But old assumptions that Brown’s main foes would be environmentalists and trial lawyers have been undercut repeatedly in recent weeks. Instead, perhaps his most formidable obstacles to making the Golden State more hospitable to new construction are local officials eager to maintain control over what their communities look like. Across California, they’re preparing or considering ordinances that require local voter approval of projects of a certain size or density or otherwise put hard limits on certain types of development — measures that would block key provisions of Brown’s plan.

A recent Voice of San Diego article noted such efforts in Del Mar, Costa Mesa, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, El Dorado County, Cupertino and Gilroy. Among the requirements that those communities may impose: requiring voter approval of most new construction higher than two stories and creating zones in which any construction required ballot OKs.

NIMBYism popular in many communities

Critics claim this would worsen the California housing crisis, not help it. But in city after city, officials say they are responding to local sentiment.

This gets to a key weakness of Brown’s strategy: While there is a growing understanding that the best way to relieve California’s housing crisis is by adding more stock, people are often only enthusiastic about the idea in the abstract. When it comes to one’s own community, enthusiasm usually wanes as part of a “not-in-my-backyard” attitude.

A classic example of this NIMBYism is now playing out in Millbrae, just south of San Francisco, in the region with the highest housing costs in California. A proposal to build 300-plus homes with office buildings and retail space next to a Bay Area Rapid Transit station — a prototypical “smart growth” project — is facing growing opposition.

The project would be on 116 acres already owned by BART. It complies with local housing policies and comes after years of complaints from area residents that their children can’t afford to live near them.

But at a July 12 City Council meeting, residents jammed the chambers to warn the project would worsen crime and traffic and harm quality of life. According to a local newspaper account, one resident even said the BART effort amounted to a criminal enterprise — “like the Wild West for outlaws to come and take stuff.”

Former San Francisco mayor touts status quo

That same day, the San Francisco Chronicle printed an op-ed by former Mayor Art Agnos blasting Brown’s housing proposal and offering a defense of the status quo of strong regulation. Agnos challenged the idea that adding more housing stock is the best way to bring down housing costs and said “rent stabilization” — i.e., rent control — should be an option for every city.

Agnos also called for more government funding for affordable housing programs that critics say amount to lottery programs which only help a relative handful of families.

From 1993-2001, Agnos was the western regional director for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. On his personal website, he depicts his efforts to help poor people find housing in San Francisco with government subsidies as a rousing success story.

Agnos doesn’t mention this claim in the Chronicle op-ed.

Rail authority board chairman Dan Richard described the change in plans as being driven by practicality: Having the first segment go from Kern County to San Jose instead of Fresno to Burbank allows the authority more certainty in being able to complete an initial segment. The old plan was for a difficult, partly mountainous 300-mile route costing $31 billion. The new plan is for a flat 250-mile route costing about $20 billion.

This allows for “a transition from planning and initial construction to being able to stand up and say we have federal funding, bond money, cap-and-trade revenue, and that those funds are sufficient for us to build, open and operate the first real high-speed rail leg in California,” Richard said at the news conference announcing the changes.

L.A.-area route risked mass political defections

But there is also evidence that the rail authority feared that if it continued with the original plan, it would face a political Waterloo. The state project had already lost the crucial support of some Los Angeles-area politicians and risked losing far more — starting with state Senate President Kevin de Leon and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon.

In 2014 and 2015, throughout the San Fernando Valley, grass-roots opposition to the state’s planned route built steadily. Some Latino activists said the bullet train’s effects would be so harsh on working-class minority communities that it should be a civil rights issue because the train and its 20-foot-high sound wall would bisect the San Fernando Valley in a way that would disrupt traffic, business patterns, schools, transit and everyday life.

At a May 2015 town-hall meeting, rail authority officials heard impassioned pleas to take their project elsewhere.

“Our community’s history has been riddled with displacement. My family has all its roots here. I want my grandchildren to grow up here, understanding how great a place it is. We like where we live,” testified San Fernando resident Genaro Ayala, according to a Los Angeles Times report.

But at that meeting, Richard downplayed the impacts to the crowd. Lou Correa, a veteran Democratic politician from Orange County appointed to the rail authority board in March 2015, said he detected “NIMBYism” in the complaints. That sparked a furious response from local residents, who said that rich communities used similar tactics to block projects they didn’t like, and that it was outrageous for anyone to suggest opposition was reflexive instead of driven by concern about impacts on their neighborhoods.

This public anger has translated into political support. As CalWatchdog reported last year, many public officials have been sharply critical of much or all of the project. The most prominent initial opponents included Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Burbank, and Rep. Judy Chu, D-El Monte, Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich, who represents much of the affected part of the county, and San Fernando Mayor Pro Tem Sylvia Ballin and Councilman Jaime Soto. Now the list also includes elected leaders from Sylmar, Santa Clarita, Shadow Hills, Lakeview Terrace and other Valley communities. In December, Assemblywoman Patty Lopez, D-San Fernando, dropped her official support.

Did Rep. Schiff pressure Obama administration?

Schiff is the heavy hitter of the crowd because of his willingness to use his good relationship with the Obama administration to pressure the federal government, the state government’s de facto partner in the high-speed rail project because of $3 billion-plus provided in federal funds and because of the many federal regulatory approvals still needed.

A year ago, for example, he made headlines in the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys when he ripped the National Parks Service for delays in completing promised studies involving the Angeles National Forest. That led the Save Angeles Forest for Everyone group, known as SAFE, to urge Schiff to pressure federal officials to seek changes in the bullet-train route, starting with plans for a mountain tunnel.

It’s not known what, if anything, the veteran Democrat did. But the California High Speed Rail Blog, home to the project’s most ardent defenders, expressed deep concern in January 2015 that Schiff’s opposition to the state’s plans “is going to make it very difficult for such a tunnel to be built. Other Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation will likely defer to Schiff on this, leaving the CHSRA with even fewer allies for a tunnel in the unlikely event they chose that alternative.”

However it came to pass, Schiff got his way, and, for now, his district is safe from disruption.

So everything is looking positive for the Warriors coming back to San Francisco? Not exactly. Critics have assembled a multimillion-dollar legal fund to fight the project at every turn, and a classic NIMBY battle between well-funded interests looms.

The main opponent “came out of nowhere” in April. The San Francisco Business Times had details:

A group of University of California, San Francisco, donors is threatening to sue or push a ballot measure against the Warriors’ potential Mission Bay arena over parking and traffic concerns. …

 

The group, a nonprofit called the Mission Bay Alliance, worries that arena traffic will bottle up to ensnarl ambulances headed to nearby UCSF Medical Center and threaten the neighborhood’s ability to grow as a biotechnology hub. Its proximity to AT&T Park and possible overlapping game days will exacerbate that, the group says.

 

Sam Singer, who is representing the alliance’s public relations efforts, [said], “The alliance wants to see the (arena) and office towers halted completely. If that doesn’t happen through the EIR and public participation process, the alliance will consider a lawsuit and going to the ballot to stop the stadium.”

Poll suggests public not sold on arena

On the eve of the supervisors’ vote, the Mission Bay Alliance released a poll of 540 voters that showed much less support than the Warriors have asserted. This is from a statement on the alliance’s website:

Based on what they know today about the proposed arena plan in Mission Bay, fewer than half of voters say they support it:

 

Support – 49 percent

 

Oppose – 42 percent

 

Don’t know – 10 percent  …

 

Once voters became aware of the facts surrounding the proposed arena and the expected regional impacts, including traffic gridlock, the lack of parking and clogged emergency access for adjacent UCSF hospitals, support for the arena plummeted even more:

 

Support – 38 percent

 

Oppose – 59 percent

 

Don’t know – 3 percent

 

Parking and traffic ranked as the two most problematic impacts, with 65 percent of voters concerned about traffic gridlock and 67 percent about a lack of parking in and around the arena. … [The project] does little to alleviate the burden the arena will put on regional transit like BART and CalTrain.

Being a popular champion helps sway debate

But the Warriors and the city leaders who back them up on the planned move could benefit tremendously from timing. San Diego voters agreed to help pay for PETCO Park for the Padres in the city’s downtown area in November 1998 — a month after the team won a rare National League title and advanced to the World Series.

The contrast is sharp with present-day San Diego and seemingly broad opposition to having local governments help the Chargers pay for a new NFL stadium. Other factors certainly come into play. San Diego’s reputation as “Enron by the Bay” has faded, but the city’s years of financial struggles have left scars. The city is debating a huge infrastructure program, prompting questions about why $200 million that might go to fix pocked roads and add fire stations would instead help a billionaire build a stadium. But it hasn’t helped the let’s-hold-our-noses-and-accept subsidies crowd that the Chargers have been hugely disappointing since their 14-2 season in 2007, rarely living up to expectations.

The Warriors, by contrast, sharply exceeded expectations in 2014-15, when they won their first NBA championship in 40 years. This season, meanwhile, they got off to the fastest start of any team in NBA history. That could be an ace in the hole for team owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber.

That is the deadline for the California High-Speed Rail Authority to respond to a landmark ruling by Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny, who is hearing a series of related challenges to the rail authority's project. On Aug. 16, Kenny released a decision related to a lawsuit filed by Kings County, Hanford farmer John Tos and homeowner Aaron Fukuda that agreed with their arguments that the rail authority would be breaking state law in two ways if it began construction of the project, as is now planned for 2014.

The judge held that the state had failed to identify the sources for the entire $31 billion needed to complete the bullet train's “initial operating segment” from Merced to the San Fernando Valley and to obtain all necessary environmental approvals for that segment.

Instead of ordering the project be halted, however, Kenny scheduled a “remedies” hearing for Nov. 8 at which the state would discuss how it planned to address the deficiencies in its business plan and the inadequacies of its environmental reviews. The plaintiffs have already sent Kenny their proposed order. It argues that based on his Aug. 16 decision, the judge has no choice but to “permanently enjoin” the rail authority from proceeding with construction until it was in compliance with state law.

Set grounds for appeal — or accept likely long delays?

Observers of the Kings County lawsuit say rail authority officials — and Gov. Jerry Brown, who emerged as a vigorous project backer in late 2011 — have a starkly difficult decision to make in their remedies filing.

If they accept Kenny's interpretation of Proposition 1A, their remedies would delay construction indefinitely and possibly permanently. It's not just that full environmental reviews will take years, with project opponents having many opportunities to employ the NIMBY tactics long honed by California environmentalists. It's the daunting task of finding more than $20 billion in firm new funding for the project. In the sequester era, the federal spigot that previously provided more than $3 billion in funds has been turned off. No private investors are interested without the sort of revenue or ridership guarantees that are forbidden under Proposition 1A.

But if the rail authority rejects Kenny's interpretation, that would foreshadow an appeal of his ruling and probably also prompt an indefinite delay on construction. Having ruled the state's plan violated two of Proposition 1A's key taxpayer protections, the judge is unlikely to say construction can begin while his decision is appealed.

This suggests the only way ground can be broken next year as planned  in the Central Valley is under extraordinary circumstances: a state appellate court issuing what amounts to an emergency suspension of Kenny's Aug. 16 ruling.

'The protections … must now be taken seriously'

Among those who consider this extremely unlikely is Quentin Kopp, the former San Francisco judge and state senator who is considered the father of the state bullet-train project and who helped write Proposition 1A. Kopp no longer supports the project touted by the rail authority. “It is not at all what we promised voters,” he told me in an interview in which he expressed deep satisfaction with Kenny's decision. “The protections in the proposition must now be taken seriously.”

If that happens, the bullet-train project is imperiled on other legal grounds as well. A key provision of Proposition 1A was the requirement that the train be true high-speed rail, defined as going the 400-plus miles from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco in two hours and 40 minutes or less.

But under the revised “blended” plan approved by Brown to reduce the project's estimated cost from $98 billion to $68 billion, such a result appears impossible. The “blended” blueprint would only provide true high-speed rail from San Jose to the northern reaches of sprawling Los Angeles. At each end, travelers would have to switch to regular commuter rail. Even a four-hour trip looks optimistic under such circumstances.

The rail authority has never been able to offer any credible documentation that the 160-minute requirement could be met under its revised plan. Instead, it cites “verbal assertions based on (the) skill, experience and optimism” of project engineers.

This weakness of the rail authority's plan is targeted in another lawsuit being heard by Kenny. Kings County, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and two other parties argue that the state cannot legally issue the $9.95 billion in bonds authorized by voters in 2008 because the “blended” system is not what they approved and is far from a “statewide high-speed rail system.” A state review panel cleared the issuance of the bonds in March.

Kenny's decision in that case is expected this month, according to the Fresno Bee.

By Joseph Perkins

Chris Thornberg is one of the most astute analysts of the California housing market. Back in 2005, when he was senior economist for Anderson UCLA Forecast, he appeared on a San Francisco radio show I hosted, “The Bay Area Housing Report.”

I questioned his assessment that a ginormous housing bubble had reared itself here in California. I challenged his warning that it was only a matter of time before the bubble burst, causing protracted damage to the state economy.

I thought Thornberg overly bearish. I shared the view of many economists (including former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan) that, while median home prices would not continue to increase by 10 percent or more a year, as they did during the go-go days of the housing boom, the housing market would have a soft, rather than hard, landing.

Well, I was wrong. And Thornberg was absolutely right.

New housing warnings

Eight years later, the gimlet-eyed economist has moved from UCLA Anderson to Beacon Economics, a consulting firm he cofounded. And Thornberg is sounding fresh warnings about the housing market.

Not about the return of rapidly rising home prices. But about NIMBYism — Not in My Back Yard-ism. He argues it has created artificial housing shortages in California’s population centers, which threatens the state’s long-term economic health.

In an essay published this week in the Los Angeles Times, Thornberg cites the examples of two major housing developments in the so-called City of Angels, Casden West L.A. and Il Villaggio Toscano.

Both have been substantially downsized because of NIMBY activism by no-growth community groups to which L.A.’s faux-populist politicians shamelessly pander.

Casden West L.A. planned to build more than 600 housing units, along with 160,000 square feet of retail space, adjacent to the Metro Expo Line in West L.A. It’s the kind of transit-oriented “infill” development that’s held out as “smart growth.”

Yet, after fierce opposition by NIMBY groups, the developers of Casden West L.A. last month were forced to reduce the number of homes by 7 percent. And of that 7 percent, more than 10 percent of units were required to be “inclusionary” housing, to be sold at below-market rates to lower-income buyers.

As to the retail, the developers of Casden West L.A. were forced to reduce that by all of 90 percent.

Housing reduction

The developers of Il Villaggio Toscanco had a similar bad experience at the hands of NIMBY activists. The mixed-use, urban infill project in Sherman Oaks was to have 500 residential units along with high-end retail. But by the time the local neighborhood council finally approved the development this past May, the number of homes were reduced 20 percent.

Such NIMBYism is not unique to L.A., Thornberg pointed out. It is commonplace throughout coastal California.

“Add up the downsized and failed projects,” he decries, “and the net result is a state housing shortage.” And because of that shortage, the economist explained, “Seven of the 10 least affordable housing markets in the nation are in California.”

In Thornberg’s estimation, “California’s lack of housing is by far the greatest threat to our economic growth.”

And the only way the state is going to produce the housing California needs, is if the NIMBY groups that wield disproportionate influence not only in L.A., but practically every population center throughout the state, are no longer able exercise de facto veto power over housing development.