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The Omnibus to Nowhere.The Omnibus to Nowhere Here’s a bit of tactical advice: If you want to overhaul your local or state approach to housing policy, try doing it one piece at a time.That’s a consensus that’s starting to emerge from a network of advocacy groups that have fought for housing policy reforms in state legislatures and city halls over the last several years.State legislatures, and to a lesser extent city councils, often like to advance their policy goals through omnibus bills — big packages of related provisions that address a topic or group of topics from different angles.An extreme version of this approach is the so-called “big ugly” in Albany, where New York State lawmakers often pass a massive late-spring bill with dozens of unrelated policies and a duct-taped-together voting bloc.A much more common practice is single-topic omnibus bills, in which a legislator or group of legislators intentionally builds a package of policies.That allows them to take a big swing at a social problem, like the high cost of housing, and draw in support from advocates and special interest groups along the way.But in state after state in recent years, advocates have found that omnibus housing bills are often too big to succeed.California state Sen.Scott Wiener, the YIMBY standard-bearer in state politics who is now running for Congress as a Democrat, noticed it early on.Early in his state legislative career, Wiener sought to promote greater housing density through a series of big bills with lots of provisions, like SB50 in 2019, which generated a huge controversy and failed to pass.In ensuing years, Wiener and his allies passed many of the components of their early policy packages as one-off bills with broad support.They helped set the stage for SB79, a broad-based transit-oriented development bill that passed last year.Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, watched the state legislature reject a big package of housing policies he supported in 2023, only to come back the next year and pass modified versions of many of its separate provisions.Colorado state Sen.Chris Hansen told Governing at the time that breaking the package into a series of bills “helped us put the right focus on each policy.” New York Gov.Kathy Hochul’s ambitious Housing Compact fell flat in 2023, but the state legislature has continued to advance individual housing policies, including a bill passed this year to expedite environmental review for new construction projects.Idaho’s state legislature recently passed a handful of housing policy reforms, while letting a few bills fall by the wayside — proposals that likely would have prevented anything from moving forward if they’d all been packaged together.“When people compare notes across our network they generally come to the conclusion that it’s un-strategic to run an omnibus bill,” says Henry Honorof, director of Welcoming Neighbors Network, a coalition of advocacy groups.Part of the reason is that big packages of policies related to technical land-use rules are hard to understand.When lawmakers are under time pressure to vote on bills with consequences that can’t fully foresee, their impulse is to vote no.Single-policy bills are easier to digest.There are drawbacks to the piecemeal approach.Most obviously, it makes it easier for lawmakers to vote against the most ambitious aspects of a housing agenda while still supporting incremental changes.Colorado’s state legislature still has not passed bills that would allow smaller property subdivisions or prevent cities from imposing large minimum lot sizes.Bills to address similar policies also failed this year in Idaho even as other measures moved forward.It can limit the ambitions of a policy agenda.But something is going to “take the arrows” in any legislative session, Honorof says.And bill numbers themselves often become toxic, focusing opposition on a specific piece of legislation and making it easy for legislators to vote against it.When that bill contains the whole agenda, then the agenda is kaput.“With piecemeal bills,” Honorof says, “you just abandon the bill that becomes toxic.” L.A.’s Mayoral Race is Now a Democratic Primary The contest for mayor of Los Angeles has gone to some unexpected places in the last few months.With incumbent Mayor Karen Bass’s popularity dropping since the L.A.wildfires in early 2025, a field of challengers emerged to try to knock her out of office.One of them was Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star who initially seemed to stand little chance as a Republican of gaining traction in Democratic-leaning L.A.Over the course of the campaign, Pratt, who lost his home in the fires, gained steam with critiques of Bass’s performance.On election night last week and in the days after, as ballots were still being counted, Pratt appeared to be in second place behind Bass, setting up a head-to-head in the fall.But ballots continued trickling in, and Nithya Raman, a progressive city councilmember who entered the mayoral race at the last minute, was declared the second-place finisher.She’ll face Bass in the fall, even as President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders suggest, without any basis, that Pratt lost because of election fraud.Raman is a left-leaning politician who received the endorsement of the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter in her earlier races and has promoted progressive and tenant-friendly policies on the city council.But her critique of Bass, whom she had endorsed before deciding to challenge her, is not that Bass isn’t left-wing enough.It’s that she has mismanaged the city, including the response to the wildfires and public finances.That could set up a finely textured, left-versus-left debate about the inner workings of local government.Or maybe not.In her first comment about Raman after she was declared the second-place finisher, Bass tacked to the right, or at least to the center.She called Raman “an opponent who allows encampments near schools and fights against hiring more cops,” tacitly conceding the left lane in the general election campaign.It’s a line of attack that Pratt likely would have used against Bass if he’d secured a place in the runoff.Raman is framing her campaign as a fight for a more affordable city and against “pay-to-play politics” and a “broken status quo.” She has already drawn and will continue to draw comparisons to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose first few months in office have become a touchstone in urban politics around the country.Bass’s low favorability rating is more or less locked in place, says Mike Bonin, director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State LA.About 57 percent of voters view her unfavorably, according to a late-May poll.But Raman’s rosier numbers — 40 percent view her favorably to 35 percent unfavorably, according to the poll — could go up or down based on how the campaign unfolds.“A lot of voters have a very negative opinion of the mayor,” Bonin says.“When it’s an either/or race, I think the challenge for Raman is she has to not just critique the mayor, she has to offer her alternative vision of Los Angeles.The primary really did not feature the candidates defining a vision of L.A.very well or talking about what they wanted to do.” Bass and Raman have different approaches to housing, one of the toughest challenges facing the city.Raman was backed by YIMBY groups and wants to promote more housing construction, while Bass joined most of the L.A.City Council in opposing a state law that would have done just that.Their differences on such issues could make for an enlightening campaign season, says Bonin, who also served as a progressive Democrat on the city council.But he says it’s shaping up to be a generic center-left vs.left-left slugfest.“There are few things as unseemly and as unproductive as a Democrat-on-Democrat contest,” he says.A Rideshare Tax Dies in Philly Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker lost a battle with th