New Pathways to Encourage Housing Production: A Review of California’s Recent Housing Legislation

In this brief, we interview planners and land use lawyers to gain an early understanding about the extent to which the new laws are influencing housing production. Making a connection between new laws and housing production is difficult; data can be hard to gather, and a range of other issues affect production, such as cost and availability of land, labor, and construction supplies. This brief is therefore not meant to be an evaluation of the effectiveness of these state laws. Rather, it is an effort to characterize the breadth and goals of recent legislation, and to assess practitioner experiences with using these laws to further housing production.  The report provides an overview of California’s housing system, catalogs recent housing legislation, and summarizes themes from interviews with stakeholders across the state.

Read the full brief here.

In addition to the brief, we have released an accompanying online tool that allows users to search and sort legislation passed since 2016 by categories such as year, code section, and topic area. Find the interactive tool here.