This is California Housing Today Top Five Today, for Thursday, April 23, 2026. We’re bringing you the biggest stories on pro-growth policy, housing, transit, and economic development in California.
Yeah, and today’s basically big-city ambition running straight into small-city process headaches. That’s California in one sentence.
Let’s get into it.
From MIT Technology Review: Los Angeles is finally going underground.
Clip from MIT Technology Review on YouTube.
Good. A city this dense along Wilshire should’ve had serious subway muscle decades ago. Driving that corridor is not freedom; it’s a hostage situation.
Yeah, and that frustration is exactly why this extension matters. The engineering story is real too, but the bigger deal is Los Angeles slowly proving it can build high-capacity transit where the old excuses used to win.
And once the tunnel boring tech solved the methane problem, the only thing left was political courage and time — which California somehow makes more expensive than geology.
That’s fair. Tunneling under a major boulevard in a methane-rich zone was never going to be cheap or fast. Still, if this opens as promised and performs well, it strengthens the case for more grade-separated transit where buses alone can’t carry the load.
Next up, a classic California land-use conflict: beloved grocery store, giant parking lot, and a transit-rich neighborhood that needs more homes.
From Darwin BondGraham at The Oaklandside: Rockridge Trader Joe’s could be replaced by 415-unit senior housing towers.
The bustling Trader Joe’s grocery store in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood might, in the next few years, be transformed into a 415-unit senior housing complex.
Exactly. This is the kind of site that should go vertical. If your “neighborhood character” depends on preserving a parking lot next to transit, your character stinks.
The pro-housing case here is strong: Rockridge is affluent, transit-accessible, and badly underbuilt relative to demand. The wrinkle is that replacing a grocery store is politically combustible, especially when seniors will need nearby daily services, not just new units.
Fine — put Trader Joe’s back on the ground floor and keep building upward. We do not need to choose between cauliflower gnocchi and 415 homes.
And mixed-use is usually the cleanest answer in exactly these fights. But even if the retail comes back, towers of 25 and 30 stories in Rockridge will test whether Oakland’s political class really supports housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods, or just in theory.
From SFMTA: PRESS RELEASE - FACING FISCAL CLIFF, SFMTA BOARD APPROVES BALANCED TWO-YEAR BUDGET TO PRESERVE MUNI SERVICE AND KEEP SAN FRANCISCO MOVING.
Facing the most challenging financial crisis in its history, the SFMTA Board of Directors today unanimously approved a balanced two-year operating budget of $1.5 billion for Fiscal Year 2026-2027 and $1.6 billion for FY 2027-2028.
Balanced budget is doing a lot of emotional work there. If your transit agency is staring at a cliff, that’s not stability — that’s a temporary plank over a canyon.
Yeah, this is a stopgap more than a victory lap. But preserving core Muni service matters enormously, because once agencies cut frequency and reliability, ridership falls further and the recovery gets harder.
And San Francisco cannot keep pretending world-class transit can run on vibes, parking tickets, and occasional rescue money.
Right, the underlying issue is structural funding. If leaders want dense, low-car neighborhoods and a healthy downtown, they need a durable operating model for transit, not just episodic crisis management.
Now to high-speed rail, where Sacramento may be preparing another lifeline for the Central Valley segment.
From The Center Square, Madeline Shannon: More than $500 million of cap-and-trade money could help fund California high-speed rail.
A new bill introduced in California's legislature, Senate Bill 1411, could allow the California High-Speed Rail Authority to use over $500 million in cap-and-trade funds for the Merced to Bakersfield section of the high-speed rail.
If the state is serious about decarbonization, this is one of the least embarrassing places to spend climate money. Trains are the point, not a side quest.
That’s the strongest argument for the bill: cap-and-trade revenue should support projects that cut long-term emissions and reshape travel patterns. The criticism, of course, is that high-speed rail’s full statewide promise is still far from realized, so every additional funding stream attracts scrutiny.
Sure, but “it’s not finished yet” is a weird complaint about infrastructure. That’s like yelling at a bridge because it’s currently halfway across the river.
Fair jab. Though opponents also worry about opportunity cost and governance, not just the timeline. Even so, if lawmakers ease the $500 million cap, they’re signaling that the Merced-to-Bakersfield spine remains the state’s best shot at keeping the project moving credibly.
And finally, a quieter but important Los Angeles policy change that could alter where housing pencils out.
From Hoodline: L.A. Shrinks Fee Maps For Developers Ahead Of April Rollout.
The city has redrawn its Affordable Housing Linkage Fee market-area maps into smaller, neighborhood-based zones that will take effect on April 24, 2026.
This is the kind of wonky map tweak that can kill projects without ever making the front page. Same building, same lot, different color on a city map — suddenly the math dies.
Exactly. That’s why this matters. Linkage fees, set-asides, and density rules all interact with financing, and when cities redraw boundaries at a finer grain, they can make policy more accurate but also less predictable.
And unpredictability is poison. Developers can price a tough rule; they cannot price bureaucratic mood swings dressed up as planning precision.
Exactly — certainty is often as important as generosity. If LA wants both more housing and more affordable housing, it has to be careful that localized fee calibration doesn’t unintentionally push feasible projects back onto the shelf.
A couple of reactions worth noting after today’s five. LAist has a useful explainer on the measure heading to the ballot to overturn Los Angeles’s so-called mansion tax, which keeps the city’s transfer-tax fight alive into November. The reason it’s interesting for housing people is that this is no longer just a revenue debate — it’s become a referendum on whether transaction taxes suppress development, deals, and ultimately housing production.
And over in Bay Area discourse, the San Francisco Business Times report on billions in taxable income leaving the region sparked a lot of discussion online. The eye-catching figure was
The Bay Area lost $24 billion in adjusted gross income between 2022 and 2023.
That’s not a housing story only, but it intersects directly with affordability, business climate, office demand, and the tax base that funds transit and local services.
California’s secret talent is making rich people, then acting shocked when some of them leave and the budget gets weird.
There’s a glib version of that and a serious one. The serious version is that high-cost regions need enough housing, enough transit, and enough economic dynamism to stay competitive even after the pandemic scrambled old assumptions.
That’s the California Housing Today Top Five Today. This is a Lantern Podcast.