have been rallying outside the Capitol building weekly for the last month. The most recent protest marked the 50^th anniversary of the Poor People’s Campaign and March, which was organized by Martin Luther King Jr.

“Nothing feels progressive about the way California is run from the top,” Kait Ziegler, co-chair of the California Poor People’s Campaign, told the Sacramento Bee. “So we’re coming from the bottom to mobilize and say we aren’t going to be silent anymore.”

Chief among the concerns of the campaign were the issues of housing, homelessness and workers’ rights. Citing that “8 million Californians pay half or more of their income for rent,” the group demanded the establishment of a “human right to housing.” Additionally, they argue the state should invest more in affordable and low-income housing, as well as rent control and more protections for renters and tenants.

When taking into account the cost of living, California has the highest poverty rate in the country. By the normal metric, the Golden State comes in 35^th.

The Campaign also called for a homeless bill of rights, which, among other things, would safeguard the right of people to sleep in legally parked cars and sleep in public areas. The group also endorsed several bills that would divert some of California’s budget surplus toward affordable housing.

Finally, the group reiterated demands for measures to protect workers’ rights. These measures include Assembly Bill 2946, which would extend the statute of limitations for prosecuting wage theft and AB2293 and SB1412, which would reduce barriers to employment for those with certain prior convictions.

The Poor People’s Campaign expects to be back in action Monday.

Senate Bill 35 – the 2017 measure authored by state Sen. Scott Weiner, D-San Francisco, that was billed as the most far-reaching response to California’s housing crisis – could be about to get its first major test in Silicon Valley, the region with the state’s most severe problem with extreme housing costs.

Under the law, cities that have failed to build enough housing to honor their obligations under state law to respond to public needs must approve properly zoned housing projects that meet certain conditions, such as having 10 percent “affordable housing” units and paying union-scale construction wages. State housing officials reported in February that nearly 98 percent of cities would be affected in some ways by SB35’s requirement that housing be fast-tracked.

Weiner’s bill was hailed by many activists, housing experts and think tanks as a potential “game changer” that could address California’s emergence as the state with the nation’s highest effective poverty rate because of the high cost of shelter. But many local elected officials have reacted with anger and dismay to their apparent loss of control over construction permitting, with a Brown administration housing official taking withering fire at a meeting with city leaders in San Diego County in early March.

Now the question of how much say local authorities still have over housing in the SB35 era is about to be addressed in Cupertino.

Voters rejected 800 housing units; now far more may be built

Last Tuesday, officials with the Sand Hill Property Co. announced that they will seek to use provisions of Weiner’s law to compel Cupertino officials to allow their company to build more than 2,400 homes on a lot that now holds the Vallco Mall. Opened in 1976, the mall – shown above in a 2017 photo – was once a vibrant commercial hub, with nearly 200 tenants. Now it has fewer than a half-dozen.

Sand Hill had proposed a multi-use project at the mall site, but Cupertino voters in 2016 rejected the plan out of fears that its housing component of up to 800 units would strain local schools and roads. Now the company wants far more housing, especially less expensive options. Its plan calls for about 1,200 of the proposed residential units to be “affordable housing” – meaning they would be set aside for families making about $85,000 or less a year. A San Jose Mercury-News analysis said this single project “would increase Cupertino’s affordable housing stock fivefold.”

“It has now gotten to a point where we do not have any confidence that this process can come to a conclusion in a timely manner,” Reed Moulds, managing director of Sand Hill, told the Mercury-News. “This housing crisis needs to be resolved in a manner that actually provides near-term solutions, and sites like this have an opportunity to do a lot of good for the housing situation.”

The project also would include 2.2 million square feet of office and retail space.

But SB35 or not, local activists are gearing up to try to persuade Sand Hill to sharply downsize the project. The Better Cupertino group has fought development of the Vallco Mall site for years. Its website bristles at attempts to limit local control of planning and even challenges the widely held view that suburban malls such as Vallco are doomed, given the steady growth in online shopping.

But the tone, at least, of city officials seems to reflect an assumption that times have changed. Cupertino Councilman Barry Chang told the Mercury-News that he didn’t see how his city could reject the application, at least if it met the standards set out by SB35.

Cupertino, home to Apple’s headquarters, has a median home price of $2.3 million as of late February, according to data from the Zillow real-estate information company. Zillow said home values have soared by more than 25 percent in the last year alone. The Rent Jungle website said that as of February, the average monthly rent of an apartment in Cupertino was $3,114.

The program uses what are called “private activity bonds.” The tax-exempt bonds allow corporations to borrow at the low interest rates available to local governments while providing them a 4 percent tax credit to limit their tax exposure.

They’re commonly used to fund not just affordable housing but hospitals and other public infrastructure as well as private university housing. The California State Treasurer’s Office, which oversees issuance of six versions of the bonds, reported that in 2016, they were used to fund $6 billion in affordable housing projects and to provide $2.2 billion in tax credits tied to use of the bonds, according to the Los Angeles Times. This either preserved or created more than 20,000 affordable housing units.

State Treasurer John Chiang (pictured) was the leading California critic of House Republicans’ move to end the bonds. In November, he told Bond Buyer if they were successful, it would “throw gasoline on the housing shortage” in the Golden State.

While the cut in the corporate tax rate and other pending tax code changes give companies less of an incentive to buy private activity bonds to shield income, the bonds and related tax credits are also made available to developers when they are required to build affordable housing as a condition of approval for other, market-rate housing projects.

That leverage – attaching conditions to project approvals – would have remained had the private activity bonds and related tax credits been scrapped. But affordable housing advocates see the incentives as valuable sweeteners in cutting deals with developers.

Feinstein rips lowering of mortgage interest deductibility

Other changes in the tax bill may end up having the most significant effect on California housing. The National Association of Realtors expects home values to decline by 10 percent or more in high-cost states for two reasons: Because the final version of the GOP bill reduces the deductibility of mortgage interest from the first $1 million of a newly purchased home’s value to the first $750,000 and because it caps the amount of local and state taxes that can be deducted from income for federal tax filers at $10,000. The Realtors group, which opposes the tax bill, said Americans have been well-served by the tax incentives.

On Sunday, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein took to Twitter to rip the lowering of mortgage deductibility limits.

“The Republican tax bill caps the mortgage interest deduction at $750,000 for new mortgages. In California, seven counties have average home prices that are more than $750,000: Alameda, Marin, Orange, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties,” she wrote.

The tweet finished with a “GOPTaxScam” hashtag.

Twelve of the 13 GOP no votes on the House tax plan came from the three states, with three from the Golden State: Dana Rohrabacher of Costa Mesa, Darrell Issa of Vista, and Tom McClintock of Elk Grove. There were fears of more defections because both the House and Senate plans would only allow tax filers to take up to a $10,000 deduction in property taxes, only a little more than half the average $18,000-plus deduction in California. The House plan would also only allow deduction of mortgage interest on up to $500,000 on a home loan, down from the present $1 million.

But a compromise was reached allowing individual filers to take a deduction of up to $10,000 on any combination of combined income, property and sales taxes. The allowable deduction of mortgage interest on a home loan rose to $750,000.

To cover the revenue lost because of the changes, the 20 percent corporate tax rate approved in both the House and Senate bills rose to 21 percent – still down sharply from the present 35 percent.

It is not clear whether the concessions would stem defections from GOPers representing high-tax stakes. The House bill passed 227-205 last month, meaning Speaker Paul Ryan doesn’t have many extra votes to spare.

Two New York Republican House members – Peter King and Dan Donovan – were rebuffed in their bid to retain the present complete deductibility of state and local taxes for families earning less than $400,000 per year and to gradually phase out the deduction for higher-income earners in coming years.

Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-New York, was one of the few on-the-fence lawmakers to offer immediate comment on the compromise.

“Many middle-income taxpayers … were promised a tax cut and won’t being seeing the tax relief that they’re expecting,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

State Democrats, housing advocates see likely tax change as devastating

Two tax proposals that drew withering fire from California Democrats and higher education leaders, including UC President Janet Napolitano, were scrapped. One would have eliminated the deduction for interest on student loans and the other would have classified graduate-school tuition waivers as taxable income.

But changes to the tax code that California Democrats and advocates for the poor say will ravage construction of affordable housing appear on track for adoption. The changes make low-income housing tax credits that businesses use to reduce their tax liability less attractive. The credits have defrayed the cost of 40 percent of some major housing projects in Northern California, according to a Bay Area News Group report last week.

“All the work that we did this year, the hard work of advocates working for years, if not decades on this, could be wiped out overnight if Donald Trump and his Republican allies are successful in passing the so-called tax reform,” Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, told a BANG reporter.

Chiu is chairman of the Assembly’s Housing & Community Development Committee.

But the housing package – a spate of measures that increase funding for subsidized housing programs and reduce regulations for building certain high-density projects – is unlikely to halt debate about housing policy as home prices remain high.

For instance, median home prices in the Bay Area topped $740,000 last month and topped $700,000 in Orange County – breaking records and raising concerns about a new housing “bubble.” Statewide, median housing prices have topped $469,000, which is driving down homeownership rates and keeping the state’s cost-of-living-based poverty rates above 20 percent.

Virtually everyone, left and right, agrees that the state is facing a crisis. Candidates for the 2018 gubernatorial election, which is starting to heat up, are likely to make housing a core component of their campaigns. So far, Republican candidates John Cox, a San Diego-area businessman, and Assemblyman Travis Allen, a Huntington Beach conservative, have largely called for reducing housing regulations, but have not offered detailed plans.

Democrat John Chiang, currently the state treasurer, has touted his efforts to promote affordable housing programs. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has focused on bringing back government-directed redevelopment-style low-income housing programs. The partisan approaches are not surprising – and not particularly detailed, at least not yet.

The big surprise so far is that Democratic candidate Gavin Newsom, the current lieutenant governor and leader in the major public-opinion polls, has released a fairly thorough housing blueprint. It suggests that housing will be a top priority in his high-profile campaign – and his proposals embrace the main concepts touted by Democrats and Republicans alike.

“Simply put, we’re experiencing a housing affordability crisis, driven by a simple economic argument,” Newsom argued in a new post on the Medium web site. “California is leading the national recovery but it’s producing far more jobs than homes.” Here’s where the plan makes headlines: He’s calling for the development of 3.5 million new housing units by 2025, which would mean a near quadrupling of the state’s annual housing production.

That’s not an unreasonable number. In the last dozen years, “California has only produced 308 housing units for every 1,000 new residents,” he explained. Given continued population growth, “it’s obvious we’re not on pace to meet that demand.”

Typical of a Democratic official, Newsom called for more funding for affordable housing, including support for the $4 billion housing bond that is going on the November 2018 ballot. It was part of the Legislature’s housing package. Newsom also called for increasing the state’s funding of affordable-housing tax credits from $85 million to $500 million.

Taking a similar line as Chiang and Villaraigosa, Newsom called for replacing local housing programs that had previously been funded through the state’s controversial redevelopment agencies, which were shut down by Gov. Jerry Brown during the 2011 budget act, as a means to help the state plug its then-gaping budget hole. The agencies had siphoned around 13 percent of the state’s general fund budget to subsidize economic-development projects including housing.

But the real news is Newsom’s focus on “regulatory reform and creating new financial incentives for local jurisdictions that produce housing while penalizing those that fall flat.” Under the old redevelopment system, cities did indeed subsidize low-income housing. But the tax-increment financing scheme, by which cities were incentivized to permit tax-generating retail complexes, led to the overall underdevelopment of housing projects, according to various state analyses.

Those problems still exist. “Cities have a perverse incentive not to build housing because retail generates more lucrative sales tax revenue,” Newsom wrote. “The bigger the box, the better, because cities can then use the sales tax for core public services.” He doesn’t offer many details, but Newsom wants to revamp the tax system to “financially reward cities that produce housing and punish those that fail.” He’s reviving the old debate about the “fiscalization of land use,” but there’s little doubt that local incentives have a major impact on housing permits.

Echoing Gov. Brown, Newsom notes that solving the problem will take more than “throwing money” at it. He calls for “implementing regulatory reform and creating new financial incentives for local jurisdictions” – issues that will bolster conservatives who want to see more market-based housing.

Indeed, California builders have argued that they are more than capable of meeting the needs – if only government regulations and local land-use controls were loosened enough to enable them to build more. His plan will annoy conservatives, though, as he also calls for stronger tenant protections as the state streamlines the permitting process.

Most significantly, the Newsom plan – with its myriad details and mixture of elements from right, center and left – is sure to focus the early campaign on this significant issue. An energized housing debate should warm the hearts of all Californians who are concerned that housing prices are soaring beyond the reach of most California families.

Steven Greenhut is a Sacramento-based writer. Write to him at stevengreenhut@gmail.com.

The California Legislature enters the final week of its 2017 session with ambitious measures on immigration, renewable energy and housing still up in the air.

Two of the measures have been championed by state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles.

One – SB54 – would put relatively strong limits on how much local and state law enforcement agencies could cooperate with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of Homeland Security and other federal immigration authorities.

Labelled the “sanctuary state” bill by critics and de Leon alike, it passed the state Senate in March. But law enforcement officials’ concerns have won a friendlier reception in the Assembly, where the bill appears stalled despite approvals from three committees. Some sheriffs have warned the bill would put California on a collision course with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the U.S. Justice Department, which has already acted to withhold funds from “sanctuary cities” on the grounds that the federal government alone sets immigration policy.

Sessions’ recent announcement that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would end in six months could give fresh fuel to the “sanctuary state” bill. Under the program, an estimated 200,000 California youths who were brought here as children have some legal rights. Protecting this group from deportation or other negative consequences has been a priority of state Democrats since Trump’s election last November.

Another high-profile de Leon bill also passed the Senate in May before facing a cooler reception in the Assembly. SB100 would set a goal for state utilities of having 60 percent of their electricity generated by renewable sources by 2030 – up from the present goal of 50 percent – and require utilities to plan to be 100 percent renewable by 2045.

While the measure has passed three Assembly committees, most recently the appropriations panel on Sept. 1, its future may depend on whether Gov. Jerry Brown provides a last-minute boost. Utility lobbyists say the state is already making perhaps the biggest gains of any large state in shifting to renewable energy and that they don’t need a further push by Sacramento.

Housing bond, real-estate fee may be packaged

Two measures to address the state’s housing crisis – including one measure long seen as a slam dunk – also await final approval.

The first – SB3 by Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose – won some Republican support when it passed the Senate. It would ask California voters to approve $4 billion in general obligation bonds next year to pay for construction of affordable rental housing and “smart growth” projects near transit hubs and to revitalize the state’s veteran home loan program, which is expected to use up all of its present funding at some point in 2018.

SB3 was initially expected to be approved late last month. Reports over the weekend suggested that delays may be because of the desire to package SB3 as part of a comprehensive deal that could rescue the second high-profile housing bill – SB2 by Sen. Toni Atkins, D-San Diego. To generate an estimated $250 million a year in reliable, permanent funding for affordable housing projects, it would increase fees by $75 on some real-estate transactions.

Because it is a fee hike, it needs two-thirds support from both houses to advance to Brown’s desk. In July, it passed the Senate with the bare minimum of 27 votes. But insiders have been skeptical for weeks that the measure can get the 54 votes necessary to pass the Assembly. No Republican Assembly members back the bill, meaning all 54 Assembly Democrats would have to be yes voters for it to advance.

A Los Angeles Times report last month suggested that was unlikely because some Assembly Democrats in swing districts didn’t want to vote for a measure that could be depicted as a tax hike after having already voted to raise fuel taxes earlier this year.