Rep. Robert Garcia plans to start pro-housing caucus to address national housing shortage
The YIMBY group would look at adjusting tax incentives, parking requirements and zoning regulations to encourage housing production.
Long Beach, like many other cities in California and across the country, is facing a housing crisis that is largely due to not building enough new homes. Most cities have lagged behind for decades, leaving a deficit that will require building thousands of new homes.
And although a supply oriented approach to the problem has been controversial in some places, cities are seeing results when it is implemented. In Minneapolis and Austin, rents fell after local governments ushered in new rules allowing the construction of more apartments.
Now, Rep. Robert Garcia, who represents much of Long Beach in Congress, plans to launch a pro-housing YIMBY (yes in my backyard) caucus in the next few weeks to try to tackle the issue at a federal level.
“I’m starting this because I’m a YIMBY myself,” Garcia said in an interview Thursday, adding that the national push for more housing is part of the reason as well.
As cities around the country deal with what is now a nationwide housing crisis, more people are looking at ways to expand supply to ease the burden of housing costs, including the White House.
Vice President and presidential nominee Kamala Harris has pledged to build 3 million new homes if she wins the election in November. And Garcia's pro-housing caucus could help take on some of the toughest issues, he said.
“The fact that you have a presidential candidate setting out a goal and a number of homes to build, I think it's really substantial and I think the caucasus can help in a bipartisan way,” Garcia said.
Garcia pointed to his People Over Parking Act, which aims to ban minimum requirements for parking in some transit-friendly areas, as a policy the caucus could help push through Congress.
Parking mandates raise the cost of housing construction and removing these requirements could help create walkable, multimodal cities, he said.
“The most important thing is to meet the housing moment that is now being discussed," Garcia said. “And the moment requires a lot more building.”
The caucus would, hopefully, be bipartisan, as he said both Democrats and Republicans can agree on issues like cutting regulation and encouraging economic growth. And while he can’t release names yet, he said there are already 10 representatives interested in being a part of the pro-housing group.
His experience as mayor of Long Beach from 2014 to 2022 is part of why Garcia wants to form the caucus. He said he faced obstacles in getting the City Council to approve more housing in the 2019 Land Use Element that updated zoning for several parts of Long Beach.
“When we were doing the last citywide upzoning when I was mayor, we pushed really hard to get a lot of density passed,” he said. “It should have gone further, in my opinion, but it is what it is.”
That plan did establish the Downtown Plan, which yielded several thousand new units Downtown, and the Southeast Area Specific Plan with a couple thousand more in the pipeline.
Those two plans have led to a sustained bump in permitting from the city, according to housingdata.app, which tracks how many homes cities around the country approve each year.
But it has still been more than 20 years since Long Beach outpaced Los Angeles or San Francisco in per-capita housing permitting.
After decades of under-building, it will take a lot more than this small bump to build out of the housing crisis and Garcia thinks leadership from the top could help.
Tax incentives for cities and states, addressing parking issues and updating zoning regulations to encourage more homes are among the things the YIMBY caucus could tackle, he said.
"I think I was a pro-housing mayor and I pushed the City Council as far as I could," Garcia said. "And you're seeing all of this housing being built because of it."
Now, in Washington D.C., he wants to be a leader of the pro-housing movement nationwide, and help provide cities with the tools they need to meet this challenge.
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