Maybe California Deserves Nice Things: SB 79 Recap Pt. I

SB 79, the state’s biggest pro-housing bill to date, heads to Governor Newsom’s desk

Let’s fucking gooooooooooooooo!

Passing major housing laws is easy in California. All it takes is three tries over eight years; more than 100 amendments across a legislative session; thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of constituent phone calls; and a concerted months-long push from dozens of organizations, both professional- and volunteer-led, across the state.¹

Such was the fate of SB 79 (Wiener), a bill passed by the state legislature yesterday that will allow 4-7 story buildings within a half mile of major transit stops if signed into law by Governor Newsom. Though the bill still awaits the Governor’s signature—it was only sent to his desk yesterday, after all—I already feel like my team just won a sports ball game, but I actually played a small part in winning and the stakes matter. Millions of current and future Californians will benefit from the homes this bill* will produce.²

With SB 79’s passage, California’s YIMBY movement achieves a historic victory, the apotheosis of a decade of rapid expansion and laser focus on building a strong pro-housing movement. Yet housing advocates remain far from ascendant, and the state’s housing shortage remains far from solved.

This is the first of three posts exploring what SB 79’s journey says about California’s broader housing movement and state politics. Today’s article focuses on what it took to pass SB 79 and why it’s such a huge accomplishment; the next will look at the limitations of the bill and what California can learn from other states; and a final post will dig into the ideological blob that still underlies NIMBYism, the biggest internal threat to California’s long-term success.

God is Change

To start, housing abundance remains controversial among the state’s political leaders and advocates.

SB 79 survived the legislative process by the narrowest of margins. It made it through the state Senate by a single vote, rolling multiple committee chairs to even make it to the floor in the first place.³ It also survived the state Assembly by a single vote, though it had friendlier chairs in committees there. The bill’s narrow passage largely depended on the author’s willingness to accept amendments, more than 100 of them by the end of the session.

Those amendments include changes that reveal the ongoing fractured nature of California’s housing politics.

Most dramatically, the bill had to carve out some counties to get enough votes, a common trade-off in big state housing laws around the country. SB 79 will now apply to only eight “transit-rich” counties, areas with fifteen or more high-frequency transit stops: San Francisco, Santa Clara, Alameda, San Mateo, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego Counties. These exclude some high-income transit oriented areas, such as Marin County (home of Gavin Newsom) and Contra Costa County, my home County.

The exceptions reflect the brutality of politics. Some of Contra Costa’s jurisdictions lobbied aggressively against the bill, swaying several key votes. Once bill authors dropped the county from the bill, those jurisdictions removed their opposition, winning back essential votes. The same strategy played out in other carved-out counties like San Bernardino. California’s approach echoes the Texas state legislature’s approach to passing a large statewide upzoning bill this year—which only applies to the about 20 cities, the largest jurisdictions in the largest counties in the state.⁴

Turns out overriding local zoning rules becomes more politically viable when the state leaves some areas alone.⁵

Next, two sets of amendments reflected tensions specific to the housing advocacy community. Most dramatically, the bill now excludes multi-family buildings with more than two homes. Some tenants’ rights advocates fear that allowing new housing development on existing multi-family properties will displace existing residents.

As a result, SB 79 cannot be used to replace any housing structure larger than a duplex with higher density. Instead, SB 79 primarily applies to commercial properties and single-family lots. Still a huge accomplishment, creating enough zoning change to legally allow millions of new homes (though the number actually built will be smaller).

SB 79 also added stricter low-income housing mandates, essentially requiring all new projects built using the law set aside a proportion of affordable homes for low-income tenants. Though the new requirements will be higher than those originally proposed, they will be lower than some advocates preferred.⁶

Not everyone agrees how these low-income housing mandates, called “Inclusionary Zoning” requirements, should be implemented. From an article I wrote about the debate over inclusionary zoning mandates:

On one side, supporters for inclusionary zoning argue it is an essential housing affordability strategy. Across the country, inclusionary zoning has produced hundreds of thousands of deed-restricted low-income homes, at no direct cost to the taxpayer. Inclusion is in the literal name. Who doesn’t want that?

On the other side, other housing advocates argue that inclusionary zoning has large unintended consequences which undermine its core intent. Broadly, they argue inclusionary zoning is a tax on new housing that reduces development feasibility. Because new housing—even expensive new market-rate housing—drives down overall rents, inclusionary zoning ultimately counteracts its own goals.

Lastly, the bill now includes a union labor requirement for any project built pursuant to SB 79 over 85 feet. Shorter projects, which have less financial flexibility, have no such requirements.

These amendment won the support of the California Conference of Carpenters, the state’s largest construction union, and United Here, another large construction union; it also swung the Building and Construction Trades, a coalition of other construction unions, from opposition to neutral.

Regardless of your particular feelings about SB 79’s many amendments (I’m personally pretty sad that my home county was exempted entirely), they won over key legislators to support the bill.

North vs South

Different parts of the state responded differently to all these amendments. For reasons not totally clear to me, Northern Californian Assembly Democrats and Republicans both are much more likely to support housing reform than those in SoCal (in California’s Assembly, bills need 41 votes to pass, a simple majority of all spots in the legislature, so abstentions are functionally the same as “no” votes).

Source from which I saw this.

The North-South divide illustrates just how far California’s most populous region—L.A.—needs to go on housing. For all their flaws, the Bay Area and Sacramento regions have made more progress on real reform locally, and they’re more inclined to support state intervention too. L.A.’s leaders seem much less cognizant of how desperately California’s housing shortage threatens our future political influence for a generation.

Why the split? A geographical determinist might hypothesize that these regions already had more compact urban forms on average, so they are more inclined toward urban housing development by default. Maybe Hollywood has fried most legislators’ brains down South.

Those factors could have played a part, but culture often arises spontaneously and propagates for unclear reasons, so the Bay Area may simply be more inclined toward housing because of good vibes.

Building Power Over Time

SB 79 represents eight years of housing advocacy efforts to pass meaningful transit-oriented housing reforms. California has tried similar reforms before with different bill numbers, but those failed. To shamelessly rip from a newsletter alert sent by California YIMBY’s Comms Director Matthew Lewis:

“In 2018 California YIMBY sponsored our very first bill, SB 827, which would have made it easier to build homes near transit stops. That bill died in its first committee vote.

In 2019 we came back with SB 50, which also would have legalized homes near public transit. That bill got further, making it to the Senate floor, but ran out of time before the Senate could take a vote.

Since then we've incorporated elements of SB 50 into bills that did become law [including laws like AB 2097, ending parking minimums within a half mile of transit stops]. But we still needed to do the basic work of making it easier to build homes near our train and major bus stations.”

By the end of its journey, SB 79 had united most of the housing movement. Not only the YIMBYs, but most low-income housing advocacy organizations, the business community writ large, and the Carpenters Union came on in support. Many tenants’ rights organizations that had previously opposed the bill for fear of displacement moved to neutral, as did the State Building and Construction Trades.

SB 79 won’t solve California’s housing crisis overnight, but it proves that ambitious reform is possible—and that years of organizing, bridge-building, and persistence can break through the status quo. For the first time, the state has opened the door to millions of new homes near the transit lines where people most need them. This victory shows what’s possible when housing advocates, labor, and community groups work together.

The fight for more homes isn’t over. Gavin Newsom, who has long been a champion for housing, still needs to sign SB 79.⁷ Longer term, many of California’s neighborhoods remain off-limits to the homes people need, and SB 79 will benefit from further cleanup.

But the passage of SB 79 shows the tide is turning. The era of housing scarcity doesn’t have to define California’s future. An era of housing abundance can.

1. SB 79’s passage also depended on a foundational decade of movement-building that cost tens of millions of dollars to hire professional organizers throughout the state and countless hours of volunteer time.

2. I should say, millions of current and future Californians will benefit from the housing This bill and its likely successors will produce. I hope there will be cleanup legislation and expansions in the future.

3. To “roll” a committee chair means the bill passes through that committee without the chair’s support. This is rare in California’s legislature; committee chairs have substantial influence over all the bills that pass through their committee, so they normally get their way lest they decide to retaliate by nuking uncooperative committee members’ own bills. Rolling two chairs in a row is extremely rare; no other bill survived such a gauntlet this legislative session.

4. SB 79 also decreased the radius of rezoning from 1/2 mile to 1/4 mile in cities with fewer than 35,000 people, a concession very closely mirroring Texas's approach--but also decreasing the bill's impact in some of the state's wealthiest cities.

5. For better or worse, UC David Law professor Chris Elmendorf tweeted about this a few months back. I can't find the tweets but they've stuck with me--a particularly scary prospect as a housing advocate in the suburbs

6. As originally written, SB 79 would have required new housing built using the law to include 5% very low-income or 10% low-income homes; the new standard requires 7% very low-income or 13% low-income. This is still lower than earlier state housing laws, which required new development include at least 20% low-income homes to access state streamlining.

And those requirements are still lower than some tenant-serving organizations preferred. Even after dropping their opposition, one of the state’s lead tenants’ rights advocacy organization wrote in a newsletter “However, as one coalition partner put it, we are also disappointed because the bill could have required even more affordable homes for low income families.”

7. Email the Governor's office asking for his support of SB 79 HERE (automated email template that takes 2 mins to fill out).