A San Francisco housing development is under construction in 2024. The state needs to build just over 300,000 new homes annually to catch up to demand but typically only approves about 100,000 per year.

According to California’s statewide housing plan, the state needs to build just over 300,000 new homes each year to catch up with demand. Yet it consistently falls short of this goal.

During the past decade, California has struggled to stay above 100,000 housing approvals per year; the number was roughly 102,000 in 2025. And only a fraction of those units are ever actually built.

These may strike some as surprising, given that during that same decade, the California Legislature has passed hundreds of bills designed to facilitate the construction of new housing — often to great fanfare from pro-housing politicians and activists.

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The Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley optimistically predicted that Senate Bill 9 from then-state Sen. Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, which was enacted in 2021 and allows duplexes and split lots in single-family zones, could lead to as many as 700,000 new homes. Yet two years after the law took effect, it had produced only around 500 applications and a few dozen additional housing units. 

Even worse was SB4, the so-called “YIGBY” (Yes, in God’s backyard) bill that opened church lands to affordable-housing construction in 2023. Scott Wiener, the state senator from San........

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