The Homework: August 12, 2024
Welcome to the August 12, 2024 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
August marks the final weeks of the legislative session, and bills that have cleared their committees and have no fiscal or budgetary impact are eligible to be presented on the Senate or Assembly floor. All other bills will be referred to the appropriations committee.
The appropriations process concludes with the “Suspense File,” which is where bills with budget implications are held for final review by Senate and Assembly appropriations committees. Suspense hearings for the Senate and Assembly are currently scheduled for August 15th; bills that make it through those hearings, or are amended, will then be sent to the floor for final votes. Bills that don’t proceed are functionally dead for the year, but as we say in Sacramento, they’re not “dead” – they’re just held in suspense.
The following California YIMBY sponsored and high-priority bills are in the appropriations committee:
Sponsored Bills:
- SB 1123 (Caballero): This bill updates SB 684 (2023) to make it legal to build up to 10 homes on single-family zoned vacant lots.
- SB 1211 (Skinner): This bill will encourage more ADUs on multifamily properties by providing more flexibility around how ADUs can be built alongside existing multifamily housing.
High Priority Bills:
- AB 2144 (Grayson): This bill will reduce uncertainty around new home building by requiring local governments to provide evidence in their Annual Progress Reports, required by the state’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment, that they are complying with existing laws regarding transparency in impact fees.
California YIMBY also has sponsored or high-priority bills that have either bypassed or been voted out of the Appropriations Committee, and are going straight to the Senate or Assembly floor.
Sponsored Bills:
- SB 937 (Wiener): This bill will authorize deferrals of impact fees and extends entitlements in order to provide developers tools to pencil out projects.
- AB 1820 (Schiavo): This bill will require cities to provide a precise estimate of the fees required for a proposed housing development at the time of building permit application.
- AB 2580 (Wicks): This bill will require local governments to monitor how new historic designations could impact their ability to meet housing needs under existing state law, and report new historic buildings and districts to the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) during the Annual Progress Report of the Regional Housing Needs Assessment process.
High Priority Bills:
- SB 1210 (Skinner): This bill will help to eliminate uncertainty around utility connection fees by requiring that fees are clear, transparent, and posted online.
Lastly, our sponsored bill AB 3057 (Wilson), a technical fix to an existing law that will grant local Junior ADU ordinances the same exemption from environmental review that is already granted to standard ADU ordinances, is on the consent calendar on the Senate floor and is expected to be sent to the Governor’s office soon.
To stay current on what housing bills California YIMBY is sponsoring, supporting, and watching, you can now use our Abstract link to track with us.
Stay tuned to future editions of The Homework, and follow the California YIMBY Twitter channel, @cayimby, to stay up to date on developments on the legislative session and related news.
Housing Research & Analysis
How Urban Housing Shortages Fuel Costly Climate Disasters
How do urban housing shortages caused by tight zoning and other land use regulations increase the risk of climate disaster? In Relational Geographies of Urban Unsustainability: The Entanglement of California’s Housing Crisis With WUI Growth and Climate Change, Miriam Greenberg, Hillary Angelo, Elena Losada, and Christopher C. Wilmers connect insights from urban social science, planning, and the natural sciences to argue that high housing costs in center cities – which are the result of strict regulations (and often, bans) on infill and multi-family housing – displace people to relatively-more affordable exurbs in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where they are at increased risk of climate disasters from fires, floods, and other extreme, climate-driven events.
Key Takeaways:
- Where previous researchers assumed people’s desire to live near natural amenities was “pulling” development into the WUI, these writers identify the high cost of urban housing as a “push” factor driving sprawl in the relatively more affordable WUI exurbs.
- Researchers studying growth in the WUI and its relationship to climate risk should expand their analysis to include the urban housing market factors that influence growth at the urban periphery.
- Efforts to curb sprawl in the WUI and ensure climate resilience should include action on the urban housing affordability crisis, particularly in California.
Leveling the Field: Reforming Land Use for “Missing Middle” Homes
In housing construction, new homes are said to “pencil out” – or be financially feasible – when the expected rental income or sales price is high enough to cover construction costs plus a reasonable return on investment. A project that doesn’t cover its own costs, and deliver a competitive return, “doesn’t pencil” — and so, does not get built.
Understanding housing finance is critical to making good housing policy, which is why the UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation has an ongoing “Making It Pencil” series that analyzes the housing construction finance environment in California.In the most recent installation, Making Missing Middle Pencil: The Math Behind Small Scale Housing Development, David Garcia shifts the focus from large, midrise “five over one” projects to four types of “missing middle” projects: for-sale duplexes, for-rent fourplexes, for-sale fourplexes, and for-rent tenplexes.
Key Takeaways:
- California’s recent efforts to encourage small-scale, “missing middle” infill housing in urban areas have not been successful, because building this type of housing is not financially feasible in most markets.
- Right now, the only types of infill, multifamily housing that reach the minimum rates of return are for-sale duplexes in the East Bay and Sacramento. Everywhere else, builders are better off building large, luxury single-family homes.
- While policy reforms like impact fee relief and building code changes will make certain projects more financially feasible in some markets, missing middle housing will not truly scale without fundamental changes to both land use and building code regulations, and finance.
Houser Headlines
- Is coastal California doing its fair share to fix the state’s affordable housing crisis?
- Backyard ADUs booming in L.A. County. Why these surprising cities are building the most – Los Angeles Times
- Opinion | California’s Homelessness Is a Failure of Will – The New York Times
- Say your prayers. California’s new plan to ease the insurance crisis is going to need them
- More Americans are moving into areas with higher flood and fire risk – The Washington Post
- A $1 Trillion Time Bomb Is Ticking in the Housing Market – Bloomberg
- Wildfires will put even more pressure on the country’s housing crisis
- California’s housing crisis may be fueling wildland development, researchers fear
- Opinion: Tide Is Turning for Affordable Housing in California’s NIMBY Coastal Cities – Times of San Diego
- Audit: California risked millions in homelessness funds due to poor anti-fraud protections
YIMBY Social – Top Posts
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