I'm a constituent in your district and a housing researcher at UCLA, and I urge you to vote yes on SB 79 and AB 647 when they come before you.
In our work at UCLA we've studied the effects of various state housing reforms, especially efforts to increase housing supply, affordability, and diversity in higher-opportunity neighborhoods in the Los Angeles metro area. Broadly speaking, I've seen two trends.
The first is that laws requiring or encouraging cities to plan for more housing are generally ineffective. When cities comply (and they often don't), they usually do the bare minimum. Even when cities go above and beyond — as Los Angeles arguably did with its recently-approved citywide housing incentive program (CHIP) — they fall far short of what needs to be done to end the state's housing affordability crisis. There are good reasons to believe that state legislators can pass stronger housing reforms than local officials, without incurring the same amount of political backlash. The architect of Oregon's package of housing reforms is now the state's governor, for example. Substantively, state intervention is also important because it ensures that all jurisdictions pull their weight and contribute to solving the housing crisis. When everyone is required to do something, no one has to do a great deal or bear a disproportionate and unfair burden.
The second trend is that direct state intervention into the types of housing cities must allow can be extremely effective. After passing two major laws in 2016, permits for accessory dwelling units have increased roughly 25-fold in California, from around 1,300 to nearly 29,000 in 2023. In Los Angeles, ADU permits grew from fewer than 100 in 2016 to over 9,000 in 2024 — a 10,000% increase over eight years. This incredible transformation is the result of continuous effort by the state legislature to make ADU approvals faster, simpler, and less expensive.
Unfortunately, we have not seen a similar increase in multifamily housing production — and multifamily housing is what we need most. Since 2014, California has consistently permitted roughly 50,000 to 60,000 units each year in projects with five or more units. Texas, with 70% of California's population, permits more than twice as much total housing and 60% more multifamily homes annually (see HUD’s building permit database).
There are many reasons multifamily development has not meaningfully increased in California, but a major one is that we have taken a different approach to encouraging multifamily than we have with ADUs. For ADUs we have provided standardized rules and made it possible for people to build homes without having decades of experience, years of idle time, political connections, and tens of millions of dollars (or more) of financial backing. These are still table stakes for multifamily development in California. At the smaller multifamily project scale, SB 9 is burdened by infeasible ownership and subdivision requirements, among other shortcomings. At the larger scale, laws like AB 2011 and SB 35 include affordability and labor requirements that leave few projects financially feasible, and few projects being built results in a small number of affordable units, limited benefits to workers, and continued undersupply and unaffordability of housing more generally.
Cities play an important role in trying new policies, but only the state can scale them up enough to end the housing crisis. State reforms succeed when they make building housing the priority, recognizing that other requirements are desirable but not more important than producing homes for people to live in. And when we build more housing, subsidizing rents and income-restricted development gets cheaper and tradespeople are in higher demand, increasing their power in the market. This year's housing legislation, and SB 79 and AB 647 in particular, suggest to me that we're finally coming to grips with these lessons.
California passed its first ADU law (SB 1534) in 1982, and many more were signed into law over the next three decades. It wasn't until 2016, with the passage of SB 1069 and AB 2299, that these reforms finally broke through and began producing homes in meaningful quantities. I believe that SB 79 and AB 647 can do for multifamily homes what the 2016 laws did for ADUs, and I strongly urge you to support them and protect them against changes that would blunt their effects.
Sincerely,
Shane Phillips