The Brief

California lawmakers just laid the groundwork for a highly targeted building boom.

Senate Bill 79, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, would “upzone” neighborhoods immediately surrounding train, light rail and subway stations in many of the state’s most populous metro areas. That means apartment developers will be able to construct residential buildings — some as tall as 75 feet — regardless of what local zoning maps, elected officials or density-averse neighbors say.

In a legislative year teeming with controversial housing bills designed to kick-start more construction in California, SB 79 has been among the most controversial. Because it would override the planning decisions of local governments, the bill had to overcome opposition from a host of city governments and their defenders in the Legislature, while fracturing the Capitol’s reigning Democratic Party over questions of affordability, labor standards and who ultimately has the final say over what gets built where.

The bill now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom who supporters expect will sign it.

Wiener’s bill is meant to address two crises at once: The state’s long-term housing shortage and the financial precarity of its public transit agencies. By allowing taller and denser development, the legislation is meant to pave the way for more apartment developments in areas closest to jobs and services. By centering that development around public transit stations, it’s meant to steer more people away from cars and toward buses and trains.

“Decades of overly restrictive policies have driven housing costs to astronomical levels, forcing millions of people away from jobs and transit and into long commutes from the suburbs,” Wiener said in a statement after Friday’s vote. “Today’s vote is a dramatic step forward to undo these decades of harm, reduce our most severe costs and slash traffic congestion and air pollution in our state.”

SB 79 also would give transit agencies the ability to develop their own land, giving them another potential revenue source — a financial model common across East Asian metros.

Making it easier to build on and around public transit stops has been a career-spanning effort for Wiener, who first introduced a version of the idea in 2018. That measure died in its first committee hearing. Wiener tried again in 2019 and 2020 but never was able to push the idea out of the Senate.

That’s all helped to bestow the proposal with a kind of mythic status in California’s legislative housing wars. Its success at last slaps a symbolic bow on a year marked by the state Legislature’s unprecedented appetite for pro-development bills. Earlier this year, lawmakers made national news in exempting most urban apartment projects from the state’s premier environmental review law.

California YIMBY, one of the sponsors of the bill and a vocal force in the Capitol for pro-construction legislation, was quick to take a victory lap after the final vote in the Senate this afternoon.

“Today, California YIMBY achieved one of its founding goals — legalizing apartments and condos near train stations,” the organization’s CEO Brian Hanlon said in a written statement. “We won many victories over the past eight years, but the dream of passing a robust, transit-oriented development program has long eluded us, until now.”

For opponents of state-imposed density measures, the vote marks an equally weighty defeat.

Susan Kirsch, founder of Catalysts for Local Control, a nonprofit that advocates for the preservation of municipal authority over housing policy, predicted the legislation would have a “devastating impact” on California’s low-rise neighborhoods, describing “extreme seven-story buildings next to single-family homes with nothing that the community can do about it.”

Amended to victory

The secret to Wiener’s success this year after so many past failures might have been his willingness to whittle the bill down.

Over the course of the year, the proposal underwent 13 rounds of amendments — more than any other policy bill. Many of those changes were made to convince powerful interest groups to drop their opposition. That often meant reducing the bill’s scope.

The legislation would only apply to counties with at least 15 passenger rail stations. According to its sponsors, just eight counties fit the bill: Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Mateo.

That’s a concession that likely softened opposition from rural and suburban legislators.

Rather than applying to every major bus line in the state, as the 2018 iteration did, SB 79 only targets homes within a half-mile of train stations, subway stops and “high-frequency” light-rail and commuter rail stops. Buildings within the nearest quarter-mile of Amtrak stations, Bay Area Rapid Transit stops and Los Angeles subway stations can top out at roughly seven stories. But parcels farther out or surrounding less-trafficked light-rail stations would be capped at more modest heights.

The legislation also comes with asterisks about the kinds of projects that can make use of its provisions. Developers, in select cases, must hire unionized construction workers — a provision that convinced the powerful State Building and Construction Trades Council to drop its opposition.

Projects also must set aside a modest share of homes for lower-income residents (at least 7%) and replace any rent-controlled units that are destroyed during construction. Lower-income neighborhoods also have more time to plan for the rezoning with the new rules not taking effect until at least 2032. That compromise led a number of tenant rights, “housing justice” advocacy groups and other affordability advocates to stand down earlier this week.

Case in point: Sen. Aisha Wahab, a Fremont Democrat who, as chair of the Senate’s Housing committee, nearly killed the bill earlier this year, was the second to speak in favor of it Friday.

In a fig leaf to ticked-off local governments, the bill also allows cities that already are planning for transit-oriented apartment buildings at a significant scale, such as San Francisco and Sacramento, to stick with those plans rather than abide by the full scope of the new law.

“If you look at the bill and you read the bill, I actually view it as a thoughtful, relatively narrow-in-scope bill,” Oakland Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, a frequent political ally of Wiener’s on housing matters, said on the Assembly floor Thursday.

Reshaping the American Dream

Many of her fellow legislators, Democratic and Republican alike, disagreed.

The Senate ultimately passed the bill by the narrowest possible margin, with Wiener only claiming his final vote from Bakersfield GOP Sen. Shannon Grove after a few tense minutes. The Assembly vote was equally close, with just 43 of the chamber’s 80 members supporting it.

“This blunt, one-size-fits-all bill will not work for a district like mine,” said Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, a Los Angeles Democrat who represents portions of Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Hollywood. “For many Californians, living in a single-family neighborhood fulfills a lifelong dream — the American Dream.”

Placing apartment blocks in those neighborhoods “has the potential to fundamentally reshape my district without the benefit of careful land-use planning," he said.

Zbur was partially channeling opposition from his counterparts in local government. Last month, a narrow majority on the Los Angeles City Council voted to oppose SB 79, which members characterized as a Sacramento power grab and a giveaway to real estate developers. The city is one of dozens of municipalities that came out against the measure.

Supporters counter that deferring to local governments on land-use decisions has resulted in a chronic undersupply of new housing, as local elected officials historically have catered to the interests of change-averse homeowners.

Marc Vukcevich, a policy director for the LA-based transit and pedestrian advocacy group Streets For All, a co-sponsor of the bill, said he didn’t think the city of Los Angeles’ opposition to the measure carried much weight.

“The Legislature knows that LA is a deeply unserious actor when it comes to housing,” he said.

Most significant housing bill ever?

For all the concessions Wiener made along the way, backers of the bill still are calling the proposal historic.

“It’s by far the biggest housing bill the California Legislature has passed,” said Matthew Lewis, a spokesperson for California YIMBY. “There’s more to do, but it’s a major, major step. And honestly, I feel like as people start to see what is actually going to happen, the politics will start to change too.

“The fear is Hong Kong. I think the reality is going to be something closer to Copenhagen — not everyone is going to build the maximum demand.”

Whether homeowners in Palo Alto, mid-city San Diego and the San Fernando Valley ultimately come to appreciate the new apartment developments in their communities will depend on whether any get built in the first place.

Past upzoning efforts in California have proven to be more ambitious on paper than in practice. In 2021, state lawmakers passed Senate Bill 9, a measure that both supporters and opponents said would end single-family zoning in California by allowing homeowners to build up to four units on their property. Four years in, the law has resulted in precious few units. Housing advocates point to costly requirements and loopholes that made the law difficult for property owners to actually use.

Simon Büchler, an economist at the Miami University in Ohio who has studied the results of different upzoning policies, said developers are generally keen to build around public transportation stations, making SB 79 a promising approach.

“The success of upzoning depends crucially on where it happens,” he said in an email. “Ideally, you want to upzone in high-demand areas with strong transit connections, since those are the places where added density will translate into meaningful increases in supply.”

In any case, the changes will be gradual.

“Supply increases take time [often many years] to materialize, even in the right places, so these policies are far from an overnight solution,” he said.

Cobbling together enough single-family homes in a desirable transit-adjacent neighborhood is easier said than done, said Mott Smith, a developer and board member of the California Infill Builders Association. Land values are steep. Finding enough sufficiently large land all in one place requires a fair bit of luck. Both make it hard to profitably build a six-story apartment building.

“We will probably see in the next five years 20 to 30 SB 79 projects around the state, that’s my wild guess,” he said. “Both the opponents and the proponents of the bill are probably overstating how much this is going to change the built environment in California.”

That could be especially true in the current economic climate. Tariffs on building goods, immigration crackdowns targeting construction workers and high interest rates show no sign of abating, factors that make it hard to build — close to a train station or not.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Since 1977, Richard Santillan has been to every Opening Day game at Dodger Stadium. 

“The tradition goes from my father, to me, to my children and grandchildren. Some of my best memories are with my father and children here at Dodger Stadium,” Santillan told The LA Local, smiling under the shade of palm trees near the entrance to the ballpark Wednesday morning. He was there to protest the team less than 24 hours before Opening Day.

Santillan, like countless other loyal Dodgers fans, is grappling with his fan identity over the team’s decision to accept an invitation to the White House and owner Mark Walter’s ties to ICE detention facilities.

More than 30 people joined Santillan on Wednesday morning for a press conference held near 1000 Vin Scully Drive to convey a message directly to the team. 

“We are demanding the Dodgers stop participating in funding of inhumane treatment of families and do not go to the White House to celebrate with the criminal in chief,” Evelyn Escatiola told the crowd. “Together, we have the power to make a change.”

Escatiola, a former dean of East Los Angeles College and longtime community organizer, urged fans to flex their economic power by “letting the Dodgers know that we do not support repression.”

Jorge “Coqui” Rodriguez, a lifelong Dodgers fan, spoke to the crowd and called on Dodgers ownership to divest from immigration detention centers owned and operated by GEO Group and CoreCivic.

Jorge Coqui H Rodriguez speaks at a press conference outside Dodger Stadium on March 25, 2026, to demand the Dodgers not to visit the White House following their 2025 World Series win.

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J.W. Hendricks

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The LA Local

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In a phone interview a day before the protest, Rodriguez told The LA Local he did not want the Dodgers using his “cheve” or beer money to fund detention centers. 

“They can’t take our parking money, our cacahuate money, our cheve money, our Dodger Dog money and invest those funds into corporations that are imprisoning people. It’s wrong,” Rodriguez said. 

Rodriguez considers the Dodgers one of the most racially diverse teams and said the players need to support fans at a time when heightened immigration enforcement has become more common across L.A.

The team’s 2025’s visit to the White House drew ire from the largely Latino fan base, citing the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on immigrants. 

In June, the team came under further scrutiny when rumors swirled online that federal immigration agents were using the stadium’s parking, which immigration authorities later denied in statements posted on social media accounts.

The team again came under fire after not releasing a statement on the impacts of ICE raids on its mostly Latino fan base at the height of immigration enforcement last summer. The team later agreed to invest $1 million to support families affected by immigration enforcement.

When he learned the Dodgers were pledging only $1 million to families in need, Rodriguez called the amount a  “slap in the face.” 

“These guys just bought the Lakers for billions of dollars and they give a million dollars to fight for legal services? That’s a joke,” Rodriguez said. “They need to have a moral backbone and not be investing in those companies.”

According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times, former Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershawsaid last week that he is looking forward to the trip.

“I went when President [Joe] Biden was in office. I’m going to go when President [Donald] Trump is in office,” Kershaw said. “To me, it’s just about getting to go to the White House. You don’t get that opportunity every day, so I’m excited to go.”

The Dodgers have yet to announce when their planned visit will take place. 

Santillan sometimes laments his decision to give up his season tickets in protest of the team. His connection to the stadium and the memories he has made there with family and friends will last a lifetime, he said. On Thursday, he will uphold his tradition and be there for the first pitch of the season, but with a heavy heart.

“It’s a family tradition, but the Dodgers have a lot of work to do,” he said.

A local favorite mom-and-pop bookshop in Eagle Rock is facing displacement due to a steep rent hike. The owners say theirs is just one of several small businesses along Eagle Rock Boulevard struggling to keep up with lease increases.

Over the past 19 years, many in the neighborhood have come to love READ Books for its eclectic collection of used titles and shop dog Florence.

Co-owner Jeremy Kaplan said it’s been a delight to grow with the community over the years.

“Like seeing kids come back in, who were in grade school and now they’re in college,” Kaplan said.

But the building where Kaplan and wife Debbie rent was recently sold, and the rent increased by more than 130% to $2,805 a month, Kaplan said. He told LAist it was an increase his small business simply could not absorb.

Kaplan said he originally was given 30 days notice of the rent increase. After some research, assistance from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office and some pro-bono legal help, Kaplan said he pushed back and got the 90-day notice he’s afforded by state law.

California Senate Bill 1103 requires landlords to give businesses with five or less employees 90 days’ notice for rent increases exceeding 10%, among other protections.

Systems Real Estate, the property management company, did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

What can small businesses do? 

Nadia Segura, directing attorney of the Small Business Program at pro bono legal aid non-profit Bet Tzedek said California law does not currently allow for rent control for commercial tenancies.

Outside of the protections under SB 1103, Segura said small businesses like READ Books don’t have much other recourse. And even then, commercial landlords are not required to inform their tenants of their protections under the law.

“There’s still a lot of people that don’t know about SB 1103. And then it’s very sad that they tell them they have these rent increases and within a month they have to leave,” Segura said.

She said her group is seeing steep rent hikes like this for commercial tenants across the city.

“We are seeing this even more with the World Cup coming up, the Olympics coming up. And I will say it was very sad to see that also after the wildfires,” Segura said.

Part of Bet Tzedek’s ongoing work is to advocate for small businesses, working with landlords who are increasing rents to see if they are willing to give business owners longer leases that lock in rents.

What’s next 

After READ Books posted about their situation on social media, commenters chimed in to express their outrage and love for the little shop.

While he looks for a new spot, Kaplan says he’s forming a coalition of local businesses and activist groups to see what can be done to help other small businesses facing similar displacement. He wants to address the displacement issue for businesses like his, which have made Eagle Rock the distinctive neighborhood that it is today.

Owl Talk, a longtime Eagle Rock staple selling clothing and accessories in a unit in the same building as READ Books, is facing a “more than double” rent increase, according to a post on their Instagram account.

Kaplan said he’s been in touch with the office of state Assemblywoman Jessica Caloza and wants to explore the possibility of introducing legislation to set up protections for small businesses like his, including rent-control measures or a vacancy tax for landlords. Kaplan said he also reached out to the office of state Sen. Maria Durazo.

By his count, Kaplan said there are about a dozen businesses within surrounding blocks that are at risk of closing their doors or have shuttered due to rent increases or other struggles.

When READ Books was founded during the Great Recession, Kaplan said he knew it was a longshot to open a bookstore at the same time so many were struggling to stay in business.

“It was kind of interesting to be doing something that neighborhoods needed. That was important to me growing up, that was important to my children, that was important to my wife growing up,” Kaplan said.

“And then somebody comes in and says, ‘We’re gonna over double your rent.”

Topline:

Frozen budget: Most of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting budget comes from an assessment that people who own property illuminated by lights pay on their county property tax bill. The amount people pay depends on the kind of property they own and how much they benefit from lighting. A typical single-family home currently pays $53 annually, and in total, the assessments bring in about $45 million annually for the city to repair and maintain streetlights. Changing the amount the Bureau of Street Lighting gets from the assessment requires a vote among property owners who benefit from the lights.

Ballots: L.A. City Council’s vote gives city staff the green light to prepare and send out those ballots. Miguel Sangalang, who oversees the bureau, said at a committee meeting earlier this month that he expects to send out ballots by April 17. Notices about the ballots will be sent out prior to the ballots themselves.

Near unanimous vote: L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez was the only “No” vote Tuesday, saying she wanted to see a more current strategic plan for the bureau. Sangalang said the bureau developed a plan in 2022 that lays out how money will be spent. Councilmember Imelda Padilla was absent for the vote.

Vote count: Votes will be weighted according to the assessment amount. Basically, the more you’re asked to pay yearly to maintain streetlights, the more your vote will count. Ballots received before June 2 will be tabulated by the L.A. City Clerk.

How much more money: According to a report, the amount needed in assessments from property owners to meet the repair and maintenance needs of the city’s streetlighting in the next fiscal year is nearly $112 million.

Use of the money: Sangalang said at a March 11 committee meeting that the extra funds would be used to double the number of staff to handle repairs and procure solar streetlights, which don’t face the threat of copper wire theft. That would all potentially reduce the time it takes to repair simple fixes down to a week. Currently, city residents wait for months to see broken streetlights repaired. The assessment would come with a three-year auditing mechanism.