Will the YIMBY ‘Holy Grail’ Deliver an LA Building Boom?
Supporters of the California zoning reform bill SB 79 say it will unleash a wave of multistory apartment buildings. In low-rise-loving Los Angeles, that could be a tall order.
By Patrick Sisson
November 11, 2025 at 6:00 AM PST
When California Governor Gavin Newsom signed State Bill 79 into law on Oct. 10, supporters of the pro-housing “Yes In My Backyard” movement celebrated a legislative victory that had been called a YIMBY “holy grail.” By legalizing multistory apartments near transit stops in the state’s most urbanized counties — and crucially, in areas formerly zoned for single-family homes — SB 79 was hailed as a huge step toward closing California’s longstanding affordable housing gap.
Along with recent reform of the state’s infamous project-delaying environmental review law, CEQA, SB 79 boosters like the advocacy group California YIMBY say that the legislation can unlock the promised goal of “housing abundance” when it comes into effect on July 1, 2026.
Now comes the hard part — especially in places like Los Angeles. There, SB 79 faces fierce opposition from community groups who see it as a destroyer of neighborhoods, and from lawmakers like Mayor Karen Bass and a majority of the city council who believe it usurps local control.
A multistory apartment building under construction in Los Angeles in 2025. The city has so far failed to meet its goals for building new housing units.Photographer: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
It also raised a new concern for YIMBYs around building design and aesthetics, according to California YIMBY president and chief executive officer Brian Hanlon. The legislation allows apartment buildings of up to nine stories near transit stations — a typology unfamiliar to much of this low-rise suburban metro whose most famous affordable housing format, the utilitarian postwar “dingbat,” never rose above three floors. If a generation of big, boxy, unsightly SB 79 projects go up and sour public opinion about increasing density, it’ll lead to additional pushback, he fears.
“Neighbors would welcome new buildings if they felt they were honoring local vernacular and more aesthetically pleasing,” said Hanlon.
In response, Hanlon said that Ed Mendoza, who works at the Metropolitan Abundance Project, a think tank started by California YIMBY, began reaching out to architects, urban planners and others in mid-October seeking to create a multipart proposal — a kind of YIMBY beautification policy framework to improve building design.
Making SB 79 buildings beautiful is just one of several challenges awaiting YIMBY leaders, local lawmakers, developers and others who are invested in translating the law into progress on housing affordability. They will also have to overcome entrenched community opposition, building codes that make development more costly, and the often-glacial pace of the building and permitting process in cities like Los Angeles. The YIMBYs might have won this round, but California’s NIMBYs remain formidable opponents.
A new report by Hilgard Economics put a damper on the excitement. The authors concluded that high costs and financing challenges mean the bill is “unlikely to trigger a new wave of construction.” Residential permitting in LA this year through September is down 11% compared to the same time last year, due to high interest rates, policy uncertainty, and a cautious regulatory environment.
Scott Epstein, director of policy and research for Abundant Housing LA, acknowledges the task ahead. “I see this bill as necessary but not sufficient means to achieve housing abundance in California,” he said. “There’s a lot of other work that we have to do.”
Looking Up
Submitted by California State Senator Scott Wiener, SB 79 has been a capstone in the San Francisco YIMBY legislator’s years-long effort to get more housing built in a state that by many estimates needs at least 1.5 million new homes. The bill aims to supercharge transit-oriented development — zoning rules that encourage density around public transit — by overruling local zoning and the decisions of municipal governments that have largely failed to meet state-mandated housing production goals. A recent analysis from the University of Southern California found the city of Los Angeles has fallen far short of approving and building the 456,000 new homes needed between 2021 and 2029, with units for low and moderate-income residents pacing well behind those for more affluent Angelenos.
City of Los Angeles Falls Behind Housing Goals
New home production for all income groups is running well short of what's needed.
Sources: Current Regional Housing Needs Assessment, Southern California Council of Governments. Housing Element Annual Progress Reports via California Housing & Community Development
Courtesy USC Neighborhood Data for Social Change
The potential is enormous, the bill’s backers say. In Los Angeles, the new law would immediately allow for roughly 448,000 new housing units to be built, according to an analysis by the LA transit advocacy organization Streets for All. (Over the next decade, about a million more units would be possible, as exclusions in areas of high fire risk expire.)
An AI-powered zoning analysis by a startup called Deepblocks determined that roughly 20% of building parcels fall within an SB 79 tier; the law allows for differing height and density levels depending on the distance the land is from one of the roughly 150 applicable transit stops. The 129,000 eligible parcels include almost 80,000 now occupied by single-family homes.
Los Angeles has had a transit-oriented development program since 2017, and in 2024 it passed the Citywide Housing Incentive Program, which upzoned wide swaths of the city. But it exempts neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes and limits new development to certain corridors, fueling equity concerns. Currently 75% of the city remains off-limits to new apartments.
A detail from a map of the Los Angeles metro prepared by the advocacy group Streets for All shows areas around transit stations where various degrees of dense development will be permitted under SB 79Source: Streets for All Data/Dev Team
SB 79, on the other hand, will upzone single-family neighborhoods like Rancho Park on LA’s Westside, or along Van Nuys Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley — a major north-south arterial that runs through a mix of built-up commercial areas and residential neighborhoods full of one-story ranchers built after World War II. In areas closest to transit stations, buildings will be permitted to stand up to 95 feet tall and 160 units an acre.
As a kind of unintended consequence of SB 79, the bill’s connection between both rail stops and bus rapid transit lines and development has catalyzed resistance to planned transit improvements in Los Angeles, as neighbors bristle at the prospect of multistory buildings looming over low-rise neighborhoods.
In Burbank, for example, a long-planned BRT project from North Hollywood to Pasadena had raised alarm among residents angry at potentially losing a lane of traffic and parking to the new express bus service. Now, since BRT comes with automatic upzoning, it’s not just a transit fight, but a housing war. A Burbank resident and planning and environmental consultant told CalMatters that the bus line would now “destroy the single-family neighborhoods on either side” of the bus route.
Two-story “dingbat” apartment buildings built in the 1950s remain a popular form of multifamily housing in many LA neighborhoods.Photographer: Bing Guan/Bloomberg
Streets for All said in a statement supporting SB 79 that with the city spending billions of dollars on new transit lines in the coming decades, it needs to add accompanying density to increase ridership and make the investments pay off; the groups estimates 45% of parcels near rail stops in LA are zoned for low density uses like single family homes or parking.
Construction Costs
To unleash SB 79’s potential, California YIMBY’s Hanlon outlined a number of advocacy priorities. One focus is speeding permitting and lowering the cost of new construction; that includes pushing back against some fees involved in multifamily development, like mandatory park district fees, as well as transfer taxes. In Los Angeles, Measure ULA — also known as the “mansion tax” — imposed a tax on property sales above $5 million in order to fund affordable housing and homelessness prevention. But the controversial fee has also added costs to large apartment projects and caused some multifamily developers to avoid LA projects altogether, contributing to a drop in new permits for multifamily housing projects.
Even addressing details like making it easier to hook up apartments to power, which can be delayed months, could make it more feasible to build. Other potential next steps would be creating a state revolving loan fund for multifamily buildings and eliminating inclusionary zoning subsidies that mandate set-asides for a certain number of affordable apartment units in larger projects — a program whose effectiveness has been a source of debate among housing advocates.
YIMBY supporters hope that SB 79 can bring building designs that Angelos will find more attractive than the typical “five-over-one” housing complexes.Photographer: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
Aaron van Schaik, principal for LA-based development firm SuperLA, proposes another means of speeding construction: pre-approved apartment designs. The city and county are already working on various pre-approved design catalogs for homeowners rebuilding after the January wildfires, and recently held a competition for small lot apartment designs; expanding the pre-approval concept to other multifamily designs could shave significant time off pre-planning, get lenders more aligned with smaller projects, and provide more certainty for small developers.
“I could chew your ear off for hours about how the current development process is so flawed and broken,” said van Schaik. “The idea that everything is custom makes no sense. A catalog of some form opens up a lot of opportunities, even for the existing landowners.”
Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the housing and homelessness committee, introduced a suite of permitting reforms in July to help accelerate permitting and cut red tape for developers.
“Right now, we don’t have a process through which we can ensure that this system moves forward in a predictable, time-limited way to give developers the answers they need to build according to the rules that we’ve set up,” she said. “We have to do that in order for this to work. We need to create an incentive structure that really rewards departments for ‘getting to yes.’”
Up to Code
Single-stair reform — a push to change building codes to allow smaller apartment projects — is one legislative shift advocates like California YIMBY have championed. US building codes typically mandate double-loaded corridors — with exits and stairs at each end — in buildings of three or more stories. Allowing a single stairway would save space and allow for more multi-bedroom, family-friendly units, said Mike Eliason, a Seattle-based architect and author of Building for People. Crucially, while the reform may not by itself significantly impact affordability, saving space opens up development in smaller, infill lots, including the thousands of single-family lots upzoned by SB 79.
Read more: An Underrated Upside to YIMBY Ideas? Better-Looking Buildings
In Los Angeles, a motion co-sponsored by Raman was passed in the City Council in August, instructing city departments to complete a draft building code update that would allow single-stair up to six stories. But efforts to make this change won’t move forward until the state finishes its own review of single-stair changes to building codes, a process that’s supposed to conclude on Jan. 1, 2026, when the state fire marshal releases a recommendation.
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Other aspects of the city’s building code that add costs include setbacks, plumbing regulations and material requirements. Stephen Smith, director of the nonprofit advocacy group Center for Buildings in North America, said that the hard costs of construction — materials, labor, and equipment — can exceed $400 a foot in California. A recent Turner & Townsend study found LA was the world’s sixth most expensive metro in terms of construction costs, behind both New York City and San Francisco.
Because of US regulations governing large apartment buildings, Smith says, it’s the only country where as a building gets denser, the cost of construction goes up.
“That’s not something you see outside of North America,” he said. “Abroad, the economies of scale balance each other out. In the United States, there’s no balance. The requirements hit hard, and they hit fast.”
An apartment building under construction near Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles in 2024. As office vacancies have persisted in the city’s core, the residential population has boomed.Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg
But while zoning reform took years of concerted political effort, changing the building codes — dense, technical regulation dealing with health and safety issues, with deep-pocketed industries incredibly engaged in the rules and their economic impacts — stands to be even more fraught.
Eliason also argues that alternative financial models would help SB 79 achieve more of its backers’ broad goals of housing affordability and livability. Instruments like community land trusts and co-ops, as well as social housing, would help broadly increase the affordability of these newly enabled projects.
Another important aspect of design that comes into play is community infrastructure, which is often overlooked. Eliason says that adding density across a large metro area also requires comprehensive plans for more parks, sidewalks, schools and transit capacity. Even including more narrow driveways and wider sidewalks can help improve walkability in areas that are seeing a surge of new residents.
“In the US, we simply just rezone places without thinking about how the neighborhood will change over time, and what the quality of life will be in those places,” Eliason said.
Mapping the Boom
Going forward, the first step for SB 79 will be finalizing the maps for where it applies. During negotiations over the bill in the California legislature, the initial language was changed 13 times, including limiting it to high-frequency transit stops and eight mostly urban, not suburban, counties. Metropolitan planning agencies will be responsible for setting the final boundaries for the bill: The Southern California Association of Governments, which oversees Los Angeles and San Diego, told Bloomberg CityLab it is “working with the Department of Housing and Community Development to identify the qualifying transit stops for developing the maps,” but has no timeline yet.
Local jurisdictions will also be able to include some temporary exemptions, and shift density from one area to another. The expected political battles over these maps have injected a new measure of uncertainty into future development. SuperLA’s van Schaik has a pair of smaller apartment projects in the works but he and other developers are waiting on final maps before moving forward on SB 79 projects.
SB 79 offers hope, but the landscape for developing in cities like Los Angeles remains difficult. Raman sees a need to get communities engaged in a wider conversation about neighborhood change.
“It’s really a political question of, how do we think about LA as a city that grows, and what does it mean to accommodate that growth?” she said. “Growth is essential to our long-term economic resilience. If people believe in LA, they also believe in more Angelenos.”
— With assistance from John Gittelsohn
