California’s housing crunch keeps getting worse. As one Bloomberg headline declared, “Only 16% of Californians Can Afford to Buy a Home.” It takes an income of $208,000 now to qualify for a 30-year loan. High interest rates are partly to blame. But so are the state’s many restrictions on housing.

California YIMBY, which stands for Yes in My Back Yard, is pushing six pro-housing bills. “All of them are still in play,” research director Nolan Gray told us. “At the heart of California’s housing affordability crisis is that, for the past 50 years, we’ve written laws that make it impossible to build.” Now it’s time to reverse that policy and repair the damage.

Several bills have been passed in recent years, such as Senate Bill 10 from 2021, which streamlined housing permitting. But more obviously needs to be done. Briefly, here are the six bills, including their key wording.

Assembly Bill 835, by Assemblyman Alex Lee, D-Milpitas, would direct the “State Fire Marshal to research standards for single-exit, single stairway” dwellings, instead of the current requirement of two exits. Better construction in recent decades has reduced fire risk, allowing for different standards that would cut construction costs. The old standards are obsolete.

Senate Bill 423, by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, “would extend the operation” of Senate Bill 35 from 2017. SB 35 reduced local authorities’ ability to block affordable housing developments.

Senate Bill 4, also by Wiener, would make it easier to develop low-income housing “located on land owned … by an independent institution of higher education or a religious institution.” It would include nonprofit corporations set up for that purpose.

Senate Bill 450, by Senate President Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, among other things “would prohibit a local agency from imposing objective zoning standards” not applied uniformly within a housing zone.

Senate Bill 684, by Sen. Anna Caballero, D-Merced, would require a local agency to approve, without a review or hearing, parcel maps “for a housing development project that meets specified requirements.”

Assembly Bill 1633, by Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, would clarify standards determining “whether a local agency’s failure to exercise discretion under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) … constitutes a violation of the Housing Accountability Act.”

That is, it would limit CEQA abuse by local authorities.

The last bill could be a first step in the long-needed overhaul of CEQA.

Enacted in 1970 to protect the environment, the law has become a tool to impede housing developments. It’s often used by NIMBYs (Not in My Back Yarders) who don’t like certain developments and by unions angry that developments aren’t using union labor. Obviously, this is not a proper or intended use of CEQA.

Unfortunately, CEQA reform has remained elusive, despite broad bipartisan consensus that abuses must be stopped.

Absent CEQA reform, California is still a long way toward meeting the state’s steep housing needs.

But the six bills backed by California YIMBY “are important steps in the broader project of fixing the years of bad policy in California,” as Gray said.

We urge the Legislature to pass all these bills — and to start planning for comprehensive CEQA reform in 2024.