Four years ago, there were reasons to hope that progress was possible in the Golden State. In 2016, then-Gov. Jerry Brown blasted his fellow Democrats’ complacent orthodoxy of responding to the housing crisis by providing heavily subsidized “affordable housing” units which cost $400,000 or more to a relative handful of families which won de facto lotteries. Brown declared that the only way to have a substantial, long-lasting remedy for the problem was through a sharp increase in privately built homes. He endorsed a “by right” measure in which housing projects that met basic conditions could not be blocked by local officials…