How Can Procedural Reform Support Fair Share Housing Production? Assessing the Effects of California's Senate Bill 35

Land use regulation that constrains housing production risks exacerbating and perpetuating economic and racial segregation, inhibiting economic growth, increasing the cost of housing, and worsening environmental harm. California’s housing law attempts to avoid these outcomes by imposing “fair share housing production” requirements on local zoning and planning. Despite this planning framework, housing need has outpaced housing demand in many California communities for decades. Inadequate production, particularly affordable housing production, has galvanized the California legislature to reform state housing law across many dimensions. This paper discusses just one of these recent reforms, enacted in 2017 —Senate Bill 35 (SB 35). SB 35 builds on the state’s existing fair share production law by limiting procedural obstacles to some housing production. SB 35 does this by preempting local power to impose a discretionary approval process on qualifying affordable or mixed-income housing in localities that have failed to approve adequate affordable housing in prior years. Lawmakers hoped that making affordable housing development faster and more predictable would allow for more housing to be built in more communities, at a lower cost. This paper provides preliminary empirical support for that theory. We find that, in some cities, SB 35 is in fact speeding up housing approvals.