The Homework: April 18, 2025
Welcome to the April 18, 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
It’s an important month for pro-housing reforms in the California legislature, with many major housing bills coming up in their first committees in both the State Senate and Assembly.
California YIMBY is locked in and focused on getting our sponsored and priority legislation through their committee hearings. The outcomes of these hearings will determine the scope of housing reform for the remainder of the legislative session.
We’re working to ensure the following bills advance in Committee in the coming weeks:
- Assembly Natural Resources Committee:
- AB 609 (Wicks): Creates a CEQA exemption for housing projects that comply with local laws and are located in environmentally friendly areas, reducing risks and increasing feasibility for these developments.
- Senate Housing Committee:
- SB 79 (Wiener): This bill 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.
- SB 677 (Wiener): This bill will update both SB 9 and SB 423, improving both bills to make it faster, easier, and more affordable to build homes of all types in the neighborhoods where they are needed the most.
- SB 9 (Arreguín): This bill clarifies that all Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) are exempt from owner-occupancy requirements as required by AB 881 (Bloom 2020), not only those built after the law went into effect.
- Senate Local Government:
- SB 315 (Grayson): The bill imposes reasonable limits on park fees for infill housing and establishes better oversight and accountability for the application of these fees.
- Assembly Local Government Committee:
- AB 1061 (Quirk-Silva): This bill will make 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 1308 (Hoover): Speeds up the post-entitlement process by requiring building departments to provide estimated timeframes for permit inspections and allowing applicants to contract with private professionals for inspections.
- Assembly Housing Committee:
- AB 413 (Fong): This bill will require 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 595 (Carrillo): This bill will create more affordable homeownership opportunities for working families and communities of color by providing tax credits for the construction of for-sale homes affordable to Californians who earn moderate income.
The rest of our sponsored and priority bills are still awaiting their hearing dates:
- AB 1154 (Juan Carrillo): This bill will remove owner-occupancy requirements for JADUs that do not share sanitation facilities with the existing structure. It will also exempt small ADUs under 500 square feet from parking requirements, similar to existing exemption for JADUs.
- AB 253 (Ward): This bill will speed 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 days.
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, @cayimby and cayimby.bsky.social), to stay current on housing policy research, news, and legislative updates.
Housing Research & Analysis
Driving Up Housing Costs: How California’s “Time Tax” Compares to Colorado and Texas
California faces a severe housing shortage, with seven of America’s ten most expensive metropolitan areas. While building more housing is critical to address this shortage, building costs in California far exceed those in other western states.
In “The High Cost of Producing Multifamily Housing in California,” RAND researchers Jason M. Ward and Luke Schlake analyzed production costs across California, Colorado, and Texas, identifying policy areas where California could learn from our western neighbors without sacrificing environmental and safety priorities.
Key Takeaways:
- California’s affordable housing costs $640 per square foot, versus $228 for market-rate housing in Texas—a 280% difference that limits how many homes can be built with public funds.
- California’s slow permitting timelines imposes a substantial “time tax” of $1,284 per unit, per month. The typical California development takes 49 months, compared to just 27 months in Texas.
- California’s extremely high impact fees, which average $21,000 per apartment and can go as high as $60,000, are triple the national average and more than 20 times higher than they are in Texas, where fees average less than $1,000 per apartment.
Dazed and Confused: Why Truckee Homeowners Abandon their ADUs
In Truckee, California, where median home prices exceed $1.1 million, workers essential to the resort community struggle to find housing they can afford. However, despite California’s nation-leading ADU reforms and the potential for rental income, few homeowners in the small mountain town build these less-expensive secondary homes on their properties.
In “Barriers to Implementing Accessory Dwelling Units for Middle-Income Workforce Housing in a Rural Resort Community,” Thomas J. Powell, doctoral candidate at Northeastern University, examines why Truckee homeowners who expressed interest in building an ADU abandon their projects.
Key Takeaways:
- 45% of potential ADU builders cite complex approval processes as their primary obstacle. Homeowners must navigate requirements across 18 separate fee-charging entities in Truckee.
- High costs deterred construction, with 37% of homeowners identifying financial requirements as a significant barrier. At $400-500 per square foot, even small ADUs can cost more than $300,000 to build.
- Homeowners couldn’t access reliable information. No surveyed homeowners knew about Truckee’s ADU assistance program, 55% were uncertain if their properties qualified, and those seeking help encountered unresponsive officials and inaccurate fee information.
Houser Headlines
- California keeps poking holes in CEQA. A new bill could blow a crater through it
- If California wants to show the nation it can govern, it can’t let Bay Area public transit fail
- De-weaponizing CEQA
- This California law made housing too expensive. Here is how to change it
- New push to exempt urban housing from CEQA reignites statewide reform battle
- California Lawmakers Take Step Forward on Bill to Simplify ADU Development
- Other states do housing better than California; a new study shows how they do it
- Is this S.F. parking garage really worthy of historic preservation?
- Why is it so expensive to build affordable homes in California? It takes too long
- ‘Not acceptable.’ Not a single home building permit finalized in Altadena following Eaton Fire
- Progress By 1,000 Cuts? Housing Legislation Snips Away at California’s Red Tape
- Greece offers a blueprint for ending California’s housing crisis
- PG&E is delaying ADU construction in California, builders and homeowners say
YIMBY Social – Top Posts
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