California just demolished a major obstacle to housing construction within its borders — and provided Democrats with a blueprint for better governance nationwide.

On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a pair of housing bills into law. One exempts almost all urban, multifamily housing developments from California’s environmental review procedures. The second makes it easier for cities to change their zoning laws to allow for more homebuilding.

Both these measures entail restricting the reach of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a law that requires state and local governments to research and publicize the ecological impacts of any approved construction project. Individuals and groups can then sue to block these developments on the grounds that the government underestimated the project’s true environmental harms.

At first glance, these events might seem irrelevant to anyone who is neither a Californian nor a massive nerd. But behind the Golden State’s esoteric arguments over regulatory exemptions lie much larger questions — ones that concern the fundamental aims and methods of Democratic policymaking. Namely:

• Is increasing the production of housing and other infrastructure an imperative of progressive politics that must take precedence over other concerns?
  
• Should Democrats judge legislation by how little it offends the party’s allied interest groups or by how much it advances the general public’s needs (as determined by technocratic analysis)?

In making it easier to build urban housing — despite the furious objections of some environmental groups and labor unions — California Democrats put material plenty above status quo bias, and the public’s interests above their party’s internal harmony.

Too often in recent decades, Democrats have embraced the opposite priorities. And this has led blue cities and states to suffer from exceptionally large housing shortages while struggling to build public infrastructure on time and on budget. As a result, Democratic states have been bleeding population — and thus, electoral clout — to Republican ones while the public sector has fallen into disrepute.

California just demonstrated that Democrats don’t need to accept these failures. Acquiescing to scarcity — for the sake of avoiding change or intraparty tension — is a choice. Democrats can make a different one.

California Democrats were long hostile to housing development. That’s finally changing.

Critics of California’s CEQA reforms didn’t deny their state needs more housing. It might therefore seem fair to cast the debate over those reforms as a referendum on the importance of building more homes.

But the regulatory regime that the opponents of CEQA reform sought to preserve is the byproduct of an explicitly anti-development strain of progressivism, one that reoriented Democratic politics in the 1970s.

The postwar decades’ rapid economic progress yielded widespread affluence, ecological degradation, and disruptive population growth. Taken together, these forces spurred a backlash to building: Affluence led liberal reformers to see economic development as less of a priority, environmental decay prompted fears that humanity was swiftly exhausting........

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