Comment by ggm
2 days ago
... near transit hubs.
It should be a net positive if it doesn't die in the courts for every single proposal.
It's also not enough by itself but Rome wasn't built in a day.
2 days ago
... near transit hubs.
It should be a net positive if it doesn't die in the courts for every single proposal.
It's also not enough by itself but Rome wasn't built in a day.
This law (and other recent CA YIMBY laws) don't create much surface area to sue or slow a project:
* The approvals are designed to be "ministerial", meaning there is no discretion on whether to approve or not. If the project meets the objective criteria spelled out in the law, it must be approved.
* If the city doesn't approve in a limited time window, it's deemed "approved" by default.
* Ministerial approval protects the project from CEQA lawsuits. CEQA requires the government to consider the environment when making decisions. When the approval is ministerial, the government doesn't make any decisions, so there is no CEQA process to sue against.
California spent decades digging this hole and it's gonna take decades to dig themselves out, even with bills like these.
But that's still better than refusing to fix the problem.
With the CEQA reform from a couple months ago, those court cases should be lessened a bit.
SB 79 is just the latest in a long sequence of pro-housing bills to get passed in California in the last 5-6 years. I’d rather them do one or two small winnable battles per year than bet it all on a giant do-everything bill which might galvanize more opposition.
Frankly, this strategy seems to be a good one considering what a winning streak CA YIMBYs have been on.
There may never be another transit hub built
> ... near transit hubs.
I don't understand this narrative that California has been pushing the last few years - basically, "There's a bus stop in the neighborhood, therefore we can add a bunch of new housing without doing any other infrastructure upgrades." I just don't see it. What I do see after new housing is added is insufferable traffic and no parking - and empty buses.
Probably 99% of bus stations aren't relevant for SB79. I think the goal is to make it more like dense cities outside of California (NYC, Paris, Tokyo, etc) where car ownership can be unnecessary or even a liability. Public transit is a lot more scalable than cars. A train that only has 50 people on it may look nearly empty but it's better than having 40 cars on the road.
You are mistaken on the basic facts of where this permits more hosing.
You also do now understand people in urban areas and their desires. For example look at Seattle, which has added a lot of population, but only added 1 car per 30 new people:
https://www.theurbanist.org/2025/09/07/while-seattle-populat...
For a few generations, 99% of housing that was built was car dependent. That's not what the market wants. So when options are provided that allow living without a car, people flock to it.
While I wholly support density and bike everywhere myself, I don’t know if “people are getting poorer in Seattle” is the win “The Urbanist” thinks it is.
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HN has one particular view, which is to keep increasing density without care for any other factor. But density does change neighborhoods and quality of life in many negative ways, including the example you shared. Someone may get to move into that area at a lower price. But someone else loses what they had. I don’t understand why those who demand lower priced housing are more valid. And too often, the response here is to attack anyone who brings up the negatives of high density living (edit: here come the oh-so-predictable downvotes). I suspect that is partly ideological, and partly due to age skewing younger here. But I wish there was more tolerance for mid-size towns that don’t get density forced on them, but can stay a healthy balanced size because that’s what the locals want to hold onto for their own quality of life.
The people who want small, mid-sized towns are free to live literally anywhere they want outside major metro areas. There's 90+% of the state by land area left to them.
This discussion is and has always been centered around the housing crisis in urban centers, where it's been illegal to build density for decades. This has caused issues where those urban centers can't afford for people to provide critical services ( like teachers, laborers, medical staff, social services workers, etc) because housing simply doesn't exist at a price they can afford. Unless the suggestion is to make do with crumbling community services, housing reform is mandatory.
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