California Voters Opt for Orderly Urbanism on Election Day

Golden State voters decisively rejected progressive approaches to crime and housing.

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week's stories include a few follow-ups on lawsuits and elections the newsletter's been tracking. That includes:

• A settlement that's been reached in a lawsuit challenging Healdsburg, California's inclusionary zoning fees.
• A preliminary win for a Kalispell, Montana, homeless shelter in their legal fight against a city government that's trying to shut them down.
• A loss for missing middle reforms at the ballot box in the small town of Harbor Springs, Michigan.

But first, our lead story looks at California voters' resounding rejection of the big city progressive approach to housing, crime, and public disorder.

---

California Votes for Orderly Urbanism

The 2024 presidential election saw the country shift right. Donald Trump improved on his 2016 and 2020 performances almost everywhere. That rightward shift was most pronounced in urban areas with the highest cost of living.

This is interesting…

The highest cost of living urban areas shifted the most toward Trump.

(h/t to @BenGlasner & @CardiffGarcia for identifying this trend first). pic.twitter.com/XZXr9sNDNZ

— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) November 10, 2024

Commenters, particularly conservative commenters, are already interpreting this as a referendum on the dismal results of big city liberal governments on basic issues of crime and affordability.

That result can be overinterpreted. Big cities are still overwhelming Democratic. Trump's low baseline of support in these places makes his absolute gains more pronounced when measured as a percentage improvement on past performance.

At the same time, urban America's rightward shift can also be underinterpreted if we just look at the presidential race. Where voters were able to vote specifically on progressive approaches to urban government, the election looks like even more of a red wave.

That's certainly the story in California.

There, voters were asked to decide two ballot initiatives: one on whether to eliminate state guardrails on rent control; the other to roll back a previous initiative that lowered sentences for theft and drug offenses.

The first failed spectacularly. The second succeeded by an even larger margin.

Call it a win for orderly urbanism. Voters are sick of progressive solutions on housing and crime and opted for something different.

The question is whether last week's election results will actually lead to safer, more affordable, more livable cities.

A Crushing Defeat for Rent Control

The biggest housing issue on the California ballot was rent control. Proposition 33 would have repealed all state-level limits on local rent control policies, thus giving cities and counties a free hand to regulate rents however they pleased.

The measure went down in flames on Election Day, with roughly 60 percent of voters casting a "no" ballot.

That result is good news for the availability of rental housing in California, given rent control's well-documented history of reducing rental housing supply and quality.

It is nevertheless a somewhat surprising result. California has a much higher proportion of renters than most other states and polls consistently find that rent control is supported by a wide majority of respondents. Dozens of cities already have rent control policies on the books.

The delta between generic support for rent control and support for Prop. 33 is particularly stark in some cities. One late October poll of Los Angeles County voters found that 79 percent of them back rent control. But on Election Day, only 44 percent of L.A. voters supported Prop. 33.

Russell Lowery, the executive director of the California Rental Housing Association (one of the many property owner groups opposed to Prop. 33), credits the measure's resounding defeat to well-targeted messaging that downplayed the typical free market arguments against rent control.

"The property rights argument that property owners wanted to have is a losing one. If it's property rights versus rent control, we lose," he tells Reason.

Instead, Lowery says the 'No' campaign spent a lot of time and resources targeting varied groups with messages about how rent control would make California's universally acknowledged housing crisis worse for them or their families.

Senior homeowners heard that rent control would dry up rental housing opportunities for their children. Current renters heard that it would reduce new construction, and lock them into their current unit.

Still, even the most effective campaign is going to have a hard time flipping 60–40 support for rent control into a 40–60 ballot box loss for rent control.

The polarizing nature of Prop. 33's sponsor and main financial backer—the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF)—likely didn't help the "yes" cause either.

The operator of discount pharmacies for AIDS patients and its president Michael Weinstein have backed any number of controversial causes over the years—from opposing medication that prevents HIV infections and requiring condoms in porn to fighting market-rate housing construction in Los Angeles.

AHF has also reportedly burned a lot of bridges with elected officials by constantly taking rent control to the ballot instead of negotiating compromise legislation with property owners.

The whirl of controversy around AHF likely did little to turn off voters directly. (Prop. 34, a landlord-backed initiative that would prevent the organization from spending money it earns from its pharmacies on political advocacy, is still too close to call.)

AHF's controversial nature plausibly discouraged elected officials and advocacy groups favoring rent control from campaigning for Prop. 33. That would also lower support for the measure.

A Resounding Win for Crime Control

As impressive as rent control's defeat was last Tuesday, it pales in comparison to the success of California's tough-on-crime measure.

Prop. 36 asked California voters if they wanted to increase legal penalties for certain drug and theft crimes. With roughly 70 percent of ballots counted, some 70 percent of voters said yes they do. Prop. 36 has earned majority support in every single county in the state.

Backed by a coalition of law enforcement groups and retailers, Prop. 36 was presented as a solution to some of the most visible signs of California's urban dysfunction: smash-and-grab retail theft, shuttered storefronts, public drug use, and spiking overdose deaths.

The measure largely rolls back a 2014 ballot initiative that had lowered penalties for simple drug possession and the theft of goods worth less than $950 from felonies to misdemeanors.

Prop. 36 supporters blame the marked rise in shoplifting and overdoes deaths on those 2014 sentencing reforms.

The measure allows for people to be charged with felony theft, regardless of the dollar value of what they stole, if they had two prior theft convictions. Existing law allows for felony charges only when the value of the items stolen is over $950.

Prop. 36 also lengthens felony sentences for theft and property damage if three or more people committed the crime together.

Anyone who has spent time on social media in the last three years will have seen viral videos of gangs of shoplifters smashing up a Walgreens somewhere in California while staff stand by helplessly. Prop. 36 tries to stop this by making everyone in those videos liable for felony charges.

On the drug front, the measure also increases sentences for selling fentanyl and other hard drugs and requires that people convicted of selling those drugs serve their sentences in state prison instead of county jail.

Prop. 36's critics argued that the measure misdiagnosed the causes of the state's drug overdose and crime waves.

Both followed national trends that had happened years after the passage of those 2014 sentencing reforms. The dollar threshold for felony theft is a lot higher in conservative states and California's overdose rate is lower than most other states.

Meanwhile, the 2014 sentencing reforms had succeeded in lowering the population of California's inhumanly overcrowded prison system.

Whatever the truth of those arguments, they couldn't overcome the sentiments of an electorate that is sick of crime and public disorder.

YIMBY Wins and a Progressive Rout in Local Elections 

This electoral trend toward orderly urbanism was most stark in ultraliberal San Francisco. Fifty-eight percent of voters there lined up against Prop. 33—despite the Board of Supervisors unanimously passing a rent control expansion just weeks before the election. Prop. 36 won with 64 percent of the vote.

The city's new mayor is David Lurie, a moderate political neophyte who ran on overthrowing the city's corrupt, incompetent "system" and has promised to declare fentanyl a public emergency. He narrowly defeated incumbent mayor London Breed, who has run a YIMBYish (Yes in my backyard), tough-on-crime-ish administration.

Progressive candidates for mayor who argued for rent control and safe injection sites as a solution to the city's drug and housing problems were thoroughly routed.

City Supervisor Dean Preston, an archcritic of YIMBY zoning reforms and tougher drug enforcement, lost his reelection race to YIMBY tech entrepreneur Bilal Mahmood.

It wasn't just San Francisco however. Progressive prosecutors were ousted in Los Angeles and Alameda County. San Diego's YIMBY mayor Todd Gloria was one of the few big city incumbents to keep his seat.

Orderly Urbanism and Urban Density

Throughout the election, Donald Trump made much hay out of the fallen state of once-beautiful San Francisco. His point was that Kamala Harris, a former San Francisco prosecutor, was to blame for the city's current woes.

This narrow partisan point didn't convince many San Francisco voters. Some 80 percent of them still voted Harris for president.

At the same time, the urban dysfunction Trump alluded to on the campaign trail was very much on the minds of voters.

YIMBYs and urbanists will often argue that compact cities well serviced by public transit hypercharge the agglomeration effects common to all urban areas. Dense, walkable urbanism concentrates more amenities, friends, romantic partners, professional peers, and job opportunities right outside your door.

The other side of that coin is that dense urban environments also hypercharge the impact of the negative externalities and antisocial behavior common to city life. Crime, vagrancy, and nuisance behavior are also concentrated right outside your door.

Murders, homeless encampments, and public drug use are just more noticeable in a dense urban area with a lot more people per square mile. That's true regardless of where a city's crime and drug overdose rates fall in relation to the national average.

Voters didn't give up on cities in 2024. They voted for candidates that promised more housing, lower costs of living, and more functional city governments. They also resoundingly supported policies and candidates promising a crackdown on public drug use, theft, and urban disorder generally.

Those tough-on-crime measures and candidates may well fail to address California's problems with public order. Traditional libertarian thinking on drug prohibition and criminal justice would suggest that they will.

Regardless of the wisdom of Prop. 36, the 2024 election represents an electoral sea change.

For the moment, voters are tired of urban governance that builds nothing, lets housing costs hit the stratosphere, and then tells voters to tolerate all the social dysfunction that spills out onto the street as a result.

---

Would-Be Landmark Inclusionary Zoning Case Quickly Settled

Last week, Healdsburg, California, settled a lawsuit filed against the city by Jessica Pilling that challenged a $20,000 "inclusionary zoning" fee she'd be charged when applying to build a single-family home and accessory dwelling unit on her property.

The city will refund Piling's fee and award her $15,000 in damages.

The Healdsburg case was one of the first challenges to local municipal fees following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Sheetz v. County of El Dorado.

In Sheetz, the Supreme Court made clear there's no legislative exception to the "unconstitutional conditions" doctrine—which requires that the conditions local governments place on the approval of new development have some sort of reasonable nexus to the impacts of that development.

Pilling had argued that because building housing doesn't make housing less affordable, there's no nexus that justifies an inclusionary zoning fee that is supposed to fund affordable housing.

Prior to Sheetz, legal challenges to local inclusionary zoning policies had had little success. Because these inclusionary zoning policies are typically through ordinances and legislation passed by city councils and state governments, they were seemingly protected by that now-overturned legislative exception.

The quick settlement of Pilling's case means that it won't be the vehicle that gets courts to take a second look at inclusionary zoning policies sans that legislative exception to the unconstitutional conditions doctrine.

David Deerson, an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation who'd represented Pilling, nevertheless says that the case shows how vulnerable inclusionary zoning policies are in a post-Sheetz world.

"This is the first, major step in what will ultimately be a bigger project of getting federal courts to recognize that by definition there is no nexus in asking someone who's building new housing to have to pay for someone else's house," Deerson tells Reason.

---

With Winter Approaching, A Judge Blocks a Montana City's Attempt to Shut Down a Warming Center

Last week, a federal judge ruled that a homeless shelter in Kalispell, Montana, will be allowed to host guests overnight while its lawsuit challenging the city's efforts to shut the shelter down plays out.

Back in September, the Kalispell City Council took the extraordinary step of revoking a conditional use permit it had granted the city's Flathead Warming Center to operate a 50-bed overnight shelter during the cold winter months.

The city had argued that the Flathead Warming Center was attracting homelessness, crime, and nuisances to the area.

In October, the Flathead Warming Center sued the city, arguing that it was being unfairly scapegoated for attracting homeless people to the town and that the revocation of its permit violated the center's constitutional rights to due process and equal protection.

In a decision issued on Thursday, a federal judge sided with the warming center and issued a preliminary injunction against the city. Kalispell's process for revoking the center's permit was "subjective, nebulous, and thus a meaningless basis for rescinding the" permit, wrote Judge Dana Christensen.

"We're thrilled and relieved. It's been getting very cold here," says Tonya Horn, the center's executive director. "There's been a big focus on where people can't be. I want us to turn away from that and focus on where people can be to get the help that they need."

The Flathead Warming Center's lawsuit is ongoing. The organization is being represented by the Institute for Justice.

---

A Ballot Box Revolt Against Missing Middle Housing In a Michigan Resort Town

On Election Day, voters in the small lakeside town of Harbor Springs, Michigan voted to overturn missing middle zoning reforms passed by the city earlier this year.

Back in May, the Harbor Springs City Council had voted to simplify the 1,200-person town's 17-district zoning code and allow duplexes and accessory dwelling units in most residential areas. City officials pitched the reforms as a means of lowering housing costs and allowing more people who work in the town to also live there.

The town's critics of reform argued that they would harm neighborhood character for no real benefit. Said one local antizoning reform activist to the local public radio station: "Growing up, I may work in a community outside of where I live for a reason. I go work there for a reason. But my expectation is not necessarily for that community to provide me a house."

The zoning reforms, of course, didn't give anyone a free house. They just let private property owners build more types of housing. Nevertheless, the antireform arguments won the day and the election.

---

Quick Links

• Voters in Eureke, California, roundly rejected a ballot initiative that would prevent a downtown city parking lot from being turned into new housing. That hasn't stopped the NIMBY group behind the ballot initiative from filing a lawsuit to preserve that parking.
• Voters in Huntington Beach, California, have approached a ballot measure declaring housing as an exclusively local matter "beyond the reach of state control." It's the latest NIMBY gambit from the conservative Orange County community that's thumbing their nose at state laws requiring them to allow for more housing construction.
• Thus far, there's been no word on who the incoming Trump administration might pick to lead the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
• A new paper looks at what messaging is most effective for convincing people to stop worrying and love new housing supply.
• In The Washington Post, D.C. architect Shalom Baranes proposes converting underused federal office space in D.C. into new housing.