New bills could ease rules on building and student housing. What does it mean for SLO County?
New housing legislation passed by the California State Legislature could make it easier to build homes in San Luis Obispo County and other parts of the state, activists and policymakers say.
Several bills backed by pro-housing growth group California Yes In My Back Yard (YIMBY) passed the state legislature on Aug. 29.
They’re aimed at loosening building restrictions on parking, commercial zoning and constructing student housing at universities.
The bills now await Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature.
Should they be signed into law, local YIMBY organizers Kevin Buchanan and Krista Jeffries said the bills could represent a significant step in the right direction for California housing.
Legislation ‘opens up a lot of potential’ for denser, mixed-use housing
One of the bills passed by the California legislature, Assembly Bill 2011, allows for the construction of affordable and mixed-income housing on commercially-zoned land, which would allow developers to build denser and closer to businesses.
Because many California cities have already fully built out residential development zones in their urban cores, Buchanan said, they have very little room to grow.
That could change with AB 2011, which was authored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks.
Allowing for more mixed-use development on commercial land circumvents many of the economic and social motives behind the zoning practices that historically have shaped most American cities, Buchanan said.
In most of the United States, municipalities typically follow a standardized set of zoning practices established by the 1926 Supreme Court case Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., which normalized exclusionary zoning for most parts of the country, Buchanan said.
This approach had the side effect of creating the suburban sprawl characteristic of many U.S. municipalities, he said.
“In the end, it comes down to segregation ,whether you want to call it segregation by race or by use or by economics,” Buchanan said.
According to Buchanan, “A lot of the modern resistance (to mixed use development) comes from either being used to a car-oriented development pattern or fear of taller, more dense buildings within cities.”
However, he said, more mixed-use developments mean that “the services that people need (are) closer to their homes. They also don’t have to rely on driving a car everywhere.”
Lower dependence on cars is better for the environment, he said, adding that the bill “opens up a lot of potential” for a more efficient housing practices.
Downtown San Luis Obispo and parts of Morro Bay and Paso Robles, which already have more mixed-use development than most of the county, could see such projects increase if AB 2011 passes, Jeffries said.
Jeffries said that increasing mixed-use developments will likely lead to cheaper housing in the long run.
As new housing is built in premium locations such as downtown SLO, older housing may become more available and, by extension, more affordable to more people, she said.
“When you don’t have enough new (housing) stock, the old stock becomes more prohibitively expensive,” she said. “If you have two houses that are almost identical on the same street, in the same neighborhood, and one of them was built 40 years ago and the other one was built last week, the one built last week is always gonna be more expensive.”
Another bill that could impact SLO County and its growing population is Assembly Bill 2221, which closes some loopholes in state laws governing accessory dwelling units that have allowed counties to prohibit the construction of ADUs.
According to the California YIMBY website, the bill would allow the simultaneous construction of ADUs along new multifamily housing — as opposed to forcing builders to circle back and construct their ADUs after the main structures are completed.
The bill also clarifies terminology that YIMBY said allows for “the abuse of technical requirements like ‘front setbacks’ or intentional misinterpretations of what qualifies as a ‘permitting agency.’”
Bill cuts down on parking requirements near public transit
Another bill passed by legislators, Assembly Bill 2097, eliminates “any minimum automobile parking requirement on any residential, commercial, or other development project,” provided the new building is within half a mile of high-quality public transit.
The bill defines high-quality transit as featuring transportation vehicles that arrive once every 15 minutes or less.
Buchanan and Jeffries said some public transit systems in SLO County have rides that arrive less frequently, which may disqualify most of the county from the parking exemptions.
“We need some sort of transit-oriented jumpstart for the Central Coast,” Jeffries said. “People keep waiting for transit to get better before we add housing, but that’s not how it works.”
Assemblymember Laura Friedman (D-District 43), who authored AB 2097, said larger cities with more developed public transit systems, such as Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Francisco, will likely see benefits from the bill should it pass.
“We’re trying to get back to those walkable, bikable inner cores, and we’re doing it right near transit to encourage people to use that transit,” Friedman said. “Of course, cities are free to create municipal parking lots, to add more buses, to add a trolley — whatever they need to do — but we want to stop sprawling around our major transit.”
AB 2097 also removes the burden of building more parking from commercial buildings along with homes, Friedman said.
YIMBY: Senate bill repeals restrictions for student housing
aictions on the construction of student and faculty housing on land owned by the Univiersity of California and California State University systems, or community colleges.
According to the website of state Sen. Scott Wiener’s, who authored the bill, this would eliminate redundancy in environmental regulations required for student and faculty housing developments.
“Students should not be living out of their cars because the housing shortage makes housing scarce and unaffordable,” Wiener said in his statement on the bill’s passage. “Stable housing is critical in allowing students to get a quality education. We can’t keep punishing the next generation by refusing to build more housing. SB 886 will allow public schools to support students by creating more places to live on campus.”
In many cases, having to meet CEQA requirements can cancel or delay new development, the website said, which raises the barrier to adding new housing to the college system.
In SLO, Jeffries said, building more on-campus student housing could help alleviate many of the issues caused by students’ presence in the off-campus housing market.
“We (YIMBY) supported that a whole heck of a lot because students put a strain on SLO’s housing stock,” Jeffries said. ”Housing for students is always a force for good.”
While local YIMBYs lobbied hard for SB 886, Jeffries said, state Sen. John Laird, who represents SLO County as part of the 17th Senate district, was the only “no” vote on the bill in the California State Senate.
Laird told The Tribune that the right way to address any university housing shortfalls is funding building projects — noting the $2 billion in housing construction funding the UC system received this year along with $1.5 billion in housing funding in 2021.
“Public universities in California already have an exemption from local taxation, and additionally the University of California system is exempt from local land use policies,” Laird said. “Adding to that by completely exempting them from individual project environmental review would completely exempt them from project-specific transportation and water mitigations.”
Some universities still owe mitigation funds to local entities, he said, so loosening those regulations is “not the way to go.”
This story was originally published September 15, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
