By Maria Patiño Gutierrez, Deputy Director of Policy and Advocacy
July 31, 2025
California needs to build more affordable housing. But we need to be careful about how we do that to ensure housing is truly affordable and that renters aren’t displaced in the process. This is why we’re concerned about SB 79, a bill currently working its way through the state legislature. If passed, SB 79 would permit developers to build more multifamily housing near public transit rail and bus stops. It would also allow transportation agencies to build housing and commercial developments on land they control.
On its face, SB 79 sounds great. Not only will the bill allow California to build more housing, but it will make it easier for more people to use more public transit, increasing low-income residents’ mobility and access to resources and potentially decreasing traffic congestion and pollution.
But will SB 79 generate enough affordable housing? Unfortunately, not as written. Projects under SB 79 will either need to fulfill a local inclusionary housing or affordable housing fee requirement, or, where there are no such requirements, meet a minimum affordability threshold set out in the law that could be fewer than 6% of the total units after extra density from the state’s Density Bonus Law (DBL) is included. (The DBL already requires jurisdictions to provide increased density, incentives and concessions, and other benefits to developers who agree to include affordable housing in their projects.)
In fact, in many instances, SB 79 would actually undermine our ability to build more affordable units.
On one hand, SB 79 would undermine local affordable housing incentive programs, meaning in some areas it would provide even more perks to developers than existing policies while requiring a lower percentage of affordable housing. This is why we are advocating for an affordability framework to guide SB 79 projects: we believe the more incentives and benefits developers get from taxpayers, the more affordable housing they should have to build. Developers should not be allowed to double-count the affordable units required under SB 79 towards a density bonus that would allow them to build an even larger project with no additional affordable housing.
On the other hand, in areas without inclusionary zoning policies, SB 79 would undermine the DBL. That’s because developers will be able to overlap the requirements laid out by the two laws rather than stack them. We think they should have to meet the SB 79 affordability requirements, and then have to add additional affordable units to get DBL perks.
How would this play out in Los Angeles? The city recently adopted the Citywide Housing Incentive Program (CHIP), a mixed-income incentive program offering large density increases for projects that include affordable units, particularly near major transit stops. The CHIP incentives are tailored to local conditions, with greater incentives provided in high-opportunity areas and higher affordability levels required in neighborhoods with the strongest rental markets. Although SB 79 recently has been amended to temporarily exempt some sites covered by the CHIP, the exact effect of these amendments is unclear, and the result could be that most of the upzoning accomplished by SB 79 during the 6th Housing Element cycle would occur in lower-density low-income neighborhoods. This would undermine one of the CHIP’s core goals of shifting mixed-income development into higher-resource areas to address historic patterns of exclusion, mitigate displacement risk in lower-resource areas, and stabilize vulnerable communities.
For these reasons, we currently oppose SB 79 unless it is amended to require developers to include an amount of affordable housing units in their projects that is commensurate with the level of benefits they are getting and allow cities greater flexibility to shift density towards higher-opportunity areas.
