Monday Morning Commentary: New Transit Housing Law Aims to Spur Apartments, but Permitting, Costs Remain Major Barriers

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California is betting that allowing taller apartment buildings near major transit stops will help ease a housing shortage that has pushed rents higher, made homeownership feel out of reach for many families and left the state with the nation’s largest population experiencing homelessness.

The new law, SB 79, is designed to make it easier for housing developers to build more homes near public transportation stops by changing zoning rules around train stations, ferry terminals and bus rapid transit stops. 

Supporters say the premise is straightforward: Put more homes where demand is strong and where residents can more easily live without relying on a car. “Building housing where in many cases demand is highest, where they can live car light or car free if they like to, where they have easy access to job centers,” Nolan Gray of California YIMBY said in an interview on KCRA’s “California Politics 360.” 

Under the framework described by KCRA, zoning standards would allow apartment buildings and other multifamily housing up to nine stories near the busiest transit stops, with seven-story buildings within a quarter mile and six-story buildings within a half mile. 

The law takes effect July 1, 2026, but its supporters are also tempering expectations about how quickly it can change the housing landscape. 

“Development takes time,” Gray said. “It could take a year or two years before the first projects start wrapping up construction at the earliest,” he said. 

KCRA also reported that some more populated Bay Area counties are exempt from the new law, including Contra Costa and Marin, while Gray emphasized that the bill is aimed at “high transit counties,” including parts of the Bay Area, Sacramento County and Southern California’s major metro counties. 

The political friction is not limited to the Bay Area. The Vanguard has previously reported that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has not supported the measure, echoing concerns from other opponents about the loss of local zoning control and impacts to existing communities dominated by single-family homes. 

That tension — between statewide mandates to build more housing and local pushback, layered atop the practical difficulty of getting projects financed and approved — is showing up in regional permitting data even as policymakers push for “abundance” and “affordability.”

In the San Jose metro area, the number of permits issued to build multifamily housing fell sharply in 2025, declining 41% from January to July compared with the same period in 2024, according to U.S. Census Bureau data cited by SFGATE.

“Residential construction being challenging in California is a longstanding situation,” Rob Warnock, a senior research associate for Apartment List, told SFGATE. “It’s a combination of red tape versus local opposition, [and the] cost of building materials and construction labor. It’s been a problem for the housing stock.” 

Warnock also tied permit slowdowns to worsening affordability, with SFGATE reporting that rent prices increased 5% year-over-year in the San Jose metro area from December 2024 to December 2025, ranking the region No. 2 nationally for increases, according to Apartment List. 

Developers and policy researchers described a landscape in which cities have taken steps to modernize, but the underlying process can still be slow and costly. SFGATE reported that some jurisdictions moved applications online rather than requiring developers to print “huge sets of blueprints,” and that state streamlining “have been incredibly effective in shortening time frames for entitlements by limiting reviews to objective standards and requiring jurisdictions to meet specific timelines for reviews,” according to Ali Gaylord of Affirmed Housing. 

Still, the hurdles can be daunting even when the project is legal on paper. 

“That certainty is huge in real estate development,” Gaylord wrote to SFGATE, explaining why developers may delay pulling permits that can cost millions until they are confident a project will proceed. 

SFGATE also highlighted emerging experiments with technology, including efforts to use data science and potentially artificial intelligence to identify inconsistent permit review practices and speed up compliance checks. “We’re starting to work with some jurisdictions … to use data science to uncover variation in reviewers and inspectors, i.e. over and under pickiness, and see how that affects overall project delays and the fairness dimension as well,” Derek Ouyang of Stanford Law School’s RegLab said in an email to SFGATE. (SFGATE)

The limits of California’s permitting and building pipeline become especially visible in moments of crisis, including the rebuilding of homes after wildfire disasters. Planetizen, summarizing Los Angeles Times reporting, said that around 12% to 13% of homes in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades had received rebuild permits about a year after January wildfires, roughly half the pace seen in Santa Rosa after a major fire there. 

Planetizen cited multiple obstacles, including “understaffing at city agencies, supply chain delays, insurance gaps, and a strained labor market slowing construction timelines,” and reported that average processing times were 79 days for Los Angeles city applications and 131 days for Los Angeles County. 

Those pressures intersect with a broader affordability squeeze that, for many residents, is not an abstract policy debate but a daily crisis driven by paperwork delays and unstable rents.

In San Jose, 76-year-old Patricia Ferraro described being overwhelmed by rent debt after a delayed Section 8 housing subsidy, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “It was such a nightmare, I think I went crazy,” Ferraro said. “I don’t think I was in my body.”

Ferraro said she felt pressured by property managers to sign a lease before the subsidy cleared and described the experience as frightening. “I was so scared. I felt like I was a child getting sent to the principal’s office. It was so frightening,” she said. 

As policymakers push new housing laws like SB 79, safety-net infrastructure is also strained by rising need. In the Bay Area, the region’s 211 helpline — which connects residents to emergency housing, food assistance and health care resources — is facing outdated technology and funding instability, according to United Way Bay Area CEO Keisha Browder in a San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece. 

Browder wrote that the helpline is “answering 50,000 calls and texts a year on outdated technology,” and that it saw an “alarming 63% surge in hunger-related calls” this year.

The collision of housing scarcity, high costs, permitting delays and stressed safety nets has become central to the political debate heading into 2026, especially as Democrats argue over what message resonates in an era defined by cost-of-living anger.

“I do think that we have to present a new vision,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin told the San Francisco Chronicle. “And what does that mean? That we cannot be the defender of the status quo. When people say, ‘Well, we need to go back to the way things were before Trump.’ No one wants to go back to the way things were because most hardworking Americans don’t believe that the status quo is working for them.”

At the same time, Rep. Pat Ryan warned about turning “affordability” into a hollow slogan. “I’m like, ‘Guys, don’t use that word.’ We’ve got to be specific and local and visceral, and talk about people’s rent and health care costs and food at the grocery store,” Ryan said, according to the Chronicle.

The larger backdrop, as 2025 closes, is a national mood of exhaustion and anxiety — and a politics shaped by competing narratives about what government can still deliver. In a Los Angeles Times year-end conversation between columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak, Chabria recalled speaking to a couple at a Sacramento protest who used gallows humor to describe the stakes. “If you don’t do something soon, you will have democracy be extinct,” the husband told her. 

For California’s housing agenda, the question is whether laws like SB 79 can move fast enough — and whether the state can make it cheaper and simpler to build — to produce measurable relief before voters conclude that the system cannot fix itself.

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