The racist California housing law Sacramento and other cities have no choice but to follow

Quietly and quickly, the Sacramento City Council on Tuesday rubber-stamped language for a countywide ballot measure to comply with a racist statute in the California Constitution. If they want to build more low-income housing legally, Sacramento leaders don’t have a choice.

A discriminatory provision known as Article 34, enshrined by a voter-approved ballot measure in the twilight of the Jim Crow era, essentially makes it harder to build homes for California’s poorest residents. Sacramento’s compulsory vote last week was a reminder of the law’s disgraceful persistence 72 years after it was passed.

Article 34 requires the public to vote on every “low rent housing” project before it may be built. To satisfy the 1950 law, most counties take advantage of a California Supreme Court ruling that allows them to ask voters for blanket approval of low-income housing in a single ballot measure. Sacramento has done this five times since 1968.

This egregious normalization of discriminatory housing law must stop.

For 29 years, state lawmakers have failed to put a repeal of the anachronistic provision on the ballot. The latest push, Senate Constitutional Amendment 2, has apparently hit a roadblock in the Assembly. State Sens. Ben Allen and Scott Wiener say it lacks the funds for a statewide campaign but not the political support, which so far has been bipartisan and unanimous.

Apparently big donors and special interests are reluctant to campaign for another change to the constitution after sinking $22 million into a failed 2020 attempt to require that race be considered in public university admissions.

In the two decades after its adoption, Article 34 was responsible for blocking 15,000 units, a 2019 Los Angeles Times story found. A 1987 analysis by the California Department of Housing and Community Development determined that the provision had a chilling effect that discouraged many local governments from seeking state and federal housing assistance. It effectively stymied neighborhood integration and restricted the economic mobility of nonwhite residents.

Its hindrance of the state’s ability to provide adequate housing for everyone is undeniable. Article 34 was a barrier to low-income housing development during the state’s 20th-century population boom, exploiting a public housing backlash and fears about communism during the buildup to the Korean War, the Times reported.

The California Real Estate Association, the predecessor to today’s California Association of Realtors, initiated the measure. The group framed public housing as a threat to capitalism and described the measure in internal memos as a way to “stop the enemy of socialism that is gnawing at the vitals of America from within,” calling it the “only means by which our great Republic will be preserved and improved.”

Article 34 has since survived several repeal attempts. It hasn’t been on the ballot since 1993.

The forces that brought about Article 34 remain an important undercurrent in California’s worst-in-the-nation housing crisis, which pits the need for dense, affordable housing against the regressive desire to allow neighborhoods to block growth.

The absence of a champion for repealing Article 34 reflects terribly on a state with so much wealth and so many big-spending special interests. If California wants to meaningfully address its shortage of affordable housing and the stains of its racist past, we should start by repealing a law that embodies both.