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PERSPECTIVE - Before we prescribe the cure, shouldn’t we make sure we’ve diagnosed the right illness?
Imagine a physician who prescribed the same medication to every patient who walked through the door. Whether the patient had pneumonia, diabetes, a broken leg, or high blood pressure, everyone received the same prescription.
We wouldn’t call that medicine.
We’d call it malpractice.
After months of studying housing legislation and the proposed projects reshaping communities across the San Fernando Valley, I came to believe we may be asking the wrong question.
California’s own research tells us the crisis isn’t simply the number of housing units. It’s affordability. Renters, seniors on fixed incomes, and households with the lowest incomes are struggling the most. The greatest shortage isn’t simply housing—it’s housing that people with the lowest incomes can actually afford.
That distinction matters.
Because a housing crisis is not necessarily the same crisis in every community.
And if the diagnosis differs from one community to the next… shouldn’t the treatment?
Like many Californians, I assumed Sacramento’s streamlining laws were enacted to help address California’s affordability crisis.
While following a proposed project in my own neighborhood, I watched a developer with a years-old application already moving through environmental review. The proposal wasn’t affordable housing. It was a 98-unit assisted living and memory care facility, including a locked memory care unit, proposed in a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone along one of our community’s primary evacuation routes.
Then Sacramento enacted AB 130.
Shortly afterward, City Planning staff proactively contacted the applicant to advise that the project could pursue streamlining under the new law. A years-long environmental review already underway was set aside in favor of the streamlined process.
California had already lived through the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise. The state had also recognized the importance of evacuation planning through AB 747.
Yet here I was watching a proposal for vulnerable seniors and memory care residents being streamlined even though evacuation remained one of the central unresolved issues.
That’s when I had a lightbulb moment.
I remember thinking,
“Wait a minute. How does this address California’s affordability crisis?”
If legislation enacted to address an affordability crisis can also be used to streamline projects that are not affordable housing while reducing review of legitimate environmental and public safety concerns, perhaps the prescription was never as narrowly tailored as Californians were led to believe.
Nor was this an isolated example.
In nearby Sherwood Forest, another streamlining law is quietly rewriting one of the San Fernando Valley’s last remaining planned estate communities. People didn’t simply buy a house there. They bought into a plan—a community intentionally designed around one- and two-acre lots, mature trees, open space, and a distinctive character. Today that plan is being rewritten, parcel by parcel.
Different community.
Different challenge.
Same prescription.
A wise man once told me,
“If you need more money, there are only two ways to get it: make more money or spend less.”
I’ve never forgotten that advice because it applies just as well to governments as it does to families.
Before reshaping neighborhoods, rewriting long-established community plans, and asking residents to accept dramatically different patterns of development, shouldn’t we first be certain we’ve identified the right problem?
People don’t simply invest in a house.
They invest in a community.
They invest in a plan.
They invest in the reasonable expectation that those plans mean something.
I spent a good deal of time following the money, trying to understand how legislation promoted as the answer to California’s affordability crisis could be applied so broadly.
Then I realized I was following the wrong thing.
I wasn’t really following the money.
I was following the consequences.
The consequences for neighborhoods.
The consequences for wildfire preparedness.
The consequences for environmental review.
The consequences for homeownership.
The consequences for public trust.
Had housing production become more than housing policy?
Had it also become economic policy?
I don’t know.
But I do know this.
If the Legislature believed affordability was the crisis, it could have written streamlining laws that applied only to affordable housing.
It didn’t.
Reasonable people may disagree about why.
Reasonable people shouldn’t be surprised that Californians have begun asking the question.
It’s understandable why the more skeptical among us have begun to wonder whether streamlining was ever primarily about affordability at all. When market-rate projects receive the same streamlined treatment as affordable housing, many have concluded that the real objective is generating economic activity and tax revenue rather than lowering housing costs.
Whether that conclusion is right or wrong almost becomes beside the point.
The moment people can no longer connect the government’s stated objective with the way a law actually operates, trust begins to erode.
Government should be very careful about leaving people outside the circle for too long.
Because eventually they tap out.
Not because they stop loving their neighborhoods.
Not because they stop caring about their communities.
They tap out because they stop believing anyone inside the circle is listening.
They stop believing the explanation.
They stop believing the legislation was written to accomplish what they were told it would accomplish.
And when trust is lost… everyone loses.
(Eva Amar is a West Valley community organizer whose work focuses on land-use issues and government accountability. She is also a national advocate for victims of sexual violence.)
