Category Archives: Housing

CEQA, deregulated housing bills, Housing, Politics

Wiener SB 677 is dead for now. Let’s keep it buried.

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On April 22, 2025, SB 677 did not advance in the Senate Housing Committee, failing by a narrow 4-3 vote. Despite this setback, Senator Wiener claims he will continue working on the bill.

This is one of the two signature bills he hoped to pass this legislative cycle with SB 79 as the other.  This is not a mortal wound, but  certainly a setback to his typically unchallenged power.  Let’s keep working on SB 79 – killing that bill will cripple him further especially with his sights turning to run for another State office.

Key Provisions of SB 677

Enhancements to SB 9 (Small-Scale Housing)

  • Mandatory Ministerial Approval: Requires local governments to approve housing developments with up to two units on lots zoned for single-family or up to four units, removing discretionary review processes. ​LegiScan+2FindHOALaw+2BillTrack50+2

  • Elimination of Owner-Occupancy Requirements: Removes the mandate for applicants to reside in one of the units, facilitating broader participation in housing development. ​LegiScan

  • Override of HOA and CC&R Restrictions: Invalidates homeowners association rules and covenants that prohibit or unreasonably restrict such developments. ​Senator Scott Wiener+2FindHOALaw+2LegiScan+2

  • Increased Minimum Unit Size: Raises the minimum allowable unit size from 800 to 1,750 net habitable square feet, promoting more livable housing options. ​Terner Center+5LegiScan+5Digital Democracy | CalMatters+5

  • Simplified Urban Lot Splits: Removes previous constraints, such as the 40% minimum parcel size and limitations on prior subdivisions, to ease the process of lot splitting. ​BillTrack50+1California YIMBY+1

  • Impact Fee Exemptions: Prohibits local agencies from imposing impact fees on housing units smaller than 1,750 square feet and mandates proportional fees for larger units. ​LegiScan+1Digital Democracy | CalMatters+1

Modifications to SB 423 (Streamlined Multifamily Housing)

  • Reduced Affordable Housing Requirement: Lowers the inclusionary housing requirement from 50% to 20% for jurisdictions that have met their market-rate housing goals but not their affordable housing targets. ​Terner Center+1Senator Scott Wiener+1

  • More Frequent RHNA Assessments: Changes the evaluation frequency of Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) compliance from every four years to every two years, enabling quicker identification of housing shortfalls.​BillTrack50+4Senator Scott Wiener+4LegiScan+4

  • Shifted Burden of Proof: Places the responsibility on local governments to provide evidence when denying developments based on environmental criteria, aiming to prevent misuse of environmental regulations to block housing projects. ​LegiScan+2Senator Scott Wiener+2Digital Democracy | CalMatters+2

Additional Provisions:

  • Coastal Zone Considerations: Clarifies that while developments in coastal zones must still obtain coastal development permits, local agencies are not required to hold public hearings for these applications, streamlining the approval process. ​Digital Democracy | CalMatters+1LegiScan+1

  • State Oversight of Local Ordinances: Mandates that local governments submit any new ordinances related to SB 9 to the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) within 60 days, allowing the department to review and ensure compliance with state housing laws. ​Terner Center 
    Is this even Constitutional or should it be?

     

CEQA, Housing, Politics, Transportation

Abundance meets resistance: Are Democrats finally ready to go all in on building housing?

By JEANNE KUANG : calmatters – excerpt

Amid a post-2024 wave of Democratic interest in the burgeoning pro-development “abundance” movement, this seemed to be an easy year for California’s yes-in-my-backyard housing development activists.
Democratic leaders in the state Legislature declared their intention to tackle affordability this year. Gov. Gavin Newsom and other politicians have since embraced the “abundance” platform, which argues that Democrats must do more to quickly deliver housing, transportation and other infrastructure projects to their constituents.
Lawmakers have introduced ambitious bills that would, for housing developments in existing neighborhoods, blow a hole through the longstanding thicket of environmental reviews and regulations that often slow down projects and add costs. One of those passed its first committee on Monday.
Still, YIMBY-ism hit a stumbling block Tuesday in the form of the Senate housing committee. The committee, led by Sen. Aisha Wahab, nearly killed a closely watched bill to require cities to allow taller, denser apartments and condo construction near public transit stations.
Wahab said she was acting on a chorus of familiar objections from progressives and others who have long delayed housing construction in California: The legislation didn’t guarantee that projects would be built with union labor. It didn’t require that the new units be affordable for low-income residents. It could infringe on local governments’ ability to block or green-light projects. It opened up the possibility of bypassing certain environmental reviews.
In the end, the committee voted 6-2 against Wahab’s objections to narrowly advance Senate Bill 79, by Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat and prominent advocate for housing production. Some Democrats were absent or didn’t vote. The committee also killed a different Wiener bill that would have further loosened restrictions on property owners who want to split single-family homes into duplexes. It was a stark reversal from prior years in the Legislature, when Wiener chaired the housing committee and pushed through several bills to spur housing production…
A progressive who is focused on preserving explicitly affordable units for low-income tenants, Wahab, a Hayward Democrat, was pushing for legislation to help cities that enact rent caps compete with other municipalities for state housing and planning grants. Some studies have found rent control in San Francisco has reduced rental supply, while other economists say capping rents is still needed to help those who are housing insecure.
“The state has prioritized development, development, development,” Wahab said. “The types of development that are going up with zero parking and all these giveaways to developers have also not translated to housing that has dignity that people want to stay in and raise their families in.”
Her bill (SB 262) drew skepticism from some colleagues on the committee, who noted the state funding programs are for development and production, but nevertheless voted to advance it… (more)
 

SB 262: Housing element: prohousing designations: prohousing local policies. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb262

Housing, Planning, Politics, Transportation

Meet the politician who could make or break California’s housing efforts. What’s her plan?

By Emily Hoeven : sfchronicle – excerpt (via email)

Following their devastating losses in the 2024 election, many Democrats have eagerly aligned themselves with the burgeoning “abundance” movement, which contends that blue states like California need to focus less on sluggish bureaucratic processes and more on tangible outcomes to win back voters.

But it’s one thing to embrace a slogan and another thing entirely to take action. Here in California, we’re about to see which side of that divide our leaders stand on.

Buffy Wicks, Chair of the Appropriations Committee
Buffy Wicks, Chair of the Appropriations Committee

 

Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, is pushing one of the biggest bills in recent memory, AB609, to exempt almost all infill housing development from California Environmental Quality Act review. And it’s just one of 20 bills in an ambitious, bipartisan package that aims to streamline and simplify the state’s housing approval process and make it easier to build the estimated 2.5 million homes California needs.

Actually passing these bills, however, will require that Democrats risk alienating some of their most influential constituencies, including labor unions and environmental justice groups — some of which have already come out swinging against Wicks’ bill and others.

It’s “a moment of truth for the Legislature,” Michael Lane, state policy director for the urbanist organization SPUR, told me.

Will lawmakers move forward with bold bills, or will they revert to the failed policies of the past?

Aisha Wahab, Chair of the California State Housing Committee
Aisha Wahab, Chair of the California State Housing Committee

One key lawmaker who will play a decisive role in answering that question is state Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Fremont, whom Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, recently appointed as leader of the Senate Housing Committee.

Committee leaders have significant sway in the Legislature. Not only can their stance on a bill meaningfully influence its chance of passage, but they also can decide whether to give a bill a hearing or kill it in cold blood.

Wahab isn’t the only committee leader or legislative power broker who will determine the fate of California’s “abundance” agenda, but she may be one of the biggest wild cards. In her first hearing as housing committee chair last month, she proclaimed that it’s time for California to “move away from development, development, development” and also stated “transit-oriented development doesn’t necessarily work.”

Continue reading Meet the politician who could make or break California’s housing efforts. What’s her plan? →

CEQA, deregulated housing bills, Housing, Politics

Latest CEQA reform effort a ‘major needle-mover,’ some housing advocates say

By Keith Menconi : sfexaminer – excerpt (audio)

Which way are they going now?

Some San Francisco housing advocates are cheering the latest push to reform California’s environmental review standards.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco, has put forward a bill — SB 607 — that would make a number of highly technical changes aimed at narrowing the scope of the California Environmental Quality Act, a decades-old environmental law that critics say has been harnessed to block all manner of projects throughout the state…

Wiener’s bill targets the rollback of CEQA’s reviews only to cover “environmentally friendly and environmentally neutral projects,” according to a press release from his office…

“It rips the heart out of CEQA,” said Richard Drury, an Oakland-based environmental lawyer who has litigated CEQA cases for decades.

The law — first passed in 1970 — requires studies to determine the potential environmental impact from projects, including how they could affect air quality, waterways and noise pollution…

“I’m not one of these people who wants to get rid of CEQA,” said Wiener in an interview with The Examiner. “But I want it to be very focused on actually protecting the environment without preventing California from building all of the things that we need to succeed.”… (more)

HOW CAN WE TRUST EITHER PARTY WHEN THEY ARE GOING IN THE SAME CIRCULAR DIRECTION? IS UT A SEE SAW OR MUSICAL CHAIRS?

 

Housing, Politics

Homelessness in SF

By Sharky Laguna : via Gotham by Susan Dyer email

Our #XoftheWeek comes from San Francisco Homeless Oversight Commissioner Sharky Laguna: “I spent 8 months working on a project to develop a better high-level understanding of homelessness in San Francisco,” Laguna posted about a report he wrote and the accompanying video and app he created. You can find the report here. The tool is interactive, so after watching the video you can play with the model, which simulates the impact of changing permanent supportive housing inventory supply, the number of people flowing into housing, and the average length of stay for people in that housing… https://housing-sim.com/

CEQA, deregulated housing bills, Housing

Fwd: San Francisco looks to boost housing after another year of slow growth

By Keith Menconi : sfexaminer – excerpt

San Francisco’s housing growth remained sluggish in 2024, with the number of newly completed homes likely the lowest of any year in at least the past 10 years, according to preliminary figures from city housing officials.
Those numbers seem to continue a yearslong trend of declining housing construction that has persisted despite a furious effort to reform San Francisco’s housing rules and make The City — infamous for its marathon permitting processes that can leave developments in limbo for years — a more hospitable place to build homes.
In the face of continued anemic housing growth, city housing officials, developers and advocates say that they will continue to push for further measures to support new construction…
As for when those efforts will spur the long-hoped for development boom, they acknowledged, it remains impossible to say.
“I think I’m going to be cautiously pessimistic” of what 2025 might bring, said Corey Smith, executive director of the San Francisco-based Housing Action Coalition. It’s one of many pro-development groups that have been making the case that The City must dramatically ramp up its home building efforts if it ever hopes to turn the corner on its affordability crisis.
That measured pessimism is a stark turnaround from Smith’s outlook at the start of 2024, when he said he had hoped new streamlining laws would be enough to help San Francisco’s flagging housing sector overcome the economic disruptions unleashed by the pandemic, including spiraling construction costs and stubbornly high interest rates…

“It costs more to build the building than the building is then worth when it’s completed,” Babsin said.…(more)

This is old news for the most part. Did not realize the value of the finished building is not worth the cost to build it No wonder insurance companies are fleeing. There is no reason to build when businesses are closing and thousands of recently constructed units sit empty. Add the high cost of capital, labor and materials and you have no reason to invest in San Francisco development projects at the moment. No reason for Smith or anyone else to be too hopeful that things will turn around any time soon. Now if people would just quit pretending and lying we could put the constant pressure to produce more housing that no one wants to live in.
CEQA, Housing, Politics

LA rezoning could displace tenants from rent-controlled units

By  TRD Staff : therealdeal – excerpt

New building incentives would put rent-stabilized buildings at risk of demolition…

ACT-LA coalition’s Laura Raymond; mayor Karen Bass

A Los Angeles plan to rezone multifamily housing could put tenants in rent-controlled apartments on the curb.

A Citywide Housing Incentive Program ordinance to be heard by the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee on Tuesday would supercharge building incentives for developers while displacing tenants in older units, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The proposed legislation would give builders a break on height and parking if they include a certain percentage of affordable units and the property is near transit, a major street and jobs and schools.

Projects that are 100 percent affordable would be eligible for incentives across a wider part of the city.

The incentives would apply in single-family zones only if a property is owned by a public agency or a faith-based organization, which accounts for 1 percent of the city’s single-family lots, according to the Times.

Instead, most of the parcels that fall under the proposed development incentives are in residential neighborhoods zoned for apartments…(more)

RELATED:

Audit finds flaws in state’s housing allocation goals
SANDAG Board of Diretors Meeting (March 22, 2024)

Housing, Politics

Vancouver housing expert questioning consensus finds a following in SF

By Keith Menconi : sfexaminer – excerpt (Includes audio)

Want to solve California’s affordability crisis? The popular answer these days is to allow developers to build more homes. Supporters say it’s an intuitive solution that follows the basic logic of supply and demand laid out in Economics 101.

But as San Francisco city officials move forward with a controversial plan to allow much denser housing development across large swaths of The City, some residents who oppose that effort are embracing a heterodox housing researcher who argues that the mainstream housing consensus is simply wrong.

On a Saturday afternoon last month, a crowd of about 200 massed inside Noe Valley Ministry to hear the housing homily delivered by Patrick Condon, a professor of urban design at The University of British Columbia. Condon had come all the way from Vancouver to offer up a warning: “You’re in for a big disappointment.”

A former city planner, Condon has become a prominent voice in Vancouver’s own housing debate. He told the gathered crowd he has seen firsthand how increasing density doesn’t solve the problem of housing unaffordability. Despite a massive development boom in recent decades that has made Vancouver one of the densest cities in North America, housing prices there are among the highest on the continent.

“Unfortunately, it will take 30 years for you to realize that you were wrong,” he said...(more)

deregulated housing bills, Housing

Want property taxes to go up? Why California should reject ballot measure easing bond votes

By Susan Shelley : Newsbreak – excerpt
Stay up-to-date with free briefings on topics that matter to all Californians. Subscribe to CalMatters today for nonprofit news in your inbox.

In November, California voters will decide the fate of Proposition 5, which would make it easier for local governments to borrow money for housing and various public infrastructure projects. Below, a taxpayer watchdog says Prop. 5 will essentially let governments increase property taxes whenever they want. The opposing view: A local mayor says the measure will help public agencies pursue vital projects that can make California more affordable…(more)

deregulated housing bills, Housing, Politics, Transportation

Bay Area Housing Finance Authority Pulls Regional Measure 4 from the November Ballot

For Immediate  Release:

San Francisco – This morning, the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority (BAHFA) voted to pull Regional Measure 4, the $20 billion dollar regional bond measure, off the November ballot. Gus Mattammal, President of the 20 Billion Reasons campaign to defeat the bond measure in November, hailed the move.

Said Mattammal, “This decision is a win for Bay Area taxpayers, and a win for affordable housing. To address housing affordability in a meaningful way, we have to address root causes, not soak taxpayers for billions of dollars at a time using bonds that would waste two thirds of the revenue on interest and overhead while barely making a dent in the issue.”

The 20 Billion Reasons campaign brought together Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents in a single campaign, a rarity in recent times, but a necessity. Said Mattammal, “Actually working on the root causes of the housing crisis in California, a crisis created by our legislature and the corporate interests to which they are beholden, is politically difficult. It’s much easier to simply raise taxes. That’s why it’s so important for voters to say ‘no’ to deeply flawed proposals such as Regional Measure 4: every time we do say no, it helps create the political conditions to work on the problem in a meaningful way.”

Though Regional Measure 4 is off the ballot for now, many other expensive proposals remain on the ballot, and the $20 Billion Reasons campaign team is excited to regroup and consider the best way forward to help ensure that Bay Area taxpayers are getting real solutions for the taxes they pay.

About Gus Mattammal – Gus is an entrepreneur and educator who has lived and worked in the Bay Area for over 17 years. He is proud to work with the committed Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents who seek to ensure that the public’s money is wisely spent. Learn more at: 20billionreasons.com