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California lawmakers pass SB 79, housing bill that brings dense housing

238 points| mji | 5 months ago |latimes.com

127 comments

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davidw|5 months ago

It has been really amazing to see this finally come to fruition. This has been years in the making, and is real progress in starting to fix California's massive housing shortage. I know a number of the people involved in this work and they have put so much effort into it. They are going to be in a partying mood at the YIMBYTown conference taking place shortly: https://yimby.town/ !

nilsbunger|5 months ago

A Redditor created a great interactive map showing where SB 79 applies in California here: https://www.reddit.com/r/yimby/comments/1ne2q87/sb_79_intera...

avidiax|5 months ago

This really shows how limited the effect of this bill is, but it's still much better than nothing.

flomo|5 months ago

Ug. I'm a 'yimby' and a Weiner voter. But his take on San Francisco transit is just like really bad. Pokey streetcars and buses, doomed to fail. You build out there in those blue areas, and they are mostly all driving.

My take is you build it, and THEN they come. Put in some GOOD transit. Make sure the utilities are in place. Developers will then flock to the place. This whole thing is using inside-out logic. Have a real plan first.

xrd|5 months ago

This happened in Oregon a few years ago: any cities with 25k or more people had to permit greater density. I'm optimistic about housing on the West Coast for the first time in a long, long time. This will transform things in a big way.

davidw|5 months ago

Oregon - thanks to governor Tina Kotek - pushed those reforms further this year:

https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2025/07/29/gov-kotek-sign...

I got to play a small part in that, going to Salem to say my piece in favor:

https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2025/03/04/oregon-gov-kot...

She liked my hoodie!

https://bsky.app/profile/tinakotek.bsky.social/post/3lkea36k...

That said, what her bills have accomplished is a bit different than CA: rather than larger buildings close to transit, we legalized 4-plexes and a variety of other housing types that use land more efficiently, throughout cities.

danans|5 months ago

Credit to State Senator Senator Scott Wiener (SF) who has been the primary champion of this and other related legislation.

Hilift|5 months ago

"Bring dense housing" misses the plot. It prevents 50% of all development projects (in recent years) from being thwarted for no reason under the veil of environment laws. Some municipalities also had requirements to "get your neighbors approval", which resulted in bizarre interactions where residents would actually ask developers for things that cost millions of dollars. "Can you build a ground floor office for my dentist husband"? (Actual question).

For those wondering, 80% of Palisades/Eaton fire residents will not rebuild and will sell. The process will take over three years and is frustrating even with the new legislation. This could result in some interesting multi-tenant developments in those areas.

username135|5 months ago

Not many transit stops in either of those areas.

modeless|5 months ago

Seems like cities will fight transit much harder than before. Add it to the pile of unintended consequences, growing as fast as new legislation is passed, and never shrinking.

To be clear, I'm strongly in favor of more development. But when we solve the problems of bad legislation by adding more legislation instead of removing legislation, we are just kicking the can down the road.

m463|5 months ago

I kind of wonder if this can be gamed, by closing train stations or moving bus stops, or bus lines.

ehnto|5 months ago

edit: I should preface, I am very pro dense housing.

Probably, but there is a lot of money on the table for developers and so I think capitalism will be aligned with denser housing for a bit of time. Developers with deep pockets aren't interested in maintaining property values for single family homes, they will want to buy up land cheap and build station/commercial complexes for dense housing to build up around.

That's my view anyway. The upside of dense living is the affordability for individuals, one of the downsides is that it can favour big corporate developers. Shared ownership structures are really important to help mitigate that for residential developments.

In a society that works together this can be symbiotic, and really efficient way to build. For a country that lets the rich eat the poor, there is potential for exploitive scenarios to arise without the right regulation in place.

gs17|5 months ago

There's another way it will be gamed without having to close or move anything:

> (e) “High-frequency commuter rail” means a commuter rail service operating a total of at least 48 trains per day across both directions, > (r) “Very high frequency commuter rail” means a commuter rail service with a total of at least 72 trains per day across both directions

I bet some schedules will be changed to fall below these requirements.

y-curious|5 months ago

I don't see anyone talking about it in the comments: Marin, the wealthy exurb north of SF, has always had a laughably aggressive hate towards public transit. I wonder if this was something they saw coming, as they are completely unaffected by this bill.

aurareturn|5 months ago

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yahway|5 months ago

The problem with ant zoning laws is that they pick winners and losers. They need abolished state-wide to ever have a true affect. Otherwise, these limited pockets get bought up by investors and again, are limited to tiny areas. Abolish it state wide and people will over build and then true affordability will return.

davidw|5 months ago

This bill barely passed (they got a majority +1, which they needed to pass) so a further reaching bill might have been difficult to sell.

The LA area in particular, has some really bad elected officials in terms of housing.

wongarsu|5 months ago

The optimistic view is that a lot of small spots of dense housing exposes more people to it, which in time could lead to more people being in favor of zoning additional land for dense housing

energy123|5 months ago

Correct, given that housing in one location is significantly fungible with housing in another location, barring some economic frictions. The total stock (both state-wide and nation-wide) is the metric that needs to be increased.

peterbecich|5 months ago

Is "ant" antiquated? Zoning is a good thing. If you abolished all zoning, construction would be completely disorganized as it was in the California Gold Rush.

ggm|5 months ago

... near transit hubs.

It should be a net positive if it doesn't die in the courts for every single proposal.

It's also not enough by itself but Rome wasn't built in a day.

nilsbunger|5 months ago

This law (and other recent CA YIMBY laws) don't create much surface area to sue or slow a project:

* The approvals are designed to be "ministerial", meaning there is no discretion on whether to approve or not. If the project meets the objective criteria spelled out in the law, it must be approved.

* If the city doesn't approve in a limited time window, it's deemed "approved" by default.

* Ministerial approval protects the project from CEQA lawsuits. CEQA requires the government to consider the environment when making decisions. When the approval is ministerial, the government doesn't make any decisions, so there is no CEQA process to sue against.

Analemma_|5 months ago

SB 79 is just the latest in a long sequence of pro-housing bills to get passed in California in the last 5-6 years. I’d rather them do one or two small winnable battles per year than bet it all on a giant do-everything bill which might galvanize more opposition.

Frankly, this strategy seems to be a good one considering what a winning streak CA YIMBYs have been on.

mayneack|5 months ago

With the CEQA reform from a couple months ago, those court cases should be lessened a bit.

TulliusCicero|5 months ago

California spent decades digging this hole and it's gonna take decades to dig themselves out, even with bills like these.

But that's still better than refusing to fix the problem.

klooney|5 months ago

There may never be another transit hub built

jimt1234|5 months ago

> ... near transit hubs.

I don't understand this narrative that California has been pushing the last few years - basically, "There's a bus stop in the neighborhood, therefore we can add a bunch of new housing without doing any other infrastructure upgrades." I just don't see it. What I do see after new housing is added is insufferable traffic and no parking - and empty buses.

smeeger|5 months ago

there will be cases of cities resisting this by dragging their feet and it will be interesting to see. if a city wants to make it really expensive or dangerous to develop this opportunity then they certainly can. zoning is not the only consideration. and there are other things that elevate the cost of development like overbearing safety and accessibility regulations that are nation-wide. still, if this bill adds hundreds of thousands of units that will take a pretty meaningful bite out of the total shortage

mutator|5 months ago

The discourse around high density housing does not make it clear what specific type of development do advocates prefer. Its likely that the market will have to decide for itself, but if we end up with an abundance of just 1/2 bedroom rental apartments, targeted towards transient younger people, I fear it's just going to enrich the property management class, and families with kids/older parents looking for larger places and hoping to establish roots are still going to stuck fighting the pricing/supply wars.

lalaland1125|5 months ago

I think you are incorrectly missing that many larger units (both 3+ bedroom apartments and houses) are currently filled with singles or couples with roommates who would rather live alone in 1 or 2 bedrooms, but can't due to inadequate supply.

Building 1/2 bedrooms would help those people move out, freeing up larger units for families.

> I fear it's just going to enrich the property management class

The property management class benefits most from the current system with no construction and high rents. Building a bunch of 1/2 bedrooms, triggering lower rents, would cause them to lose money.

rs186|5 months ago

I'll choose tall apartments with 1/2 bedroom rental units over nothing every day.

The only people who don't like to see "young people" paying $2500 in rent instead of $3500 for a 400sqft studio are landlords.

nilsbunger|5 months ago

The economics of 3BR family units are typically hard for developers to make money on. Bobby Fijan (https://x.com/bobbyfijan) is an example of a developer who is a vocal advocate of family-centric apartments and townhomes. His projects look amazing. He also talks about the challenges creating family housing.

epistasis|5 months ago

You don't think that younger people need housing too?

How about all the empty nesters that are sitting on 4 bedroom homes but are unwilling to move. Are you going to propose legislation to make them?

Will you propose legislation to specially encourage more multi bedroom homes?

The attitude of "this doesn't benefit a narrow band of people that I want to benefit, therefore it must be stopped" is why California is in such a housing mess right now.

summerlight|5 months ago

Unless we see unexpected side effects (like a lower number of housing or even more housing demands due to SB 79) I guess this will indirectly help the buyers looking for larger properties since so many people have no choice but purchasing a unnecessarily spacious house thanks to inflexible zoning.

energy123|5 months ago

Anything larger gets smeared as a "luxury apartment". There is no winning. Build, build, build, build. Public housing AND private housing. Just build. That's it.

eclipticplane|5 months ago

> but if we end up with an abundance of just 1/2 bedroom rental apartments

That's still a massive win. To replace 10 single family homes supporting 2-3 people each with a 9 story building supporting many multiples of that is a win for society.

If the people chasing 3 and 4 bedroom apartments accepted smaller rooms, they could still be economical vs studio/1/2 BR apartments and condos.

terribleperson|5 months ago

An abundance of 1/2 bedroom rental apartments would reduce the price of larger places, because there would be lower demand.

atcon|5 months ago

SB79 was “meant to address two crises at once: The state’s long-term housing shortage and the financial precarity of its public transit agencies.”[a] The 3rd crisis is the enormous budgetary deficits the state and cities are also facing: San Diego has a $300m deficit, SF $728m, LA $1b, CA $45b. One suspects the 2nd and 3rd crises are the intended targets.

But it’s unclear how SB79 would fix transit’s fiscal cliffs. The SF BART system is facing a 2026 cliff and ascribes its steep revenue declines to high work from home rates and a struggling downtown area [c] The SD MTS system has a 2028 cliff LA Metro uses sales tax increases (measures M and R) to fund 50% of its budget (fare revenue funds only 1%), yet it still faces a 2030 cliff. RTO remains deeply unpopular and downtown commercial real estate has seen steep losses [d] However, SB79 does allow transit agencies to develop and acquire land adjacent to transit stops as an additional revenue source [e]

SB79 supporters seemed to be focused on lowering multifamily rental prices, but again it’s unclear how SB79 would accomplish this, since it still depends on market incentives to add multifamily units. Banks or investors won’t loan money to developers unless the net operating income (rent) is high enough to justify investment. The other factor is interest rates, but SB79 can’t change that. Many existing multifamily properties struggle to break even and now have the highest loan delinquency rate after offices [e] Manville points out new multifamily supply is constrained by recent “mansion taxes” (eg 2023 ULA measure in LA, 2020 Prop 1 in SF)[f]. Also, SB79 reserves only 10% of a multifamily building to low income and allows market rate rents in the other units.

SB79 would give even more leverage to institutional investors and developers over municipalities and communities. Their concerns are valid (eg zoning and development plans balanced over decades, gentrification, eminent domain, etc.) and shouldn’t be dismissed automatically as collateral damage in an attempt to drive down rental prices. One housing coalition estimates 2/3 of multifamily units in LA are owned by investment vehicles which historically have shown higher annual rent increases and eviction rates than local operators [g]

[a] <https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/09/neighborhood-transit-...> [b] SF <https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/30/san-francisco-budget-screw...> LA <https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/03/california-bails-l...> CA <https://apnews.com/article/california-budget-deficit-18ff9c1...> [c] <https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2025-01/FiscalCliff...> [d] <https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/business/stressed-sf-commerc...> [e] <https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/sb79-heads-for-n...> [f] <https://www.trepp.com/trepptalk/cmbs-delinquency-rate-increa...> [g] <https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/the-consequences-of-meas...> [h] <https://knock-la.com/los-angeles-rental-speculation-4022d16a...>

Schnitz|5 months ago

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lalaland1125|5 months ago

What middle class SFHs? There are no middle class SFH neighborhoods remaining in Los Angeles or the Bay Area. Take a look at Zillow. Your average young person isn't buying anything anyways.

Your information is at least two decades, maybe three, out of date.

But this bill will help lower rents, which is a very worthy goal in and of itself.

platevoltage|5 months ago

Oh no! the thing thats already happening might happen some more!

epistasis|5 months ago

Those SFH are already rentals, from small landlords that bought a second, then a third, then a fourth home.

The ship has already sailed on the redistribution, because 1) California created an artificial housing shortage from regulatory capture by home owners, and 2) condo defect law differs so much from SFH defect law that it's almost always insane to sell condos instead of renting apartments.

This is not the doing of SB 79, this was Boomers deciding to milk future generations and prevent them from having the same easy opportunity that they enjoyed.

ezfe|5 months ago

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FilosofumRex|5 months ago

It's joke... MA has had an affordable housing law (chapter 40B)for over 50 years. when it was passed housing affordability was a rising problem, today it's a crisis!

Politicians are bound to the interests of property owners not those who can't afford it. Besides high density bring high crimes, and high concentrated poverty

kstrauser|5 months ago

When I think concentrated poverty and crime, I definitely picture Manhattan and Tokyo.

ec109685|5 months ago

In addition to condos next to transit, California should be fixing roads, so people can move further from their job.

I know it’s unpopular nimby opinion but hoping people in these homes won’t be driving cars is misguided. Give them parking, fix roads for further commute and let people live where they want.

Save money by reducing regulations on elevator size, allow for single egress buildings and ensure we aren’t kowtowing to labor too much.

Future Waymo like technology makes driving your own car even less stressful and furthers the gap between public transit and cars.

“ California Senate Bill (SB) 79 reduces or eliminates parking minimums for new residential developments located near Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) stops”

stouset|5 months ago

More roads just does not scale. Look at LA. Look at San Francisco. More capacity isn’t just going to magically appear.

Waymo is only going to increase overall utilization by reducing the marginal cost of running a car. They aren’t magic traffic-solving devices, they are traffic-adding like DoorDash and Uber have been.

1659447091|5 months ago

> furthers the gap between public transit and cars.

It doesn't have to. If Waymo (and other autonomous taxis) were clever -- and maybe they are -- they would spend their lobbing money on high speed trains and then capture the "last mile" market.

Some years ago I was riding with a friend north on the 15 (San Diego, after a decade+ absences) and my noticeable wtf face prompted a "yeah, they built a freeway in the center of the freeway". It's an abomination. When I was there, I-15 was generally for the longer drives. My friends that lived in Temecula/North County etc would spend hours of their life driving (or slowly rolling) into SD for school/work/play.

A high speed train would have fit where they put the supplemental freeway. Now there is no more room to expand once they need more capacity; extra trains or cars could be added to a train to solve the same thing and placed along the freeway there is minimal to no neighborhood inconvenience. Then companies like waymo can take people to their final destination.

rconti|5 months ago

People who pay a premium to live in a condo close to transit will almost certainly have vastly lower VMT than people who live in a SFH in a non-walkable area. Do they need more roads than the handful of houses that condo building replaced? Sure, so I can't disagree with you there. But they're all going to have massive underground garages, so a spot per unit on average is probably plenty.

mayneack|5 months ago

People who want to live in less dense houses farther from the city can already do that!

baron816|5 months ago

Robotaxis are good, but everyone owning a driverless car is bad.

Imagine you get to your destination, there’s no parking (or no free parking), so you tell your car to just circle the block while you’re inside. You spend an hour there at the tanning salon, and the car has just been circling, using the street as a parking lot and creating congestion. What happens when everyone does that?

I’m a big proponent of driverless cars, but we will need laws that ban individual private ownership. We’re going to have to experience the tragedy of the commons first because people really won’t want to give up their cars.

TinkersW|5 months ago

Nine stories anywhere in the state near a bus stop seems abit much, most small towns don't have anything over 2 or 3 stories(nor do they have a housing shortage).

CA lawmakers seem to pass laws focused on cities, and ignore the fact that maybe this isn't such a good idea in smaller towns & rural areas.

nilsbunger|5 months ago

I don't think we're going to see much of that:

* The projects won't be profitable in smaller towns, because rents aren't high enough to recoup the cost.

* Tall buildings cost MORE per square foot than short buildings, so tall buildings only get built where land costs are very high.

* This law's top density (7-8 floors I think?) only applies in a narrow window (0.25 to 0.5 miles) around major transit stops with LOTS of service, like < 15 minute bus intervals with dedicated BRT lanes, or trains with > 48 arrivals per day each way. Small towns don't have that kind of infrastructure.

* The law only applies in cities with > 35,000 people.

cortesoft|5 months ago

No one is going to build a 9 story building in a small town or rural area, it wouldn’t make any economic sense. Only places where land is valuable and scarce are economically viable for a 9 story building.

Rebelgecko|5 months ago

9 stories buildings are only for areas with heavy rail.

It's a lower limit for bus stops, and my understanding is that bus stations only count if they have dedicated bus lanes, <15 minute headways, and meet some other requirements. I've never seen dedicated bus lanes in a rural area (which are basically exempt for the law for other reasons) and you're lucky if your headways are under an hour lol

nullc|5 months ago

I don't believe it applies in any smaller towns or rural areas, the area has to cross some threshold.

If not for that the headline we might see in the news: California towns rip out transit systems. Already this might create some weird incentives to oppose transit expansions.

platevoltage|5 months ago

What developer is going to throw up a residential high-rise outside of Bakersfield?

epistasis|5 months ago

You are spreading basic misinformation, please read the article so that you do not continue to do more of it.