Why Progressive Cities Became the Hardest Places in America to Build

The site at 469 Stevenson Street in San Francisco was, in October 2021, a parking lot. It sat a short walk from a subway station, around the corner from a big downtown shopping center, in a city that had spent years declaring a housing emergency. A developer proposed to replace the lot with a tower of 495 apartments, some of them priced below market. The city's planning staff had studied it and the planning commission had approved it. Then opponents appealed the environmental review to the Board of Supervisors, and on October 26, 2021, the board voted 8 to 3 to send the project back for more study. The objections raised included the risk of gentrification in a nearby neighborhood, the ground beneath the site, and the effect of construction on older buildings close by. There were no residents on the parking lot to displace. There were cars.

In short: Here is the argument: the places most committed to progressive values in America often make new homes the slowest and most expensive to build, through discretionary approvals, layered reviews and appeals that anyone can file. That is a self-inflicted wound, and fixing it is a progressive project, not a concession to developers.

The vote that drew the state's attention

The 469 Stevenson vote did not stay a local story. California's housing department, which had new powers under laws passed in the preceding years, opened a review of how San Francisco approves housing, citing the Stevenson decision among its concerns. The state's eventual report described a city where approvals were slow, unpredictable and vulnerable to political intervention at nearly every step. San Francisco had also been assigned a state target of roughly 82,000 new homes for the eight-year planning period running to 2031, a number many times greater than the city had been producing, and the state made clear that missing it would carry consequences.

Supervisors who voted to delay the tower were not, for the most part, hostile to housing in the abstract. Several described the project as a luxury development whose affordable share was too small, and they argued the city needed to protect the nearby South of Market neighborhood, home to many Filipino families and longtime working-class residents, from rising rents. That concern was sincere and had a real history behind it. But the tool they reached for, a procedural delay on a parking lot, had nothing to do with protecting those families. It simply meant fewer homes, later, at a higher cost.

How the machinery works

To see why progressive cities in particular struggle to build, look at the steps a project faces in many of them. The specifics vary by city, but the outline is common across coastal blue metros.

Discretionary review. In much of the country, a project that meets the zoning code gets a permit. In San Francisco and many California cities, even code-compliant projects historically could be subjected to discretionary review, meaning a commission could deny or alter them for reasons not written in any code.

Environmental review. California's Environmental Quality Act requires public agencies to study the environmental effects of projects they approve. For a highway or a refinery, that makes sense. Applied to apartments in a city center, it can mean years of study and the constant threat of lawsuits, which anyone can file.

Appeals. Decisions can be appealed to elected bodies, which turns a technical approval into a political fight in which a well-organized group of neighbors has outsized power.

Fees and requirements. Impact fees, affordable-unit mandates, design requirements and union labor rules each have their own justifications, and each adds cost. Layered together, they can make a project unprofitable to build at all.

Time. Every month of delay costs money: interest, rising construction prices, and the risk that a lender walks away. Delay is not neutral. It kills marginal projects as surely as a denial.

No single step looks unreasonable on its own. Each was added by people trying to do good: protect the environment, protect neighborhoods, get more affordable units, give the public a voice. The trouble is cumulative. A city can be full of good intentions and still produce a process in which building homes is extremely difficult.

Why blue cities, specifically

There is a pattern here worth stating plainly, because pretending otherwise does progressives no favors. Many of the highest-cost housing markets in the country are in metros governed by Democrats: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Seattle. Texas cities, by contrast, built at a faster pace through the 2010s and 2020s, and the price difference showed.

Part of the explanation is demand: people want to live in prosperous coastal cities, and that would push prices up under any rules. But the coastal cities also chose rules that make answering that demand slow. Three features of progressive political culture contributed.

The first is distrust of developers. The left has good historical reasons for that distrust, starting with the urban renewal era when federal money paid to bulldoze Black and immigrant neighborhoods. That memory made many progressives instinctively side with any neighborhood fighting any project. The instinct did not distinguish between a highway through a community and an apartment building on a parking lot.

The second is faith in process. Progressives built the environmental review laws, the public hearing requirements and the citizen lawsuit provisions of the 1970s, and they were right to: those tools stopped real harm. But a process with no deadline and no default answer becomes a veto for whoever has the most time and money, and those are often affluent homeowners rather than the renters the process was meant to protect.

The third is the habit of loading every goal onto every project. A new building is asked to provide affordable units, union jobs, green design, community benefits and public art. Each demand is defensible. Together, they can mean the building never happens, and then it provides none of them.

Who pays for a slow yes

It is tempting to treat delay as a problem for developers, and to feel little sympathy. The people who pay for it, though, are mostly not developers.

They are renters, first. When the supply of homes in a region falls short of the number of households who want to live there, the shortage gets rationed by price. The highest bidders get the apartments, and everyone below them moves down a rung: into an older unit, a smaller one, a roommate arrangement, a longer commute, or out of the region entirely. Teachers, nurses, bus drivers and restaurant workers are the people who end up making those trade-offs.

They are taxpayers, second. Publicly funded affordable housing goes through much of the same process as market-rate housing. Every year of review, every appeal and every redesign raises the cost of each subsidized unit. California's per-unit costs for subsidized apartments have drawn repeated scrutiny from state auditors and reporters, and while land and labor explain a large share, the time and complexity of approvals are part of the bill. A public dollar spent waiting is a dollar not spent housing someone.

They are the climate, third. Apartments near transit and jobs let people drive less and use less energy per household than detached homes at the edge of a metro. When a city blocks a tower downtown, the demand does not disappear; it moves to the exurbs, where growth is easier to approve and much more carbon-intensive. Some of the most effective climate policy available to a progressive city is simply allowing people to live near where they work.

And they are unhoused people, last and most painfully. Homelessness in the United States tracks housing costs more closely than it tracks rates of addiction or mental illness, which exist everywhere. Researchers have pointed out that some places with high rates of addiction have relatively little homelessness, while expensive coastal metros have a great deal. A city that cannot build is a city where the bottom of the market falls onto the sidewalk.

The fair objection: supply alone will not save renters

The strongest case against this argument comes from inside the movement, from tenant organizers and housing justice advocates who have watched new market-rate buildings arrive in their neighborhoods along with rising rents, and who suspect that "build more" is a developer's slogan in progressive clothing.

That case deserves a real answer. New market-rate housing does, in the short run, bring higher-income residents into a neighborhood, and it can change the character of blocks around it. Supply works slowly and at the scale of a region, not a block. A family facing an eviction next month gets nothing from the argument that rents will be lower in ten years if enough buildings go up.

But the research on new buildings has, if anything, moved in the supply side's favor. A number of studies in recent years have found that new market-rate buildings tend to slow rent growth in nearby older buildings rather than speed it, because the people moving into the new units would otherwise have been competing for the old ones. Economists call the chain of moves this sets off "filtering" or "migration chains." It is not instant, and it is not enough by itself, but it is real.

So the honest position holds both ideas. Build much more, everywhere, of every kind. And protect tenants while that building happens, with caps on extreme rent increases, just-cause eviction rules, legal representation in eviction court, and public and nonprofit housing that does not depend on the market at all. The mistake is treating these as rival camps. A city that protects tenants but cannot build will watch rents rise until protections cannot hold them. A city that builds but does not protect tenants will push out the people it was supposed to house.

What has started to change

California, the state that built much of this machinery, has spent the last several years dismantling parts of it, often over the objections of its own cities.

A state law known as the Housing Accountability Act, strengthened repeatedly, limits a city's power to deny projects that meet its own objective standards. A 2017 law, SB 35, created a streamlined path for projects in cities that were behind on their housing targets, and a 2023 law, SB 423, extended and expanded it. A 2022 law, AB 2011, allowed housing on many commercial sites without rezoning if the builders met labor and affordability standards. In 2025 the legislature went further, passing budget-related bills that exempted most urban infill housing from CEQA, and a separate law allowing taller and denser housing near major transit stops.

San Francisco itself, under pressure from the state's review, has adopted reforms to cut discretionary steps and speed approvals. The city's leaders, including people who once voted to delay projects, now talk about permits in terms that would have sounded heretical in 2021.

Other blue states are watching and borrowing. It is worth noticing who supplied some of the earliest votes for these reforms: a cross-party coalition of urbanist Democrats, pro-business Republicans and building-trades unions. Montana and Utah, with Republican legislatures, have passed zoning reforms of their own. The idea that homes should be legal to build is one of the rare questions in American politics that cuts across the partisan line.

Owning the problem

There is a reason to dwell on this rather than change the subject. Progressives make an argument to the country: that government can deliver, that public action can make life more affordable and fair. When the cities progressives run cannot build homes on parking lots near subway stations, that argument loses credibility with exactly the voters it needs, young people priced out of the cities they grew up in, and working families commuting two hours because the homes near their jobs were never allowed.

Owning the problem means saying out loud that some of our tools were badly designed or used for the wrong purposes. It means accepting that a building with a smaller affordable share that gets built is better than a perfect one that does not. It means setting deadlines and default approvals so that delay stops being a weapon. And it means pairing all of that with serious public investment in social and nonprofit housing, so that the abundance the market produces is matched by homes the market will never produce on its own.

That combination is not a retreat from progressive values. It is what those values require once the evidence is in.

What you can do

Permitting rules are made in city halls and state capitols, often by votes few people watch.

• Find your state legislators and ask a precise question. Look up who represents you in the statehouse and ask whether they support by-right approval for apartments that meet zoning, and deadlines for permit decisions. Specific questions get specific answers.
• Speak at the hearing that decides a building. Planning commission meetings are open to the public, and the people who show up are usually opponents. A renter or young worker saying "I would live there" changes the room.
• Track the bigger fight. The housing and homelessness topic page follows reform bills and legal fights in many states, and the affordability page connects housing costs to the rest of the household budget.
• Back the groups doing both. Search housing nonprofits in your state, and look for ones that pair tenant protection with support for new homes; they exist in most large metros and need volunteers.