Another was designed to turn under-used church parking lots into fonts of new affordable housing.

A third would, according to supporters and opponents alike, “end single-family zoning as we know it.”

Fast-forward to 2025 and this spate of recent California laws, and others like it intended to supercharge the construction of desperately needed housing, have had “limited to no impact on the state’s housing supply.”

That damning conclusion comes from a surprising source: A new report by YIMBY Law, a pro-development nonprofit that would very much like to see these laws work. 

The analysis, released today, studied five state laws passed since 2021 that have swept away regulatory barriers to building apartment buildings and other dense residential developments in places where such housing has been historically barred. 

The laws under review include:

• SB 9 from 2021, which allows people to split their single-family homes into duplexes, thus ending single-family-home-only zoning across California. In practice, according to the report, building permits for only 140 units were issued under the law in 2023.  
• AB 2011 from 2022 was designed to make it easier for developers to convert office parks, strip malls and parking lots into apartment buildings. In 2023, developers on just two projects were given local regulatory approval to start work under the law. In 2024, the total was eight. The report found no projects that have made use of SB 6, a similar bill passed that same year but with stricter labor requirements.
• SB 4 from 2024, the so-called Yes In God’s Backyard law, which lets churches, other houses of worship and some schools to repurpose their land for affordable housing. The report found no takers on that bill too.

“It’s grim,” said Sonja Trauss, executive director of YIMBY Law. Though she acknowledged some of the laws are still new, she blamed their early ineffectiveness on the legislative process which saddled these bills with unworkable requirements and glaring loopholes. 

“Everybody wants a piece,” she said. “The pieces taken out during the process wind up derailing the initial concept.”

What are these requirements and loopholes that have prevented these laws from succeeding? Maybe not surprisingly, they are the frequent objects of critique by YIMBY Law and the Yes In My Backyard movement more generally. 

One is the inclusion of requirements that developers only hire union-affiliated workers or pay their workers higher wages. 

Another are affordability mandates which force developers to sell or rent the units they build at below-market prices.

A third is the strenuous opposition by local governments and the failure of these state laws to override it. In the two years following the passage of SB 9, for example, YIMBY Law tracked 140 local ordinances that, in the view of the report, were “designed to reduce or prevent” the bill from working on the ground. They included tight limits on the size of buildings, affordability requirements, or restrictions on which types of owners can make use of the law. 

Last year, the state Legislature passed a “clean up” bill meant to void some of these local add-ons.

There are plenty of other possible impediments to construction in California, which may explain why these bills have seen such tepid uptake. Sky high interest rates, chronic shortages of construction workers and high material costs (all of which could be exacerbated by current or expected changes to federal tariff, immigration and fiscal policy) all work to make residential housing development a less appealing financial proposition. Insufficient public funds and expected cuts to federal housing programs may weigh down on the affordable housing sector too.

But the report is not the first to point to the preconditions and omissions included in so many of the state’s legislative efforts to goose housing development as the reason for their lack of impact.

In a recent law paper, UC Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf and UC Santa Barbara political scientist Clayton Nall wrote that the relative success of California’s efforts to boost the construction of accessory dwelling units is the exception that proves the rule. Over the last decade, a cavalcade of state laws have stripped local governments of their ability to subject backyard cottage projects with environmental review mandates, significant fees, affordability mandates, union-hire rules, confining size or aesthetic limitations or added parking requirements. 

“The ADU boom stands alone. No other form of housing production took off in California during this period,” the authors wrote. A likely reason why, they argue, is that ADU projects don’t come with nearly as many strings attached as other forms of dense development permitted by various California laws.

In 2023, the state permitted more than 28,000 ADUs, according to state data.

The history of ADU legislation in California is instructive, said Trauss. “It took about like five years of revisions before they were really getting going.”

The YIMBY Law report is based on self-reported permitting data submitted by cities and counties to the California Housing and Community Development department. The nonprofit complemented that messy database with its own internal collection harvested from its own litigation and activism. That means the data on what is actually getting built — and therefore how effective any of these laws really are — is imperfect. 

That fact isn’t lost on many legislators. 

The Assembly housing committee’s first hearing of the year was dedicated not to new legislation, but to evaluating the state’s existing “pro-production” laws.

“We shouldn’t just keep passing more and more bills just because we can,” Chair Matt Haney, a San Francisco Democrat, said. “We should actually look at what is working, why it’s working, how we can do more of what’s working and if it’s not working, we should do more to fix it or change it.”

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If California wants to build its way out of its long term housing shortage, plenty of things stand in its way in 2024: high interest rates, sluggish local approval processes and a persistent shortage of skilled construction workers, among others. But a slew of housing bills from the 2023 legislative session going into effect on Jan. 1 promise to ease or eliminate some of the other burdens.

Among the batch of fresh housing laws are an especially high profile set by San Francisco Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener: Senate Bill 423 re-ups and expands a law that speeds up the approval of apartment buildings in which some units are set aside for lower income Californians, while SB 4 does something similar for affordable housing on property owned by religious institutions and non-profit colleges. Wiener’s two new laws set the tone of housing legislation in 2023, where ripping out barriers and boosting incentives for housing construction emerged as the dominant theme. “The era of saying no to housing is coming to an end,” Wiener said in a statement after the two bills were signed.

That was especially true for developers of purpose-built affordable housing, per policy analysts at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation in an end-of-year legislative summary. Lawmakers, the analysts wrote, in the continuation of a “remarkable run over the last several years,” gave “more flexibility to exceed or override local zoning, greater certainty on the timing and likelihood of planning approvals, and substantial relief from (environmental) review and litigation.” “I’ve never seen this type of consensus in the Legislature before,” said Michael Lane, state policy director for the San Francisco-based urban planning think-tank SPUR. Or as Politico put it succinctly in a headline from late summer: “YIMBYs” — short for so-called yes in my backyard activists who push for more building — “are winning.”

Other notable victories from that camp include AB 1287, a bill by San Diego Democratic Assemblymember David Alvarez, that will give developers permission to build denser, taller buildings if they set aside additional units for middle-income earners, and SB 684, which will make it easier to divide up large parcels of land for modest clusters of townhomes and cottages. It wasn’t entirely smooth sailing for the pro-development caucus. That second bill, by Merced Democratic Sen. Anna Caballero, will only apply to parts of the state already zoned for multifamily housing. Historic single family home neighborhoods got a last minute carve out, leading one of the bill’s sponsors to take the unusual step of asking Gov. Gavin Newsom to veto their own bill (he didn’t).

That eleventh hour switcheroo demonstrated that though the political coalition opposed to state pro-density policies are on the back foot, they are still a force to contend with. That coalition of local governments, certain organized labor groups and environmental justice advocates also prevented housing supply boosters from entirely rewriting the state’s signature environmental law, as some advocates had hoped earlier this year. But a host of new laws will make it more difficult for opponents of proposed housing projects to use the California Environmental Quality Act to delay certain types of housing projects. Oakland Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks wrote a bill that instructs judges not to consider the noise of future residents as a pollutant in need of environmental mitigation, a response to one of the most headline grabbing California court decisions of the year.

Wicks’ bill, which went into effect in September, may have gotten much of the media attention, but other, similarly intentioned bills that will become law in 2024 may prove more consequential. One, SB 439, by Berkeley Democratic Sen. Nancy Skinner will make it easier for courts to slap down “frivolous” environmental lawsuits, a second, AB 1449, by Alvarez will shield many affordable housing projects from environmental review and a third, AB 1633, by San Francisco Democratic Assemblymember Phil Ting will force cities to either approve or deny a project’s environmental review within a set time limit. “This just points out the reason we need to continue to have this fight at the state level,” said Ting in a recent webinar touting the new policy. “We know we have these two million homes to get built and they’re not getting built fast enough…Local governments just aren’t getting the job done.” Ting has also carved out a reputation as a champion of accessory dwelling units. Sometimes called in-law units or granny flats, these pint-sized add ons have become an increasingly popular way for local governments to meet their state-set housing production goals.

They’ve also come to make up a significant share of California’s new housing stock in recent years. That’s largely thanks to a suite of recent state laws that make it increasingly difficult for local governments to say no to these developments or to tack on costly requirements. Starting in 2024, a new bill by Ting may help to reshape the existing ADU market. AB 1033 will let homeowners spin off their ADUs as separate for-sale condos, so long as local governments opt in.

That’s a big “if,” but the condoization law has many backyard cottage builders optimistic about the future, even at a time when California’s residential construction industry appears to be slowing. “I am deeply concerned about the market and how few young buyers can actually afford to get into the game anymore,” said Seth Phillips, founder of the Los Angeles-based development and consulting firm ADU Gold. “If they do it right, if they really get the processes right…young homebuyers could have a whole bunch of new stuff to pick from, which basically doesn’t exist right now.”

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