California Needs More Affordable Homes. This Union Stands in the Way.

Legislative proposals to make it easier to build housing are opposed by ‘the Trades,’ which says it wants to protect construction workers

By Christine Mai-Duc of The WSJ. Excerpts: 

"California legislators proposed more than a half dozen major bills last year to address the state’s affordable-housing crisis, which researchers say is one of the worst in the nation. None of them passed.

Most died or were withdrawn, according to people involved in the processes, in large part because of campaigns waged against them by the state’s powerful construction-workers union.

California’s State Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents 450,000 ironworkers, pipe fitters and other skilled laborers, has blocked numerous bills it says don’t guarantee enough work for its members. It contributes tens of millions of dollars to political candidates and campaigns, engages in aggressive lobbying, and pays for advertisements that portray opponents as lackeys of greedy developers.

Legislative insiders say the success of the union known widely as “the Trades” is one of the main reasons Sacramento politicians have struggled to pass bills streamlining construction approval and easing zoning restrictions. Researchers say those steps are urgently needed to address skyrocketing real-estate prices and rents, as well as homelessness.

“They’re a gatekeeper for any significant legislation moving through Sacramento” on housing, said Ben Metcalf, managing director at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley and former head of the state’s Housing and Community Development agency."

"At the heart of the dispute is the Trades’ insistence that proposals to incentivize home building require certain numbers of construction workers be graduates of apprenticeship programs that are mostly union-run. Easing restrictions, they argue, makes a developer’s land more valuable and that wealth should be shared through labor protections and higher wages. They also say that the standards, known as “skilled and trained,” help combat minimum-wage abuses in the construction industry."

"Builders say apprenticeship requirements drive up the already sky-high expense of affordable-housing construction in a state where it can cost as much as $700,000 a unit to build in dense, urban areas such as San Francisco. They also argue that the union-backed provisions could slow or halt construction of affordable homes in lower-income rural and inland areas where there isn’t enough available union labor.

Housing advocates want the ability to forgo union labor on projects where a developer doesn’t get any bids that fulfill the skilled and trained requirements, or if those bids are significantly higher than the lowest alternative."

"Last May, days before a key legislative deadline, the Trades objected to about a half dozen housing bills, some of which they had previously said they wouldn’t oppose, according to legislators, staff members and advocates.

Housing advocates say they have unsuccessfully pushed for a compromise with the Trades that would allow legislation to speed construction to pass this year if it includes more union jobs."