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.

In the 1990s and early 2000s [it was] common knowledge that most Seattle-based startups had only two viable exit strategies: go public, or get acquired by Microsoft.

This led to a lopsided startup ecosystem, with a very small number of tech titans, and a large number of relatively tiny startups, with very little in between. …

The last 10 years have seen a sea-change in this dynamic in Seattle, caused by two forces.

The first part of the change has been the rise of a new breed of large Seattle-based tech companies – companies that are still smaller than the two local titans, Microsoft and Amazon, yet large enough to fill out the middle tier of the tech ecosystem.

This group includes public companies such as Expedia, Zillow, Tableau, and Zulily, as well as very large acquisitions such as PopCap Games, Isilon, Big Fish Games or Bluekai. Along with older companies such as Adobe and Real, the home-grown tech industry in Seattle now has a sizeable number of companies not only at the $100 billion valuation, but throughout the $10 billion, $1 billion, or $100 million valuation ranges. …

The second force has been the increasing appearance of Silicon Valley engineering offices in the Seattle metro area. Google was one of the first major Silicon Valley offices to open an engineering office in Seattle, and in fact Google now has two engineering offices – one downtown in Seattle, and one in the suburb of Kirkland, WA. …

A decade after Google set up shop in this city, Seattle has seen an explosion of Silicon Valley companies setting up their second engineering office. Seattle is now home to engineering offices for Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Salesforce, eBay, Dropbox, Uber, SpaceX, Taser, Palantir, Groupon, Hulo, Electronic Arts, Yahoo!, Pivotal Labs and many others …

Seattle’s secret weapon: relatively cheap housing

That’s a striking list. Virtually all Silicon Valley tech giants have a Seattle wing. But at some point, the dynamic may change from Expedia and Zillow co-founder Rich Barton’s characterization of Seattle as the “blond, scruffy-haired little brother of the star quarterback (Silicon Valley).”

That’s because the Seattle area has a huge advantage: housing is relatively affordable. Finding affordable housing in California isn’t just a problem for poor people. Many well-paid professionals are unable to afford to buy their own homes and start families.

According to bizjournals.com, in 2013, the San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley had the highest average salary ($111,885) for software engineers of any U.S. city. The Seattle area was second at $103,196 per year.

In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, that much money doesn’t get you much in the way of housing. The National Association of Realtors says the median cost of a home in San Jose/Santa Clara/Sunnyvale was $855,000 in the fourth quarter of 2014. In San Francisco/Oakland/Fremont, it was $742,900.

The housing outlook is grim for renters as well. A new Forbes magazine survey finds that the Bay Area and Silicon Valley have arguably the nation’s worst housing shortage, allowing landlords to constantly push up rents. The average monthly rent in the greater San Francisco area is now $2,802.

CA pols stick with same affordable-housing approach

A $100,000 salary buys a lot more creature comforts in the Seattle area.  The median cost of a single-family home in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellvue was $352,000 over the last three months of 2014. The average apartment rent in March was $1,615 in all locations within 10 miles of Seattle city limits.

In New York City, housing costs are also sky-high, and Mayor Bill de Blasio is heeding economists who say the best way to make homes and apartments more affordable is to increase housing stock. De Blasio wants to add 240,000 housing units.

In California, however, the politician who has focused most on the affordable-housing issue — Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego — instead wants to ramp up the traditional California affordable-housing policy of having the government subsidize some homes. Atkins’ proposals haven’t focused on the regulatory reforms that developers say are the easiest way to spur more housing construction in the Golden State.

Corporations have been known to up and leave California for many reasons. Being able to retain your engineers and coders by guaranteeing them they will live in an area where they can afford the American dream of a single-family home would appear to be a powerful incentive for a company to move to Seattle, especially now that there is such a huge concentration of tech firms in the Seattle region.

[The] firefighters union says the cuts will lead to fewer job applicants, much in the way recruitment has slowed for the short-staffed police department, which is dealing with the same pension cuts. …

“City Hall is hell bent on doing to the fire department what they have done to the police department and the results will be the same; firefighters will leave San Jose and 911 emergency response times will increase,” firefighters union president Joel Phelan said in a statement.

But just beneath the San Jose story was a link to a Los Angeles Times story about a flap over how L.A.’s city fire department was handling the hiring of new firefighters. It noted that there had been 10,000 applicants seeking to be in a fire trainee recruit class of 300 people.

10,000! Oh, yeah, reduced benefits in San Jose will keep jobs unfilled.