Virginia Postrel, Columnist

Youth! Street Life! The Case for Crowded Neighborhoods

This Angeleno is thrilled with a plan to ease California’s urban housing crisis.

January 26, 2018 at 3:00 PM UTC

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

Cities shouldn't act like suburbs.
Photographer: Edie Layland/Getty Images

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California Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, has introduced a bill that could significantly ease the state’s urban housing crisis.

Wiener’s bill would essentially prohibit cities from acting like suburbs, forcing them to allow builders to line their wide boulevards with medium-rise apartment buildings. SB 827 would forbid cities from imposing controls such as density and parking requirements on new residential construction within a half mile of a major transit station or a quarter mile from a frequent bus stop. It would override municipalities’ low-rise mandates with medium-rise minimums. On major streets, qualified housing could rise up to 85 feet, about eight stories, and on smaller ones to 45 or 55 feet, four or five stories. (These are legal minimums; cities could choose to allow taller buildings and developers could decide to build shorter ones.)