California bill allowing more housing near transit stops narrowly passes Senate

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State Sen. Scott Wiener’s bill to legalize mid-rise apartments around major transit stops squeezed through the state Senate Tuesday, five years after his previous attempt died in the same chamber.

Senate Bill 79 would allow taller, denser projects — whether housing or commercial — to be built within a half-mile of some transit stops, with the most generous bonuses reserved for projects near major systems like BART, Caltrain and parts of the Los Angeles Metro. The maximum height and density would depend on how close a project is to a transit stop, and the type of transit it’s near.

Most projects would likely be buildings between four and six stories, said Michael Lane, state policy director with urban policy think tank SPUR, which backed the bill.

The bill would also allow projects built on land owned by transit agencies to bypass the California Environmental Quality Act, a law that critics say often leads to yearslong development delays, if they include an improvement to the transit infrastructure.

In a nail-biting session in which the bill at first didn’t have enough support — that is, until some members showed up at the last minute to pass it — SB 79 received the exact number of votes it needed to pass the state Senate. It still needs to get through the Assembly to become law.

But its passage in the first chamber reflects a potential shift in legislators’ willingness to push through housing bills over the opposition of cities — and even some of its Democratic members. The shift illustrates how housing affordability has become an increasingly vital political issue — particularly in the Bay Area, where all but one of the senators representing the region supported the bill. California renters continue to be burdened at some of the highest rates in the nation, with the cost of building housing far above that of other states.

Wiener’s last attempt at a transit-oriented housing bill, which was more expansive and would have also allowed for denser housing near job centers, died in the Senate by three votes in 2020. The lawmaker said that this time, the legislation is “nuanced and surgical,” focusing largely on major transit systems. Smaller transit systems, such as those without dedicated bus lanes or signal priority, wouldn’t be covered by the bill.

“California urgently needs to build more homes to bring down costs, and building them near transit provides our public transportation systems with an urgently needed infusion of new riders,” Wiener said. “This is an idea whose time has come.”

A portion of the homes built through SB 79, would have to be set aside for lower-income households, as determined by either local law or state density requirements.

Supporters of the bill, which include a number of California YIMBY groups, said SB 79 would simultaneously address housing, transit and the environment. It would allow for housing within walking distance of trains, light rails and buses, they argued, reducing residents’ reliance on cars and giving a boost to the state’s struggling transit systems.

“These are not skyscrapers that we are asking for,” Lane of SPUR said. “It's just that kind of density that can help our transit systems work throughout the Bay, or even outside of the larger cities where we do have that robust transit.”

But dozens of California cities, including Napa, Palo Alto, San Rafael and Walnut Creek, staunchly oppose the bill, saying it would effectively contradict their own housing plans by letting developers build at a scale they never intended for their neighborhoods.

“There is already accumulating data that purport to show that overriding local control like this, given that most local housing elements include state housing mandates, has not resulted in needed housing,” Alice Fredericks, legislative committee chair of the Marin County Council of Mayors and Councilmembers, said in a statement. “SB 79 further eviscerates local control without even pretending to be in service of filling the need for housing.”

Wiener said he took such concerns into account. SB 79 would allow cities and counties to create an “alternative plan” that trims the density around one transit stop in exchange for boosting density along another, as long as this doesn’t lower the number of feasible units. And whatever homes were built would generally still have to follow other local development rules and go through environmental review, unless the developer used a separate streamlining law such as SB 423.

Still, some of the bill's strongest critics were Wiener’s fellow Democrats. Some said on Tuesday that California’s transit systems, many of which are still struggling to regain ridership post-COVID, are not yet robust enough to justify building housing nearby. Others expressed concern that the bill doesn’t do enough to prevent displacement or build subsidized housing. If members of the state Assembly take those concerns seriously, they could lead SB 79 to the same fate as Wiener’s last transit-oriented housing bill.