A Radical Rollback Of Zoning Laws In California

The main disagreement I have with the summary below is that a law from the 1990s is not a "very old law," a term that should be reserved for laws such as the 1792 law establishing which state owns the Ohio River (it is Kentucky).

On the merits, rolling back zoning regulation is a great idea, especially in California where restrictive zoning laws are one of the main reasons it has most of the most expensive housing markets in the nation.

An old law may eliminate the housing-related zoning ordinances of the vast majority of cities throughout the Bay Area. Yes, seriously. It’ll occur this Wednesday, too. Developers will be allowed to propose housing (and only housing) at any height and any density in a city, so long as at least 20% of the homes in the proposed building are deed-restricted to low income residents who make at or less than 80% the area median income. Alternatively, 100% affordable to moderate income residents where rents don’t exceed 120% area median income.

The first city to have the builder’s remedy thrust upon them was Santa Monica who failed to adopt a valid housing element. What happened next shocked California: the residential zoning for the city was suspended by law.

The whole residential zoning.

A town which in the last eight years approved 1,600 new homes and within a week, saw a dozen development proposals filed that put 4,000 new homes in the pipeline with over 800 of them deed-restricted for low income households. They couldn’t reject a single home, either. It didn’t even go through a long city council process, the project approvals were merely administrative by the planning department who verified if the project is sound in non-density or height regulations. The city councils and zoning boards had zero authority to deny the projects. Zero.

This shocked California political pundits, news media and neighborhood organizations. This had never happened before. Were more cities next? Yes, the rest of the state of California. But it was brought about by a combinations of new and old laws that got us here. So a brief history:

The “builder’s remedy” is a very old law from the 1990s known as the Housing Accountability Act (HAA). Cities since the 1970s have been required to design housing elements (formerly known as municipal master plans) that essentially sketch out the residential zoning of a city. During the ‘70s, cities were all about an anti-population growth and downzoned the capacity for future housing by the millions in housing units, which pretty quickly led to a housing shortage.

From here.