California does not suffer from a shortage of plans, promises, panels, or paperwork. It just has an inordinate amount of trouble with follow-through. This edition of B.E. tracks the widening gap between what we say we want — more housing, faster recovery, fewer encampments, secure water — and what the Golden State actually delivers, with one impressive exception: San Diego, which actually solved an existential problem by doing the one thing much of California seems to have lost the will to do: building something big.

Build Me Up, Buttercup

After years of legislation, lawsuits, and enough legislative theater to qualify for a touring production, California’s housing experts are asking the awkward question: does Sacramento actually know how to fix this? A deeply reported piece in Comstock’s Magazine lands on the honest answer: maybe, but certainly not like this. The structural obstacles — cost ($109,000 in fees before breaking ground on a Sacramento County home), regulation (CEQA weaponization), and a permitting apparatus that can stretch entitlements to 20 years — have not meaningfully budged despite the past decade's parade of pro-housing bills. Experts largely agree that California has to build its way out of the crisis. They also agree the current toolkit is delivering far too little, far too slowly. Meanwhile, a blog post over at PPIC starts with a string of stats that will make you cry: California has built 677,000 housing units in six years while adding just 39,000 people — yet owner vacancy fell from 1.2% to 0.8%, rental vacancy was just 4.3% in 2024. Researchers have identified the two main forces keeping California housing costs in the stratosphere, and neither comes with a neat little fix since they’re tied to demographic trends.

<COMSTOCK> <PPIC>

🤫 Everything you should know

💧 - THE CITY THAT SOLVED ITS WATER PROBLEM — Once upon a time, San Diego was the cautionary tale — chronically short on water, dependent on unreliable imports, and staring down the same existential scarcity that haunts California's future. Then it did something radical: it actually invested in solving the problem. Over the past three decades, the county built the largest desalination plant in North America, raised a dam, slashed per-capita consumption, and developed enough water independence that it is now actively negotiating deals to sell its surplus to Arizona and Nevada. This is not a story about luck or geography. It's a tale cooked up in an NCC imagination lab, equal parts long-term thinking, political will, and the audacity to spend real money on real infrastructure instead of waiting for the next drought to remind everyone that water matters. The rest of the state might want to take notes.
— Wall Street Journal

🤩 PLUS: Just in time for National Drinking Water Week, LA County is rolling out its new Water Plan and launching waterforla.org on May 5, a county-backed hub designed to help residents find clear, practical information about their water needs. The effort is driven in part by NCC water task force co-chair Charley Wilson, and lands squarely in one of our “core four” issue areas: clean, reliable drinking water.

🔥 - ONE YEAR LATER: 34 HOMES — More than a year after the Los Angeles wildfires reduced entire neighborhoods to ash, the rebuilding effort has yielded exactly 34 completed homes in places like Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Thirty-four. The early vows from Governor Newsom, Mayor Bass, and the White House about slashing red tape and fast-tracking reconstruction have since met the usual California buzz saw: permitting delays, an insurance market in full crisis, construction costs that have shot into orbit, and a federal recovery apparatus that made a grand entrance before quietly slipping out the side door. This story is not just about wildfire recovery. It is about our chronic inability to execute at the speed its own emergencies require. When a disaster strips away every excuse and the state still cannot build faster than this, the problem is not the actors in the system; it’s the system itself. —  POLITICO

⛺- THERE’S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY — Near a freeway ramp in San Diego, city crews have cleared a homeless encampment 67 times in less than a year. And the people living there keep returning — not because they are refusing help, but because for many of them, help does not actually exist in any usable form. Shelter beds are trapped behind waiting lists. Services are fragmented. The city has conducted nearly 500 sweeps along freeway rights-of-way since last summer and spent more than $650,000 on removals since early March, yet its shelter system remains essentially full, operating at 98% to 99% occupancy. This fiscal year, more than 16,000 referrals for shelter beds have produced placements for just 9% of requests. Manuel Cazanas, 49, disabled and exhausted, put it with painful clarity: “I tell them I’m disabled, I’m hurt, I need to leave the streets. Help me.” The politics of encampments usually fixates on the spectacle — who wants them swept, who wants them defended. The real story is much plainer, and much uglier: California is pouring enormous resources into a strategy that plainly does not work, because the infrastructure required to move people off the street and into actual stability does not exist at anything close to the necessary scale. Sixty-seven clearings. Zero solutions. — Voice of San Diego

⌚ - WORTH YOUR TIME: THE ABBEY OF NEW CLAIRVAUX

Tucked into the Sacramento Valley farm town of Vina — population: not many — the Abbey of New Clairvaux is a working Trappist monastery where monks have been growing grapes, prunes, and walnuts since 1955 on land once owned by Leland Stanford. The centerpiece is an 800-year-old chapter house reassembled stone by stone from a medieval Spanish monastery — originally purchased by William Randolph Hearst. The wine is excellent. The silence is free. — NEW CLAIRVAUX

🙅 ⚾  - DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PLAYING BASEBALL IN EUREKA

Image poorly generated by ChatGPT

In Eureka, even playground baseball requires bureaucracy’s blessing. Want to hit a ball in a park? First, secure written permission from public works, because nothing says America’s pastime like municipal paperwork. The city even defines “baseball” with forensic zeal, lest some rogue child smuggle in an unauthorized sphere for fun. Eureka Municipal Code

🏃‍♂️ 💨 ✋ FAST FIVE

1. 💸 LA28 to award billions in Olympic contracts. Will local businesses get a slice?
   LAist
2. 🐟 Commercial salmon fishing approved of CA coast for first time since 2022.
   ABC7 News
3. 📋 CBIA releases list of “Housing Killer & Creator” bills circulating in Sacramento.
   CBIA
4. 🚫 A Bay Area city becomes the first in California to ban new data centers.
   SF Chronicle
5. 😐 Reservoirs burp methane, and apparently we need to look into that.
   LA Times