State bill could make high-rise apartments in downtown Sacramento easier to build
Building and paying for high-rise housing developments in parts of downtown Sacramento could become easier under a bill aimed at addressing the state’s housing shortage and shoring up city centers still struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Assembly Bill 2074, which gained an initial victory in the Legislature Wednesday, would require cities to have at least one area near public transportation stops that does not have a density limit and allows for buildings up to at least 450 feet. It would also create a loan fund to help develop projects in those areas.
“We have huge amount of capacity and opportunity in some of these dense areas,” the bill’s author, Assemblymember Matt Haney, D-San Francisco, told the Assembly’s housing committee, “where we do have transit, where we do have a lot of jobs.”
The bill would only apply to cities with at least 400,00 people, and the size of the special areas would be determined by that population. Los Angeles, for example, must have at least 1.5 square miles that meet the certain requirement, under the bill’s current form, according to a committee analysis of the proposal. San Jose would need at least one square mile, and Sacramento would need a half-mile.
Cities could establish height limits of 150 feet and a maximum density of 200 housing units per acre for the majority of the special zones.
Jennifer Singer, a Sacramento spokesperson, said the city does not have a position on the measure, which easily passed out of the committee. It needs to clear several more committees before it goes up for a vote in front of the entire Assembly.
Haney said most of the cities that would be affected by the bill already have areas that allow for higher density housing and that communities would have flexibility on where the zones would be located.
The effort comes after the Legislature last year narrowly passed Senate Bill 79, a controversial measure that required certain cities to allow housing projects near bus, rail and other transit stops and restricted what limits those communities could put on the height and density of those developments. Many legislators and advocates see building homes near transit as an environmentally conscious way to address the state’s housing needs.
Not everyone is behind Haney’s plan.
“Limited public funds should be used not to support mostly market rate housing, but housing that serves the lowest income Californians,” said Natalie Spievack, a lobbyist for Housing California, an organization that pushes for more affordable homes.
Along with the specifics of the plan, Haney said the bill is significant because it has the support of both California YIMBY, an organization that has argued for cutting regulations around housing development, and the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, an influential labor union.
The two sides have disagreed in the past on labor standard requirements in bills meant to speed up home building.
“I hope they get used to working together,” Haney said after the hearing. “Our state would be better off because of it and we’d get more done in this building if labor and housing advocates were on the same side of the table a lot more.”
This story was originally published April 8, 2026 at 4:34 PM with the headline "State bill could make high-rise apartments in downtown Sacramento easier to build."
