California Housing Supply and Land Use Legislative Round-Up 2025

Authors:
William Fulton, Fellow
Julie Aguilar, Research Analyst

The year 2025 has been significant for high-impact housing supply and land use reforms. Notable bills include Senate Bill (SB) 79 (Wiener), the transit-oriented housing bill; Assembly Bill (AB) 130, the infill exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA); and SB 131, which, among other things, creates a CEQA exemption for rezonings required by changes to a Housing Element. Other housing bills refine or improve on previous efforts. But most build on the foundation of laws passed over the past 10 years, such as SB 35 (2017, Wiener), and its follow-up SB 423 (Wiener) from 2023, which allows ministerial approval of multifamily projects in some cases, and SB 330 (2019, Skinner), which makes it more difficult for cities and counties to deny housing projects. In addition, the Los Angeles fires in January have motivated the legislature to make it easier and faster to repair and rebuild houses damaged during declared emergencies.

This commentary provides an overview of key California bills focused on land use and housing supply passed by the legislature and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom. The legislature passed additional bills addressing other aspects of housing—finance, for example—but they are not covered in this commentary. This commentary also covers only bills that were passed by the legislature, not bills that are still pending and might move forward next year.

Encouraging Housing Production

Several production-focused bills were passed and signed by the governor. One of the most important bills is SB 79 (Wiener), which sets height and density standards for housing development near high-frequency rail stations and bus lines with frequent service and dedicated lanes. SB 79 does provide localities with some flexibility to plan for the increased density in different ways, and it empowers transit agencies to create their own plans and zoning for land they own near these stations. Projects built through SB 79 are subject to affordability requirements, protection standards for rent-controlled housing and existing tenants, and specific labor standards for certain projects above 85 feet in height.

Two significant reforms were passed before the end of the session through the budget negotiation process. In an unusual move, Governor Newsom and legislative leaders included major CEQA provisions in two “budget trailer” bills.^[1] This strategy indicates the high level of importance the Newsom administration and legislative leaders have placed on reforming California’s landmark environmental review process in order to catalyze greater homebuilding across the state. Specifically, AB 130 creates a statutory CEQA exemption for infill housing projects of up to 20 acres. Previously, local governments often used a categorical exemption, created by administrative regulation but not by statute, for infill projects of up to five acres, but the AB 130 exemption is “cleaner” and has no “exception” to the exemptions, as the categorical exemption does.

The other major housing trailer bill, SB 131, exempts rezonings related to Housing Elements—thus giving infill housing a “one-and-done” CEQA analysis at the Housing Element level—and limits the need for environmental review on projects that would have been exempt but for one environmental impact, in what is known as the “near-miss” provision. The bill also exempts a variety of other categories of uses from CEQA, including daycare centers and advanced manufacturing.

SB 92 (Blakespear) limits the state Density Bonus Law to reinforce its use for housing. The bill limits the amount of floor area ratio increase that can be applied to commercial components of mixed-use projects, and relieves local governments of the requirement to grant concessions or incentives to certain hotel uses in mixed-use projects.

Several other bills build on previous legislation, especially regarding housing projects proposed by educational institutions. AB 1021 (Wicks and Muratsuchi) makes it easier for K-12 school districts to build housing on their land. Among other things, it eliminates the requirement that such projects be located on infill sites and clarifies that projects in infill locations are exempt from CEQA. AB 893 (Fong) expands AB 2011 (Wicks, 2022), which allows some housing on commercial corridors to be approved ministerially, to include parcels located within half a mile of a public university. AB 648 (Zbur) exempts housing projects proposed by community colleges from local zoning if the land is owned or leased by the college. An affordability requirement is included if the homes are meant for faculty or staff members. Separately, SB 340 (Laird) expands ministerial approval for emergency shelters that include the addition or expansion of onsite services for residents.

Another bill building on previous legislation is AB 1061 (Quirk-Silva), which softens the exemption for historic resources under SB 9 (Atkins, 2021), the lot-split law. As originally adopted, historic districts were exempted from SB 9’s provision, meaning that parcels within those districts could not be split and redeveloped into two homes. AB 1061 changes that to exempt only historic resources and landmarks, not entire historic districts.

AB 507 (Haney) expands an existing office-to-residential incentive under AB 2488 (Ting, 2024), previously only available in San Francisco, to the entire state. The bill requires by-right approval for adaptive reuse projects that devote at least 50 percent of a project to housing, subject to affordability requirements. The bill also expands the tax-increment-style system of providing financial incentives to developers engaged in office-to-residential conversions. Meanwhile, AB 1445 (also by Haney) expands the use of Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts for office-to-residential conversions, also previously available only in San Francisco, to jurisdictions around the state.

Finally, AB 712 (Wicks) could turn the tables on local governments in litigation battles with housing developers. Under the bill, applicants who successfully sue a local agency to enforce compliance with “housing reform law” can collect attorney’s fees from the local government involved. Bill opponents have said the term “housing reform law” is not specifically defined. Meanwhile, the bill also increases fines on local governments that do not comply with housing reform laws.

Shot Clocks and Emergency Rebuilding

The Permit Streamlining Act (PSA) has emerged as an important part of the effort to expedite approval of new housing in California. The PSA creates “shot clocks”—that is, time limits—for agencies issuing permits to determine applications’ completeness and make decisions. Several PSA-related bills passed this year.

The most timely bill, AB 818 (Ávila Farías), emerged from the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires in January. AB 818 essentially mandates that local agencies approve or deny permit applications for rebuilding or repairing a residential property after a disaster declared as a local emergency within 10 days of receipt. The bill explicitly covers modular, prefabricated, and detached ADU homes under the same shot clock. AB 818 also waives impact fees for some emergency situations.

Other bills create or alter shot clocks for other agencies involved in the permit approval process. AB 1007 (Rubio) reduces the time for “responsible agencies” (agencies that review an application but do not issue the permit) to comment from 90 to 45 days. AB 301 (Schiavo and Rivas) extends the shot clock for post-entitlement review of housing projects by local agencies established by AB 2234 (Rivas, 2022) to state agencies. Thus, state agencies, like local agencies, will now have 15 days to determine completeness of an application and 30–60 days to review, depending on the size of the project.

Meanwhile, AB 253 (Ward) permits applicants to use a private plan-check reviewer if the local government takes longer than 30 days to finish the permit review process. The bill also requires local governments to post a comprehensive fee schedule for residential building permits online.

AB 920 (Caloza) requires all jurisdictions with a population of 150,000 or more to have an online, central housing application portal by 2028. The new law will cover 38 of the state’s 482 cities and 32 of its 58 counties. However, its reach is limited: many suburban cities in California have a population of between 100,000 and 150,000—34 in all—but they would not be subject to this requirement.

Accessory Dwelling Units

Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) have become a significant source of new housing in California over the past decade as a result of years of incremental legislative reform. Today, ADUs account for about 20 percent of the state’s new housing production.^[2]

This year’s legislative session yielded two important changes that may further accelerate production of both ADU and Junior ADUs (ADUs located within the main structure, not in a separate structure).

Most significantly, AB 1154 (Carrillo) eliminates owner-occupancy requirements for Junior ADUs that have their own sanitary facilities. SB 543 (McNerney) requires local governments to determine whether an ADU or Junior ADU (JADU) application is complete within 15 days or else it will be deemed completed. The bill also specifies that ADUs of under 750 square feet and JADUs of under 500 square feet will not be subject to impact fees.

Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA)

Over the past five years, the legislature has made significant changes to the RHNA process. This year’s session yielded two bills dealing with timing. SB 233 (Seyarto) and AB 1275 (Elhawary) set a variety of timelines for the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) and councils of governments in preparing RHNAs in the 7^th cycle, which is coming up in the late 2020s.

AB 1275 includes a potentially significant link between the RHNA and Sustainable Community Strategies (SCS), which metropolitan planning organizations must include in Regional Transportation Plans. The bill says that the RHNA must be “informed” by SCS. By law (SB 375, Steinberg, 2008), General Plans (including Housing Elements) are not bound by SCS, which often contain different projected land use patterns than the General Plans. So it will be interesting to see what “informed” means when this law is applied in the next RHNA cycle.

Meanwhile, SB 507 (Limón) allows local governments to enter into voluntary agreements with tribes to build housing and have those agreements count toward the jurisdiction’s RHNA target if certain conditions are met, such as the tribe’s commitment to build housing in the current RHNA cycle.

Newsom vetoed AB 650 (Papan), which called for HCD to provide more specificity in its critique of local Housing Elements, saying the bill could “inappropriately shift responsibility for preparing Housing Elements from local governments to HCD.”^[3]

An Outlier

SB 158 (Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review) appears to eliminate a CEQA exemption for a specific proposed housing project in Santa Barbara. The bill reduces the allowable size of Builder’s Remedy projects subject to CEQA exemptions from five to four acres and applies CEQA to Builder’s Remedy projects larger than that in cities and counties of a certain size, which seems customized to apply only to Santa Barbara.

Conclusion

After almost 10 years of legislation promoting housing production, the California legislature continues to move aggressively toward facilitating production—as SB 79, SB 131, and AB 130 show. Beyond that, the legislature has increasingly focused on refinements and expansions of laws that have been passed in the last few years. Whether they are new or building on previous efforts, these laws will likely go a long way toward creating the conditions for more housing production in California in the future.

 

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to the following individuals for their thoughtful review of this commentary: Ben Metcalf, Sarah Karlinsky, Carolina Reid, Muhammad Alameldin, David Garcia, Michael Lane, and Sosan Madanat.

This research does not represent the institutional views of the University of California, Berkeley or of the Terner Center’s funders. Funders do not determine research findings or recommendations in the Terner Center’s research and policy reports.

 

Endnotes

[1] Budget trailer bills are those that are considered and passed by the legislature as part of the annual budget approval process.

[2] Gray, N. (2024). “California ADU Reform: A Retrospective.” California YIMBY. Retrieved from: https://cayimby.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CAY-ADU_Report-2024-v4.pdf

[3] Newsom, G. (2025, October 13). [AB 650 Veto]. Office of the Governor. Retrieved from: https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/AB-650-Veto.pdf