“ Any city may now pick up the 469 Stevenson St. manual and use it to impose an unreviewable death by delay on almost any housing project it wants to kill.”

Anyone who doesn’t understand California housing politics won’t understand why every city would want to arbitrarily kill every housing project. California cities don’t want housing in THEIR city. They want housing in their neighboring city and want the commercial buildings in their own city. This is because Prop 13 prevents cities from collecting RISING taxes from residential properties (but they can collect rising taxes from commercial properties)

This is why California looks obscenely underdeveloped despite its GDP per capita rising 15x in 50 years.