The Homework: August 11, 2025
Welcome to the August 11, 2025 Main edition of The Homework, the official newsletter of California YIMBY — legislative updates, news clips, housing research and analysis, and the latest writings from the California YIMBY team.
News from Sacramento
Summer Recess is almost over, and the Legislature will reconvene on August 18th. The Appropriations Committee hearing, where all bills with a fiscal cost will be considered, is expected to be scheduled towards the end of August. As a reminder, bills with low or no fiscal cost will go straight to the floor for final votes.
After the Appropriations Committee, the Legislature will have a final floor session from September 6-12 to vote on bills; the bills that succeed will go to the Governor’s desk for signature into law.
The following California YIMBY-sponsored bills will be heard in the Appropriations Committee:
- SB 79 (Wiener): Will make it faster and easier to build multi-family housing near transit stops, like train and rapid bus lines, by making it legal for more homes to be built in these areas, and streamlining existing permit review processes.
- AB 1061 (Quirk-Silva): Makes it easier to increase the number of homes—including duplexes—in single-family neighborhoods by allowing the California HOME Act (SB 9, 2021) to be used in historic districts.
- AB 253 (Ward): Speeds up the approval process for new homes by allowing home builders to hire a licensed and certified third-party reviewer for review of housing permit applications if the local government cannot or does not complete their permit review within 30 business days.
- AB 1154 (Carrillo): Removes owner-occupancy requirements for “junior” ADUs (ADUs built within an existing home) that do not share sanitation facilities with the existing structure.
- SB 9 (Arreguín): Ensures that local laws governing the construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) align with state law, and provides a pathway to eliminate unlawful local barriers to ADUs.
- AB 413 (Fong): Requires the California Department of Housing & Community Development (HCD) to translate key state housing guidelines and handbooks into the non-English languages commonly spoken in California.
- AB 1308 (Hoover): This bill will help bring new homes to market faster by legally requiring a jurisdiction’s building department to perform final inspections for certain projects within ten business days, once the builder notifies the city or county that construction is complete and ready for inspection.
Our only bill that is going straight to the floor is SB 9 (Arreguín), which ensures that local laws governing the construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) align with state law, and provides a pathway to eliminate unlawful local barriers to ADUs.
To stay current on what housing bills California YIMBY is sponsoring and supporting, you can now use our Abstract link to track with us.
Be sure to stay tuned for future editions of The Homework (and follow California YIMBY’s Twitter and Bluesky channels), to stay current on housing policy research, news, and legislative updates.
Housing Research & Analysis
This One Weird Trick Could Could Cut NYC Rent by 18%
New York City could add 71% more residential floorspace by 2060, and reduce rents by 18% over the next 40 years, if it removed certain restrictions on home building.
In “Can We Rebuild a City? The Dynamics of Urban Redevelopment,” Vincent Rollet from MIT analyzed 833,000 land parcels in New York City from 2004-2022 to measure how zoning policies affect new construction and housing costs.
The average New Yorker now pays prices exceeding construction costs by factors of two to three, with floorspace selling for $700 per square foot, while costing only $160 to $600 to build. These constraints cost every household thousands of dollars in lost wages and economic opportunities, while pushing working families out.
Key Takeaways:
- Zoning restrictions significantly limit the housing supply. Removing all density restrictions could increase NYC’s total floorspace by 71% over 40 years, compared to 13% under current rules.
- Upzoning delivers larger housing gains than cost reductions through construction. Simply upzoning near transit stations would more than double housing growth rates, generating far more construction than reducing building costs by 20% or cutting property taxes in half on new buildings.
- Benefits flow to lower-income residents through market filtering: Eliminating zoning would improve New Yorkers’ overall economic well-being by an amount equivalent to a 15% income increase by 2060, with poorer households benefiting most from reduced housing costs.
Construction Costs Should Predict Housing Prices Across Cities. They Don’t. Here’s Proof.
The “hard costs” of building new homes — materials, labor, and builder profit margins — have a weak relationship to home prices across American cities. New research analyzing 75 years of data reveals that the cost of building new housing in a U.S. city will tell you surprisingly little about the relative affordability of its housing.
For example, Miami’s housing prices are nearly double what you’d expect based on its construction costs, while Chicago’s housing prices are about half what you’d expect.In “Building Costs and House Prices,” Brian Potter and Chad Syverson examined the connection between actual building costs and final housing sale prices across American cities from 1950 to 2024. They found that construction costs explain very little about why some places have expensive housing.
Key Takeaways:
- Construction costs show weak and inconsistent relationships with housing prices across regions. The statistical relationship that historically existed between hard costs and home prices completely disappeared after 2000; the cost of building new homes will now tell you little to nothing about housing affordability.
- Housing prices and construction costs began moving in opposite directions in the late 1970s. Before this, construction costs had actually grown faster than housing prices, but this trend reversed, and housing prices have outpaced building costs for nearly 50 years.
- Cities with similar construction costs can have divergent housing prices. This geographic pattern suggests that the factors that make housing expensive operate independently of the cost of building.
Houser Headlines
- Why building more homes near transit will transform lives across California
- SB 79 Would Help With Housing Costs
- The Westside is unaffordable. Allowing for more housing can help
- How Democrats overcame special interests that long blocked CEQA reform
- LA mayor bans duplexes in Palisades burn zone after getting permission from governor
- LA wildfire victims building ADUs as first step in home rebuilding process
- After outcry, L.A. restricts duplexes in Pacific Palisades – Los Angeles Times
- California creates office dedicated to housing, homelessness issues
- The Double Duplex Is Weird, Overstuffed, and Exactly What L.A. Needs Right Now
- How CEQA Reforms Will Impact Homebuilding in San Diego
- West Valley primed for housing after CEQA changes
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