The Shortcut Still Needs An Address

California has reached a very California disagreement: people who want more housing are arguing about a proposal to build more housing. Before anyone declares the entire state a failed group project, the argument contains a useful question. Where?

CalMatters reports that pro-housing groups are divided over Proposition 45. It would accelerate environmental review and litigation for housing and other essential projects, while retaining review. Critics worry about sprawl; supporters include affordable-housing developers frustrated by costly delays. Several major YIMBY groups are neutral. Existing urban-housing exemptions also have limits.

A faster approval process can be valuable. It still needs an address. Otherwise, the political sales pitch starts to resemble a navigation app that offers only one instruction: accelerate.

There is a difference between clearing an obstruction and deciding where the road should go. The word housing does a heroic amount of work when every project can shelter beneath it, whether the resulting home puts daily life nearby or adds a long drive to the monthly bill. A cheaper home can become an expensive way to buy a commute.

But delay has a price, too. CalMatters recounts an affordable-housing project whose environmental challengers lost in court after two years had passed. Nobody can move into the favorable language of a judicial opinion. It has terrible plumbing.

That is why the easy caricatures are so useless. The people asking where homes belong should have to explain how homes will actually get built. The people promising faster construction should have to explain what gets faster, for whom, and what remains protected. The answer cannot just be another brochure in which every new roof has somehow also solved transportation, affordability and the climate.

A tenant needs a home, not a lifetime appointment to a stakeholder meeting. That urgency deserves more respect than turning it into a sales coupon redeemable for any development somebody already wanted.

The ballot measure remains a proposal for voters to decide. Speed is one part of that decision. Location and consequences deserve room on the sign.

Before everybody floors it, show us where the keys work.