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Like heavy, I know little about this and have no significant comments as a result - but the detail about something unfamiliar is what makes posts like these interesting!
YIMBY policy progress, from 50k feet, seems slow and intermittent - caught up in the tangle of state and local politics, regulation and courts. You make it slightly easier to build in one way and another law makes it harder, pitting your procedural edge cases against theirs, fighting through tens of thousands of local interests. I wonder how plausible 'significant progress' is, or what the path to it is - where YIMBYs can say 'yeah, we accomplished a solid 40/70% of what we want to in ' and we can observe its effects on rents, random social issues potentially caused by housing, homelessness, etc.
Great question! To the extent that there's a long-term goal or vision, it fits with the concept of an abundance agenda. It's what Laura Foote talks about at rallies.
This is a really good point. For example, SB 9 overturned single-family zoning by (with a lot of caveats and complications) allowing duplexes (and, kinda, fourplexes) wherever you could build a house. Livable California (our statewide NIMBY organization) was terrified. And yet it kinda... went nowhere. Almost no one took advantage of the law, and there's a cleanup bill, SB 450, this year to hopefully change that.
We have a reasonably good idea of the size of the shortage (McKinsey, Legislative Analyst's Office, UCLA.) We have a pretty quantifiable idea of the effects of supply on rents, and the effect of rents on homelessness.
The state has decent reporting for some things; see here (page eight, select Structure Type as Accessory Dwelling Unit) to see the effect of the 2017-era ADU liberalization, driving annual construction numbers from less than a thousand to up to twenty thousand. SB 35 streamlined about three thousand units per year in its first two years of implementation; SB 423 looks to greatly expand that.
So, tl;dr, there's a quantifiable housing gap, we know how much housing the state is producing, and getting the latter to reach the former is a reasonably proxy for "we're winning".
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