by Geoffrey Hueter / Times of San Diego / Sept. 6, 2025
Despite recent revisions, Senate Bill 79 should not be approved without further meaningful changes.
SB 79 is a solution in search of a problem. Its goal is supposedly to enable transit-oriented development, but most California cities — especially those with significant transit investments — have already zoned for this.
In addition to adding housing capacity through general plan and community plan updates, regional transportation planning agencies and municipalities, including SANDAG and cities throughout the San Diego region, have maximized their transit investments by creating and funding specific plans for transit-oriented development — by increasing densities, eliminating parking, and streamlining permitting.
That these cities have housing plans that have been certified by the California Department of Housing and Community Development is proof that cities have already “made it legal to build housing near transit” as proponents of the bill are fond of saying.
SB 79 is too expansive to be transit-oriented. The bill’s one-half and one-quarter mile tiers should be defined by walking distance, not straight line (“as the crow flies”) distance, which can be a mile or more from a transit stop across canyons and freeways. Allowing local governments to limit this to one-mile walking distance doesn’t fix the problem, because every transit study shows that transit usage, especially for bus service, drops off significantly beyond a one-half mile walking distance. The bill should have been written to measure all distances by walking distance.
SB 79 is a zoning bill, not a housing bill. Cities have already zoned for much more housing than projected need. For example, San Diego’s current zoning provides three times the capacity for new housing as San Diego’s projected need. And this doesn’t include bonus densities that can increase capacities many times more than zoned allowances.
As a result, SB 79 won’t drive housing production, it will just change where housing is produced. SB 79 projects won’t be built near transit, they will be developed a mile or more from transit where developers can exploit unsophisticated single-family homeowners who won’t know how to revalue their properties to the “highest and best use” allowed by SB 79. This is what happened with San Diego’s Bonus ADU program, and there’s no reason not to expect the same outcomes statewide with SB 79.
It is also important to note that housing production is not driven by the state’s projections of needed homes for moderate- and low-income households. Rather, developers produce units at the rate that the market can absorb them without substantially driving down rents. When demand weakens and vacancy rates rise, the building industry cuts back on new development until the market catches up. There is no incentive for developers to flood the market with overcapacity that will permanently lower long-term trends in rents and home prices.
It is telling that Contra Costa County, which is partially represented by Buffy Wicks, the bill’s Assembly coauthor, has been excluded from SB 79 based on an arbitrary threshold for applicable rail stations. When Contra Costa County does meet the criteria for being an “urban transit county” in the coming years, the bill still protects Contra Costa by excluding bus routes from SB 79’s upzoning.
If the bill’s authors believe this is a great bill, then residents of all urban transit counties should be treated the same as Assemblymember Wicks’ constituents by removing bus transit for all counties.
SB 79 also excludes Marin County and Sonoma County, even though they are connected through efficient commuter rail lines to employment centers in those counties and elsewhere in the Bay Area. Altogether, SB 79 arbitrarily exempts three of the ten wealthiest counties in California (Contra Costa, Marin, and Sonoma), which is clearly not affirmatively furthering fair housing.
SB 79 allows local governments to relocate development from very high fire hazard severity zones and historic districts under an “alternative plan,” but the limitations under which an alternative plan can be produced make it mathematically impossible to achieve these plans in practice. Rather than requiring local action, these areas should be excluded from SB 79’s baseline capacity altogether. It is particularly egregious that SB 79 ignores fire safety in the wake of devasting fires in Los Angeles, as well as wildfires in urban San Diego neighborhoods.
This train is not ready to leave the station.
