Posted by mji 9/13/2025
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.
* 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.
Frankly, this strategy seems to be a good one considering what a winning streak CA YIMBYs have been on.
But that's still better than refusing to fix the problem.
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.
You also do now understand people in urban areas and their desires. For example look at Seattle, which has added a lot of population, but only added 1 car per 30 new people:
https://www.theurbanist.org/2025/09/07/while-seattle-populat...
For a few generations, 99% of housing that was built was car dependent. That's not what the market wants. So when options are provided that allow living without a car, people flock to it.
Those who move to cities and can live without cars have far higher incomes than median, and because they are not burning the average of $700/month on a car, they accumulate wealth far faster.
If I have misunderstood your assumption, please correct me, but the "only poor people don't have cars" fallacy is the only way I can make sense of your comment, and the only people I have heard express it are deeply out of touch with the modern world.
There are a FEW things that decline with greater wealth, like number of children, that buck intuition, but it’s not super clear what the cause and effect is. Suffice it to say, if what you were saying is true, which is improbable - I’m not saying impossible, just really improbable - we would be talking about it way more.
Now why you have to go and call me out of touch and all these big harrowing names, I don’t know. I’m just trying to talk about what is likely to be occurring. People make less money and cars are more expensive so fewer people own cars: that shouldn’t be a controversial POV.
Every affordable housing project that gets built slows the growth of the area AMI.
This discussion is and has always been centered around the housing crisis in urban centers, where it's been illegal to build density for decades. This has caused issues where those urban centers can't afford for people to provide critical services ( like teachers, laborers, medical staff, social services workers, etc) because housing simply doesn't exist at a price they can afford. Unless the suggestion is to make do with crumbling community services, housing reform is mandatory.
This is what I was referring to, in terms of HN’s attitudes on this topic. Why should a “major metro area” change to accommodate newcomers? It should just stay serving its current residents, who may want it to stay the size it is. The ones desiring to live there at a price they can afford are the entitled ones. They could be the ones to choose to live “anywhere they want outside major metro areas”. Major metro areas also don’t just come in one size. There are larger cities and smaller ones, denser ones and less dense ones. And it is perfectly valid to want a smaller one.
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/teachers-str...
Are you arguing that large urban areas shouldn't have schools and vet offices? Because that's where we've been heading absent meaningful housing reform.
Normally, this situation would result in wages rising, but there's a few issues.
1) The scale of the shortage is so severe that demand far outstrips supply, which means price-based solutions simply result in high wage earners taking all of the available supply.
2) Prices are rising faster than wages.
3) These industries don't have the cost basis to compete with high wage earners. Are you happy with your local vet prices? Are you willing to triple or quadruple the education taxes you currently pay?
4) Even adjusted wages still cause fewer people to enter these industries from other parts of the US, or switch into more lucrative careers. That's socially problematic.
https://www.newgeography.com/content/007550-total-fertility-...
Probably true worldwide except maybe Africa and Middle East.
This is anti-social, and puts the burden of housing all these workers on the rest of the region, as well as forcing the rest of the region to share transportation costs.
This is pretty obviously unfair. Why should poorer midsized towns and suburbs have to lose money so that large metro areas can maintain a housing density level that lets them cosplay as small towns while overbuilding commercial density?
The state believes local control has not benefited Californians as a whole.
I happen to live in an expensive home in a dense area and I agree with the state.
Whether good or bad, it's important to realize this is not true in California, with regard to these laws. They apply everywhere, not only in urban centers.
So if there are people who want small towns without dense development, that option has been taken away entirely.
I live in a tiny town (population < 10K) surrounded by forest, far from any urban center. An d even here some of the wooded areas are being clearcut to build dense apartments due to these laws.
According to the linked article, the only areas affected by this bills are major transit centers and high throughput public transit stops, which tends to exclude small towns far from cities. If you look at the linked map, affected areas are all concentrated in big cities
Are you commenting on the bill being discussed here or on something else entirely?
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.
On top of that, most jurisdictions (in the US) subsidize property tax rates for senior citizens, so there is a lot less price volatility for simply remaining in one’s home (or even moving to a different, but smaller detached single family home).
Unless a person specifically wants an urban lifestyle in a shared building, I don’t see much impetus to move out. Worst case, they get to stay in their home they have gotten used to and have space for visitors, best case they save a bunch of money and sleep easy knowing their costs are more controlled.
When I lived in socal, almost every person under 35 i knew there was living in a 2-4bd with roommates.
1bd and studios were very scace, and almost often prohibitively expensive.
So I second that creating a real offer for 1bd and studios would definitely free up family housing.
On top of that 1 and 2-person households still need housing. Building some for them is a good thing in my book
Middle class homeownership is basically dead in California due to the absurd price of housing. Almost everyone young who didn't inherit wealth or earn 90th percentile income is renting
The only people who don't like to see "young people" paying $2500 in rent instead of $3500 for a 400sqft studio are landlords.
I saw the author of this book give a talk earlier this year and found his point of view pretty convincing: https://islandpress.org/books/building-people#desc
At the time 2 stair requirements were adopted it was vital, with devastating urban fires a common occurrence. We have so many new options for both preventing fire and keeping evacuation routes accessible for hours that it's no longer required.
The regulation has a huge impact on the layout and form it's possible to build, and I think it's a huge driver of the visceral reaction against apartment living in the US and Canada.
Being able to build 4-8 storey apartments on a single lot with a central stair where every unit has windows on at least 2 walls would be a game-changer for north american urban spaces and a pathway out of the housing crisis.
On the one hand, maybe, but on the other hand, apartments (with the same number of bedrooms for the same COL-adjusted price) in the US are enormous compared to those in Asia and in Europe. I think the real source(s) of the visceral reaction(s) is, in no particular order, Americans' prioritization of personal independence over pragmatism (and I don't mean that pejoratively, though it can get stubborn at times), America's fairly weak renter protections/regulations, and the poor build quality of many American apartments (with dogshit sound and climate-proofing). I think it's a mix of a fundamentally American aversion to adding an additional person telling you what to do with genuine issues in the paradigm where you're paying up the ass for heating/cooling because your landlord doesn't particularly feel like installing double-pane windows, and at the same time your neighbors and neighborhood are obnoxiously loud.
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.
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.
Not if society wants to own their home.
I can’t say I would have been keen on having kids if I had to live in the quality of pretty much all the apartment buildings I have been in.
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...>
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.
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.
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
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”
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.
If you don't design infrastructure based on what people want, they are going to do it anyway. And things will be extremely chaotic.
No amount of fees, fines, etc will change that.
Travel some time. Take a look at what’s happened in Paris over the last several years. See what’s happened in Utrecht and Amsterdam. These are far from the only examples.
I have traveled all over the world, and have lived in Amsterdam for half a year. I like that model sure, but doesn't change the fact that Americans want suburban sprawl. You should move to where you like though.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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
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.