Blog Legislation

What Would SB 79 Mean for Los Angeles?

September 30, 2025

M. Nolan Gray

*Over the past five years, home prices in Los Angeles have increased by 52 percent.*

How is Los Angeles doing on housing affordability? Not good. The median home price in Los Angeles is now $930,622. That’s over 11 times the median household income – meaning the typical Los Angeles family does not have a path to homeownership.

The situation is worse for renters. Over half of all Los Angeles renters spend more than a third of their income on rent, while around a third of Angelenos devote half of their income on rent. These extreme housing cost burdens are a primary reason nearly 50,000 people in Los Angeles are homeless.

*Los Angeles permitting has been anemic in recent years — particularly when you remove ADUs — and now appears poised to collapse.*

Isn’t Los Angeles solving this problem with local solutions? Under current city policies, and at the current rate of homebuilding, it would take Los Angeles 46 years to end its housing shortage. (To the extent Los Angeles is building at all, it’s because of the statewide legalization of accessory dwelling units.) Meanwhile, local zoning in Los Angeles keeps roughly 75 percent of the city off limits to new apartments—especially the highest-opportunity parts of the city.

*SB 79-style transit-oriented development in Roseville. Allowing this type of development enriches communities and expands housing options.*

What is SB 79? SB 79 legalizes apartments near our state’s busiest transit hubs. For rail stations and bus rapid transit (BRT) stations across California, SB 79 removes most of the barriers that cities like Los Angeles have put up to block midrise, mixed-income, multifamily housing. This would allow hundreds of thousands of Californians to live near transit, while shoring up transit finances at a time when many transit agencies are facing fiscal collapse.

*The brown bubbles denote areas where Los Angeles’ Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC) program applies. The green bubbles denote areas where SB 79 would* likely apply. This is a draft map for illustrative purposes only — if passed, COGs will produce official maps.

What would SB 79 mean for Los Angeles? SB 79 would direct Los Angeles to allow midrise, mixed-income multifamily housing near all rail and BRT stations. This is an extension of local programs like Transit Oriented Communities (TOC), which provide additional incentives to build near transit.

But TOC has a structural flaw – it excludes the 75 percent of Los Angeles that is zoned exclusively for single-family homes. SB 79 would end this arbitrary distinction and allow midrise, mixed-income multifamily housing near a limited subset of the highest quality transit hubs in the city. If even 10 percent of the housing allowed by SB 79 were built out, Los Angeles would wipe away approximately two-thirds of its housing shortage.

M. Nolan Gray is the Senior Director of Legislation and Research at California YIMBY