By admin 
California is short millions of homes, and every year hundreds of thousands of Californians give up and leave. Each departure represents a vote of no confidence in California government. Young families, who disproportionately leave California, look at this state and see homes they will never afford with the jobs they can get, and they conclude that the California Dream now lives somewhere else.
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Darrell Steinberg, the former California Senate majority leader and Sacramento mayor, is among those championing the California Forever project in Solano County. Despite some naysayers, Steinberg is on the right side of history by promoting this project.
In the Legislature 17 years ago, Steinberg authored Senate Bill 375, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act, a landmark law built on a great idea: that Californians should be able to live in compact, walkable communities, a short trip from good jobs, rather than spending their lives in traffic between sprawling subdivisions. Steinberg pushed this vision by forcing regions to come up with housing strategies to lower greenhouse gas emissions, something that can only happen with smarter growth.
California Forever is the most serious attempt in a generation to deliver that vision at scale. It is a privately funded initiative to bring shipbuilders and manufacturers, create thousands of high-wage jobs and build a walkable community where the people who hold those jobs can actually live.
Critics treat the founding of a new city as something alien to California. Founding cities is one of California’s oldest traditions In the explosion of growth and ambition that followed the Gold Rush, Sacramento was laid out at the confluence of two rivers almost overnight, and Stockton and Marysville rose to serve the mines.
Nearly every place Californians now call home began as somebody’s audacious plan. The real question is: When, exactly, did we decide that this founding spirit had expired?
Indefinite litigation on needed housing enriches attorneys and consultants, starves communities and has made delay itself the most powerful land-use policy in California. When California refuses to build, the demand does not vanish. Families uproot, and the growth we turned away spreads across the Sonoran Desert outside Phoenix, the Blackland Prairies near Austin, and the North Valleys above Reno.
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California’s paralysis exports sprawl, emissions and our own children to other states, then congratulates itself on its environmentalism.
Solano County knows the stakes. Many of its leading industries have shuttered, its budget is strained and its young people face a choice between brutal Bay Area commutes or driving a one-way U-Haul to a state that builds. High-wage industry — with homes close enough to walk or bike to work — is the way back.
Steinberg is keeping faith with his life’s work, and he is doing it at the scale this crisis demands. America is watching to see whether California can get out of its own way.
The people who owe Californians an explanation are those who labor to ensure that nothing is built anywhere for anyone and then wonder aloud why their children cannot afford to stay.
Brian Hanlon is CEO of California YIMBY, an advocacy organization working to pass legislation to end the state’s housing shortage.
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