With California far below targets for new residential development, recent state legislation aims to improve on earlier accessory dwelling unit (ADU) measures, reduce parking requirements, and streamline housing permits in existing commercial buildings.
SB 897, a bill from state Sen. Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, and co-sponsored by the Bay Area Council, is the culmination of several years work, during which more and more homeowners have seen the benefits of ADUs, Louis Mirante, vice president of public policy with the Bay Area Council, told the Northern California Record.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who campaigned on a pledge to build more than 3.5 million new housing units, signed the bill on Sept. 28.
It’s estimated California needs at least 3 million new housing units to keep pace with demand, Mirante said.
“The reason the council has been so focused on SB 897 is that we continually poll our members, who tend to be the larger employers in the Bay Area, about what challenges they’re having, and they consistently tell us that housing is their number one public policy challenge,” Mirante said. “It's a challenge for them to recruit and retain employees. We’ve been focused on ADUs because we’ve had a lot of success in building housing through ADUs. They’ve been shown to dramatically increase housing production.”
Recent Census Bureau data shows San Francisco’s population down 6.3 percent; San Mateo is down 3 percent.
Since the first ADU measure, SB 1069, passed in 2016, the number of ADUs built has grown to more than 20,000 per year, Mirante said.
Another bill, AB 2097, from Assemblymember Laura Friedman, D-Glendale, is designed to reduce parking minimums, which aren’t always based on need but on ratios. In some areas, there may be three parking spaces for every car.
“When we build too much parking, we’re also under-investing in transit,” Mirante said, adding that the construction money to build unused parking can be more efficiently used to address the affordable housing crisis.
Mirante also described AB 2011, from Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, as an important housing reform law passed this year. It exempts projects that meet certain requirements from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which is frequently used by local interest groups to delay or deny new housing development.
“AB 2011 is going to help with some of the lawsuit reform because it creates a streamlined process for reviewing housing,” Mirante said. “And that process is, we hope, going to reduce the number of instances where somebody like an aggrieved neighbor can sue the project; it’s hoped AB 2011 will make significant progress in that direction.”