This might be the right move, but we should resist the urge to look for easy answers. These regulations exist so that our next generation of housing isn't a slum; urban planning has a huge impact on crime, quality-of-life, economic development, etc.

I do think that California's housing market is too restrictive, and maybe Wiener's proposal can help, but it seems that the Central Valley, specifically along the high speed rail corridor, is the prime location for housing development in California, not Wiener's SF, which is already the second-densest city in the country. I'm not enough of a real estate expert to tell you if that's already happening and people just prefer to live in the Bay Area, where California's housing market is most brutal (and where I live), or if there's some existing impediment to that kind of development.