2025 Legislation

Policy Framework

For the 2025 legislative session, California YIMBY’s sponsored and high-priority legislation fits into one of three priority areas. These policy priorities guide our decisions about which bills we work on, including those we sponsor and those we categorize as high-priority. Our list of sponsored and high-priority bills is below, and evolves over the course of the session. 

During the 2025 legislative session, California YIMBY will be advocating for policies that support the following themes:

• Building back better, faster, and more sustainably: The catastrophic Los Angeles fires have highlighted the need to take fire resilience and preparation seriously. While recovery gets underway, we need to also focus on making it faster and easier to build back better – and not just in neighborhoods devastated by fire. Most of California’s existing urban land is in areas that are substantially less vulnerable to wildfire, but for historic reasons, we’ve largely banned new housing in these areas. Our legislative priorities for 2025 will focus on easing prohibitions on housing growth and streamlining the process builders must follow to get building permits in these lower-risk areas. We’ll also focus on reforms that ensure we apply our existing environmental laws to housing in ways that improve affordability and sustainability while reducing environmental impacts.
• More homes near transit: Some of the most expensive – and desirable – housing in California is located in areas with abundant public transit amenities, like light rail, buses, and trains. While state taxpayers have made tens of billions of dollars of investments in these transit systems, too many of our cities continue to ban most housing growth near public transit. These housing bans drive up costs, and prevent our transit systems from reaching their potential to reduce traffic congestion, speed up commute times, and slash the pollution that causes climate change. In 2025, California YIMBY will work to pass legislation that makes new housing a legal right within one-half mile of major public transit stops, give more Californians access to the transit systems they paid for – and make our state more affordable, sustainable, and climate-resilient.
• Renewing the dream of homeownership: California YIMBY and our allies have a solid track record of reforming existing housing laws and accelerating progress on our goal of enabling affordable pathways to home ownership. In 2025, we’ll double-down on our successful efforts to expand these opportunities by refining existing law, continue our efforts to chip away at abuse of historic preservation laws to block housing, and accelerate progress on building ADUs.