How California’s Newest Housing Laws Could Affect Housing Production

“Since 2017, the State of California has adopted over 100 new laws designed to increase housing production,” according to a brief by William Fulton, David Garcia, Ben Metcalf, Carolina Reid, and Truman Braslaw from the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. The laws have an impact on four stages of the building process: planning, zoning, permitting, and building. The authors make “an effort to characterize the breadth and goals of recent legislation, and to assess practitioner experiences with using these laws to further housing production” in the state and provide “an overview of California’s housing system, catalogs recent housing legislation, and summarizes themes from interviews with stakeholders across the state.”

While the authors warn that “It is too early to know whether the full set of new state laws is having a meaningful impact on spurring increased homebuilding,” there have nevertheless been “positive, measurable impacts on construction starts within some specific housing domains, and interviewees expressed optimism that process changes could unlock significant increases in home-building in the future.”

The brief highlights optimistic developments in three areas: growing support for ADUs and subsidized affordable housing; a shift in culture around project approvals; and changes in California’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) and Housing Element law, which are spurring—despite much local opposition—zoning changes around the state.