Expansion sought in law to expedite housing
An ambitious effort to stimulate much-needed home building across California pushed further forward this week as Sen. Scott Wiener announced plans to expand a contentious state law streamlining approval for certain projects that include affordable housing.
Senate Bill 35 — one of Wiener's signature achievements — shook up the state's building process when it passed in 2017 and sparked intense pushback from some city leaders and residents who contended it gave Sacramento too much control over what kind of housing is allowed in their neighborhoods.
But it also helped thousands of new homes make it through an approval and permitting process that otherwise can be so difficult that projects are stymied. Now, Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, wants to make the changes permanent by removing a provision on SB 35 that would cause it to expire in 2025. He's also proposing expanding the law's reach.
The bill “has been absolutely transformational in terms of allowing people to build housing,” Wiener said Monday during a news conference. “We are desperately in need of new homes in California. We are short millions of homes.”
Under SB 35, cities must grant streamlined approval to certain projects that include affordable housing — and those projects are immune from environmental lawsuits often used by opponents to halt or delay construction. The law applies only in cities that have not approved enough housing to meet state guidelines — which currently includes most of them.
Wiener's new bill is sure to meet swift backlash from community members worried that it will allow apartments and other multi-family dwellings they might view as eyesores in their cherished single-family neighborhoods.
Susan Kirsch, who has spent years advocating against fast-tracked housing development, fears Wiener's latest will further prevent communities from getting a say in what gets built.
“There's already been such a reduction of local control,” said Kirsch, who founded advocacy group Livable California and now heads Community Catalysts for Local Control. “And we don't see that communities are looking more beautiful. We don't see that they're more able to manage homelessness.”
Affordable housing advocates, however, say this type of legislation is necessary to help California build its way out of a dire housing shortage.
SB 35 helped developers move forward with plans to turn the defunct Vallco Mall in Cupertino into 2,400 housing units — half of which are intended to be low-income — 429,000 square feet of retail space and 1.97 million square feet of office space. After years of litigation and opposition, developers now are seeking tenants for the yet-to-becompleted project.
Between 2018 and 2021, developers proposed about 18,000 housing units statewide under SB 35 — including about 13,000 low-income units, according to preliminary data from UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Of those, more than 11,000 qualified for streamlining under the law by the end of 2021. Data for 2022 is not yet available.
San Francisco alone added nearly 2,000 units under the law — 1,851 of which were affordable, as of May 2021, according to the city's planning department.
“SB 35 is an essential tool for streamlining housing in California,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a news release. “It has helped San Francisco build affordable housing projects quickly in neighborhoods across the city, and more importantly, it has helped us to create safe homes for people who need them.”
David Garcia, policy director at the Terner Center, said most projects that have used SB 35 statewide have been entirely or mostly made up of low-income units. So while the law has been “pretty useful” for getting affordable housing approved, it hasn't been as helpful when it comes to market-rate developments, he said.
Garcia's team still is trying to figure out why. But one thing he says could help boost market-rate production: Under the new version of the law, Wiener wants to drop a requirement that market-rate developments use union labor. Instead, he's proposed that all affordable and market-rate projects pay prevailing wage and offer health care benefits.
That change has sparked opposition from the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California.
“This bill continues a trend that will create unintended consequences that will result in widespread fraud and mistreatment in the residential construction sector,” deputy legislative director Beverly Yu said in a statement.