housing
California Enacts Historic Housing Reform Laws
Legislation Promotes New Housing, Infill Development, & Reduced Air Pollution
The California Legislature recently enacted, and Governor Gavin Newsom last week signed into law, two major housing reform measures. SB 9 and SB 10 represent California’s most transformative new housing laws in decades, and are a belated but welcome legislative response to the state’s longstanding housing crisis. SB 9, authored by California State Senate leader …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Bleak California Housing Picture By Numbers
Key recent studies and data can inform the legislative debate
As the debate over SB 50 and other state legislative efforts to boost California’s housing supply heats up, it’s worth reviewing some of the data about how dire the housing situation is in the state. Here are some tidbits: High Home Prices and Rents: According to the California Legislative Analysts Office, the average California home …
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CONTINUE READINGLearning Lessons from Los Angeles’s TOC Program
Challenges and opportunities as TOC continues to drive affordable housing production
I’ve written before about Los Angeles’ Transit Oriented Communities (TOC) Program, an inclusionary housing program designed to allow for increased density in residential and mixed-use projects near major transit stops in exchange for a developer commitment to include a set percentage of affordable housing units in those projects. Since implementation began in late 2017, the …
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CONTINUE READINGA Legislative Response to California’s Housing Emergency: Senator Skinner’s SB 330
How to Make a Good Bill Even Better
(This post is co-authored by U.C. Davis Law School Professor Chris Elmendorf) Last week, as President Trump harrumphed about the faux emergency on our nation’s Southern border, California State Senator Nancy Skinner introduced a potentially transformative bill that addresses California’s real emergency: the ever-escalating cost of housing in the state’s economically productive metropolitan regions. As …
CONTINUE READINGLA’s Trying to Build Transit-Oriented Affordable Housing
But could we make it easier?
My colleague Jonathan Zasloff rightly points out that one way to harness the benefits of upzoning to alleviate our housing crisis is to promote inclusionary requirements for transit-oriented development. Los Angeles has adopted just such a program through its Transit-Oriented Communities ordinance, which I’ve written about here. Per the City of Los Angeles’ initial assessment, …
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CONTINUE READINGSurveying the Landscape of Local Zoning and CEQA
First report from Berkeley/Columbia research project shows how Bay Area residential developments negotiate land-use and CEQA review
A group of interdisciplinary researchers from law and planning (which I am part of) just released its first report on how CEQA and land-use law shape the process of regulating and approving residential developments in five Bay Area cities. (I first posted about our research here.) I’ve included the Executive Summary below, and the full …
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CONTINUE READINGWhere To Build Housing In California Through 2030
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California isn’t building enough housing to meet jobs and population growth, and what housing is getting built is happening too much in sprawl areas on greenfields. While this greenfield-focused development may please pro-sprawl conservatives, it will worsen traffic and air pollution and keep the state from meeting its long-term environmental goals. To discuss where and …
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