A Few California Housing Bills Actually Cut Red Tape This Year. Surfers and Small Landlords Alike Should Notice, and Say So Out Loud.

Faster ADU electrical hookups, capped demolition fees, streamlined CEQA review for infill housing. None of it is glamorous. All of it matters more than most of what makes headlines.

CALIFORNIA – Amid a legislative session dominated by headline fights over rail overruns and gas price regulation, a genuinely notable and underreported wave of housing deregulation bills has moved through Sacramento this year with broad, often bipartisan floor support, the kind of quiet legislative progress that rarely generates coverage proportional to its actual, eventual impact on housing costs for ordinary Californians.

The specifics are worth naming individually, because the cumulative effect of small, targeted deregulation is easy to dismiss piecemeal and considerably harder to dismiss once the full list is read together. SB 1117 removes an arbitrary financial penalty many jurisdictions currently impose on accessory dwelling units over 750 square feet, directly lowering the cost of exactly the kind of modest, incremental housing supply libertarian-leaning housing advocates have pushed for consistently. SB 1196 mandates faster electrical connection timelines for those same units, addressing a bottleneck that has, in practice, delayed completed ADU projects by months even after all other permitting was finished. SB 1036 caps fees jurisdictions can charge for demolitions and utility connections, closing off a common local revenue-extraction tactic that has added unpredictable cost to renovation and rebuild projects statewide.

AB 1070 allows smaller residential buildings of three to ten units to use the simpler, less costly Residential Code rather than the considerably more expensive Commercial Code currently required, a change with real potential to make small-scale, “missing middle” multifamily construction meaningfully more viable for builders who currently face code compliance costs disproportionate to a project of that modest scale. AB 253 introduces genuine accountability into the permit review process itself, requiring jurisdictions to report how many residential permits get reviewed by public staff versus private plan checkers, and deeming permits automatically approved if an agency fails to respond within a defined window, a direct, structural check on the kind of indefinite bureaucratic delay that has quietly killed countless housing projects without any formal denial ever being issued.

Separately, and arguably most significantly, sweeping CEQA streamlining under AB 130 and SB 131 took effect this year, expanding categorical exemptions for qualifying infill housing, childcare facilities, and several other categories of development, while capping public hearing requirements and limiting the scope of the administrative record available for litigation challenges. California’s environmental review law has functioned for decades as one of the single most effective tools available to any well-resourced opponent, competitor, or simple obstructionist neighbor seeking to delay or kill a housing project through litigation rather than through any genuine environmental concern, a dynamic well documented across the political spectrum by researchers who otherwise disagree about nearly everything else in housing policy.

None of these reforms individually solves California’s housing crisis, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. Local jurisdictions retain enormous discretionary authority that state-level reform cannot fully preempt, and implementation will determine whether these provisions produce genuine change or simply shift obstruction to new procedural friction points local governments have not yet been closed off from using. But the direction matters, and it represents a meaningfully different posture from a legislature that has, for most of the past several decades, treated new mandates on housing construction as costless political wins with no acknowledged tradeoff against the state’s own worsening affordability crisis.

Advocates of limited, accountable government should say clearly when a legislature does something right, not only when it does something wrong. This year’s housing deregulation wave, modest individually, substantial in aggregate, deserves that acknowledgment, alongside continued pressure to keep cutting the much larger stack of regulatory cost still standing between California families and an affordable place to live.

Small landlords and modest-scale property owners, who lack the in-house legal and permitting staff larger institutional developers routinely maintain, stand to benefit disproportionately from provisions like the automatic-approval deadline in AB 253, which removes the specific tool, indefinite bureaucratic silence, that has historically favored whichever party in a permitting dispute has the resources to simply wait the process out.

Housing advocates on the political left and right have both, for once, found genuine common ground in supporting several of these specific provisions, a rare enough occurrence in California housing politics that it deserves to be highlighted rather than glossed over as an unremarkable procedural footnote.

The next test for this reform wave will come at the local level, where city councils and planning departments retain wide latitude to interpret and implement state mandates in ways that either genuinely accelerate housing delivery or quietly reintroduce the same friction the state legislature just voted to remove, a dynamic worth tracking closely rather than assuming the legislative victory alone guarantees the practical outcome.

Builders who spoke with this outlet described cautious optimism tempered by hard-won experience: previous rounds of state housing reform have, in several documented cases, been substantially narrowed in practical effect by local implementation choices, a pattern this year’s advocates are determined not to see repeated.

That determination alone will not be sufficient. It will take sustained oversight, from legislators, from journalists, and from the builders and homeowners directly affected, to ensure this year’s genuine progress survives contact with the same local permitting offices that have absorbed decades of prior reform efforts without fully passing their benefits through to the families this legislation was written for.

For related commentary on regulatory reform actually reducing cost rather than adding to it, see Funniest News Headlines and Funny News This Week, plus further analysis at Comical News Stories.

Additional reading at Satire And Politics.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/