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A building set to have 40 apartment units with four retail stores is under construction at the intersection of Wilshire and 6th Street in Santa Monica. May 24, 2023. Photo by Zaydee Sanchez for CalMatters

In summary

The state ordered every city and county to plan for 2.5 million new homes by 2030. With the exception of just five jurisdictions, no one is on track to hit their numbers.

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Every eight years, state housing regulators give cities and counties across California an especially dreaded homework assignment: Make a plan for a bunch of new homes.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration assigns localities goals to hit at four different affordability levels. Collectively, the numbers represent the housing department’s best estimate of the number of new homes needed to match any expected population growth and to chip away at the state’s decades-in-the-making shortage of affordable places to live.

With these targets meted out to each region on a rolling basis, this summer, a massive chunk of the state, including all of Southern California, passed its halfway mark.

So in the spirit of a mid-term exam, how are cities and counties doing?

Bad news, California. If this were graded, the state would abound in D’s and F’s.

Less than a third of cities and counties are on track to permit enough “above moderate” units, the category that typically refers to market-rate housing, according to data submitted by locals to the state housing department.

The progress report for more affordable types of housing is even bleaker. Only 32 jurisdictions — less than 6% — are on track to hit their “very low” targets. That refers to housing within financial reach of anyone earning less than half the typical local income.

After years of nudging, political trolling and litigating, most cities and counties now have state-approved plans in place. But as the production numbers show, it’s one thing to plan and another to build. Almost nowhere in the state is actually seeing the new construction necessary “to meet the housing needs of all Californians,” as housing regulators have described these targets.

Only five jurisdictions in the entire state are permitting at a pace to hit all four income targets. Four are the lightly populated unincorporated bits of small, mostly rural counties: Plumas, Napa, Yolo and Mono. The fifth is Placerville, a town of roughly 11,000 people in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento.

To be “on track,” a city or county needs to issue permits at a clip that, if sustained, would allow it to hit its state targets by the end of its planning cycle. State housing regulators told the city of Irvine in Orange County, for example, to plan for 8,671 market-rate units by 2030. Now halfway there, the city has issued more than 6,000, making it one of the minority of cities to be on pace to reach its target for above-moderate housing.

But for more affordable digs, Irvine, like most California cities, is far behind. The city has permitted just 9% of the very low-income housing needed to reach its target by the end of the decade. For the next most affordable category, which refers to units priced for those earning up to 80% of the regional median, it’s at a mere 3%.

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What’s the housing hold up?

For anyone who has been monitoring the pace of new residential development in California over the last half century, the disconnect between housing planned and housing permitted won’t come as a surprise. The state’s total planning target adds up to nearly 2.5 million units over eight years, a reduction of the even more ambitious 3.5 million target Newsom set for his administration during his 2017 election. That 2.5 million figure works out to 312,500 new homes per year. Even during the state’s boomingest boom years in the early 1960s and mid-1980s, construction figures never reached such lofty heights.

This decade, despite a blizzard of state legislation and policy changes aimed at boosting the construction of new homes, the number of new homes built annually is still just north of 100,000.

Critics of the state’s planning process have long stressed that California’s targets are unrealistic and that local governments can...