Prop 13 is a huge distortion to tax and revenue generally, but it doesn't promote anti-development NIMBYism. If anything, Prop 13 should make denser development

Prop 13 is a huge distortion to tax and revenue generally, but it doesn't promote anti-development NIMBYism. If anything, Prop 13 should make denser development more tolerable to existing residents as otherwise denser development in their neighborhood would lead to accelerated increases in assessed land values. That's the very reason Prop 13 was enacted in the first place--to improve ownership security in the face of rapid changes in the neighborhood. The one and only fix for NIMBYism is to remove local control. Cities have every incentive to continue restrictive zoning because the immediate costs are externalized to the larger region, while the benefits--satisfaction of home owning voters who don't want multi-family dwellings in their neighborhood--inure directly to the city leaders. It's a collective action problem. Mandates don't work well because leaders who comply are voted out of office, while those who find loopholes or simply ignore mandates are favored at the polls. So when politicians complain that SB50 and similar bills remove local control, that's exactly the point. But nobody wants to say that aloud because to most people "local control" is in the abstract a good thing, and losing local control a bad thing.