As California’s housing affordability crisis shows few signs of
relenting, the Legislature continues to focus on housing and land
use legislation. CSAC is engaging on several bills on behalf of
counties, many of which are currently on the Senate and Assembly
appropriations committee suspense files.
Regional Housing Needs
Two major bills are moving forward that would make significant
changes to the way planed housing growth allocations are made to
cities and counties. For general background on the Regional
Housing Needs Assessment/Allocation process (RHNA), see
CSAC’s overview from the Bulletin.
AB 1771 (Bloom) would embed fair housing criteria in the
allocation of housing needs between jurisdictions and create a
new appeal opportunity for certain housing organizations, while
SB 828 (Wiener) would reshape the RHNA process, including by
“rolling forward” past planning allocations when units weren’t
constructed. CSAC’s concerns letter on the latter bill
is available here.
General Plan and Zoning
In its current form, AB 3194 (Daly) would essentially allow
developers to build projects that are consistent with the highest
intensity land use allowed in the general plan, even if that is
beyond what’s permitted by the underlying zoning. The proponents
contend that local governments are designating areas for
higher-density housing in their general plans, but not updating
the zoning in order to circumvent the Housing Accountability Act.
CSAC and our coalition partners are
opposed to the bill working on amendments that address the
sponsor’s concerns, will preventing unintended consequences,
including de facto “upzonings” of rural areas that are designated
for limited residential uses.
Accessory Dwelling Units
CSAC is opposed to three bills that would reopen the state’s
accessory dwelling unit laws only two years after they were
substantially revised in 2016. Many counties that have already
adopted ordinances to increase local opportunity for building
these much-needed second residential units would have to reopen
their zoning codes once again. Among the provisions of
concern included in one or more of the three bills- AB
2890 (Ting),
SB 831 (Wieckowski) or
SB 1469 (Skinner)- are prohibitions on using parcel size
as a screening criteria for where ADUs are acceptable,
limitations or outright prohibitions on impact fees,
and unreasonably short time-frames for review and
approval of ADU applications.
A full report of priority bills being tracked by the Housing,
Land Use and Transportation Policy team is available on the CSAC
website
here.
