California just legalized affordable housing in church parking lots and coastal cities — and it could help solve the state's crisis

• California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed more than 50 bills this month designed to combat the housing crisis.
• Pro-housing advocates are celebrating this legislative session's wins.

California is suffering from one of the country's most severe housing crises, fueled by a chronic shortage of places to live. The Golden State is now home to a third of the country's unhoused population as lower- and middle-income residents struggle to afford homes all over the state.

After repeatedly promising to tackle the crisis, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed more than 50 housing bills this month. Pro-housing advocates say the patchwork of fixes are something of a mixed bag, but overall a strong move towards lifting burdensome regulations that make building unnecessarily costly or impossible.

"The wind is in our sails right now," Ned Resnikoff, policy director at the pro-housing group California YIMBY, or "Yes In My Backyard," told Insider. "There's really a lot of momentum behind efforts to solve the housing crisis in California."

Here are some of the highlights from the historic slew of housing laws.

Speeding up housing construction

One major success of this legislative session are a few laws designed to loosen restrictions imposed by California's Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a broad set of regulations intended to protect environmental concerns but in recent years more notorious for slowing down or killing all kinds of housing development.

"Almost anything under the sun can be considered an environmental impact" under CEQA, Chris Elmendorf, a professor at UC Davis law school, told Insider. And the unpredictability of CEQA's application adds significant costs to development.

In one particularly notorious example, local opponents of a proposed student dorm building on the UC Berkeley campus drew the school into a prolonged legal battle over the construction, claiming the student residents would violate CEQA by creating noise pollution. A state appellate court sided with the building's critics, but the governor signed a bill, which unanimously passed the legislature, specifically asserting that resident noise doesn't violate environmental regulations.

One law the governor signed — Senate Bill 423 — extends and broadens a successful 2017 law that has fast-tracked the construction of thousands of mostly affordable homes by requiring local governments to approve multi-unit, infill housing in existing residential neighborhoods. The new law — authored by one of California's most outspoken pro-housing lawmakers, State Sen. Scott Wiener — singles out San Francisco, which has struggled to meet its state-mandated housing construction requirements in part because of its lengthy approval process. The bill will require the city to undergo annual reviews and fast-track both market-rate and affordable housing construction.

Another law — Assembly Bill 1633 — will make it harder for cities to abuse CEQA to slow down or derail multi-unit infill housing construction if it complies with local requirements.

"For the first time, the legislature is really saying, we really just want this environmental review to be about the environment and not about stopping projects," said Elmendorf, who helped lawmakers craft AB 1633. The law affirms "the principle that if the project is compliant with the applicable rules, and on an infill location and reasonably dense, then the city can't use environmental review as a pretext to effectively deny projects they're not allowed to deny officially."

San Francisco Mayor London Breed called the law "a game changer" for her city, which has long been the poster child of housing crises.

"It's going to be an exciting time for housing development in San Francisco," Breed said during a panel at the Bloomberg CityLab conference in Washington on October 19. "CEQA can't be abused like it has in the past because of changes to our state laws."

Another law that's gotten a lot of attention — SB 4 — will make it easier for non-profit colleges and universities and faith-based organizations to build affordable housing on land they already own. The bill, also known as "Yes in God's Backyard," would allow organizations to bypass certain environmental regulations and permitting rules to build homes in church parking lots and other underutilized or surplus land. UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation found there are more than 170,000 acres of land that could be put to use under SB 4.

Resnikoff noted that religious organizations are especially well-positioned to provide housing for low-income and even unhoused community members. "We have this whole network of mission-driven organizations across the entire state, many of which would be quite eager and willing to minister to the most housing-burdened in their areas, and this is a way to provide that opportunity," he said.

Some disappointments

While Elmendorf thinks the overall progress made on housing policy this legislative session was positive, he lamented the failure of a pair of bills that would've allowed more density in single-family neighborhoods by legalizing lot subdivisions. The bills died in the legislature, which Elmendorf said speaks to lawmakers' continued reticence to stand up to homeowners.

Many housing advocates are also disappointed that Newsom vetoed a bill — AB 309 — to create "social housing" on government-owned land. The proposal, authored by South Bay Assemblymember Alex Lee, would have piloted mixed-income housing developments on public land. Rather than restricting the homes to only very low-income residents, as most public housing does, residents from all socio-economic backgrounds would spend no more than 30% of their income on rent.

"Just like how roads, and libraries, and schools — no matter how rich or poor you are, you still are entitled to go check out a book or go to send your kids to public school. That's the same thing with housing," Lee told Insider.

Lee said he explicitly modeled the proposal off social housing programs in Vienna, Austria and Singapore that have long been celebrated by housing advocates in the US and around the world. "If a modest Central European power and a modest trading commercial power in Southeast Asia can come successfully with a huge track record of social housing, why can't the most prosperous state and the most prosperous nation in the history of mankind be able to do that too?" he said.

The bill passed the legislature, but Newsom vetoed it, arguing in a lengthy note that the state doesn't have the budget capacity for the project. Resnikoff, whose organization endorsed the effort, noted that the state's current fiscal conditions make it very hard to pass housing policy that requires funding.

Advocates are quick to point out that California housing policy has impacts far beyond its borders. The state's housing policies have already inspired copycat efforts across the country. Resnikoff said he saw lots of similarities between New York City Mayor Eric Adams' newly-proposed housing reforms, which include legalizing building small secondary housing units on one's property and boosting density in commercial corridors. How effectively California deals with its housing affordability issues also directly impacts other states' housing markets. The migration of California residents to places from Texas to Oregon has put additional pressure on those states to provide even more housing.