Housing advocates thought that this was going to be the year when they finally cracked the California Coast.
In early spring, Democratic lawmakers, and the Yes In My Backyard activists backing them, rolled out a series of bills aimed at making it easier to build apartments and accessory dwelling units along California’s highly regulated coast and to make it more difficult for the independent and influential California Coastal Commission to slow or block housing projects. The 15-member group oversees almost all of the state’s 840 miles of coastline, a stretch of land that just under a million Californians call home.
The pro-construction push built off last year’s success for the coalition when the Legislature passed a major housing law and — breaking from long-standing legislative tradition — did not include a carveout for the coast. This year’s pack of bills was meant to cement and build off a new political reality in which the 48-year-old Coastal Commission no longer has quite so much say over housing policy.
Fast forward to mid-August and those new bills are either dead or so severely watered down that they no longer carry the promise of a more built-out coastline. Whatever happened last year, the California Coastal Commission is still a force to be reckoned with.
“Californians really treasure their coast and they feel very strongly about protecting it and bills that seek to weaken coastal protections are going to run into some strong headwinds,” said Sarah Christie, the commission’s legislative affairs director.
Since the 1970s, the California Coastal Commission has closely regulated any construction or demolition within the California coastal zone — a narrow band of land that varies from 1,000 feet to 5-miles inland from high tide….
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