Maybe you haven't looked into how these laws work, but they are handouts to developers because they guarantee that a developer can buy one house and put up 10 units (in CA, for example) without any opposition or time-consuming permitting process. So when an elderly person with out-of-state children dies, those children are going to sell to the quickest and most-secure bidder... a developer with a cash offer.

And you make a lot of unsupported assumptions about commercial areas all being contaminated. It's absurd. Commercial areas are rapidly redeveloped all the time. I've seen condos go up on the site of an auto-paint shop in a matter of months, even in CA.

Then there are the shams regarding "mass transit corridors," used to excuse even more concessions to developers. You know what's considered a "mass transit corridor" in CA? ONE ZIPCAR in a four-block area. ONE. And what happens when that car gets moved or destroyed? Tear down all the buildings?

And, even if it were possible to integrate groundwater management effectively while allowing massive ground coverage, it's NOT BEING DONE. It's too late; the laws are on the books. Gross omissions like these testify that these laws are handouts and shams, hurriedly rushed through during holiday sessions or piggybacked onto other bills to avoid public scrutiny.

So people can petulantly downvote all they want. The fact remains that these bills and these ridiculous claims that destroying single-family-home neighborhoods will "solve the homeless crisis" are a massive rip-off that won't solve the problem.

Meanwhile, in addition to the disused properties gathering weeds in non-residential areas today, states are ignoring the biggest threat to home ownership: corporate buy-ups of entire neighborhoods. It's well-documented that home ownership is the best way to build wealth, but the scourge of corporate home-hoarding is putting homes PERMANENTLY out of reach for millions more Americans every year. Yet it's ignored by politicians.

Gee, I wonder why.