Controversial builder's remedy could get a makeover

It's a hardball negotiating tactic, but no project has broken ground as a result

For the past two years, the builder’s remedy has been the unruly teenager of California housing laws.

Running roughshod over zoning regulations while sowing angst among local elected officials, the law lets developers build as much as they like, wherever they like, in cities and counties that have blown past deadlines to get their housing development blueprints certified by state regulators.

Despite its use as a hardball negotiating tactic by aggressive developers, no project has broken ground, much less finished, as a result of the builder’s remedy. That’s partially because relatively few developers are willing to make use of the confusingly worded law for lack of legal certainty.

Now some of California’s most powerful Democratic lawmakers are pushing legislation that would clear up, but also rein in, the state’s most controversial housing statute. Nearly a year and a half since a developer first used the law to propose a zoning code-blowing project, 2024 may be the year that the builder’s remedy grows up.

“The builder’s remedy has sort of lived in the Twitterverse, but actually making it a clear law, so that everyone is following the same rules of engagement and we know what the rules are … (that) is really what we’re aiming to do here,” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, a Berkeley Democrat who chairs the Assembly appropriations committee and who authored AB 1893, which she said would “modernize” the law.

The proposed overhaul, outlined in a newly amended draft of the bill published Tuesday, includes new perks for developers, textual edits to clear up how the law would apply and a new streamlining provision that would let developers bypass environmental review and public hearing requirements as long as they pay their workers union-level wages and meet basic environmental requirements.

But the bill also would put a cap on how big builder’s remedy projects can be, while prohibiting its use in industrial zoned areas. That’s a break from current law, in which the sky — and the California Building Code — is the limit.

“We tried to land this bill in a place where it is a stick