California’s housing crisis didn’t begin on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s watch. But it’s fair to wonder whether Newsom will be able to claim any significant progress in the area he’s made so central to his agenda by the time he leaves office in early 2027.
That’s not an indictment of Newsom. It’s an acknowledgement of the intractability of the state’s housing shortage. Despite years of attention from Newsom and his predecessors, the gap between the number of new units needed and what’s being built, which first became noticeable in the 1970s, has widened in every decade since.
