‘Limited to no impact’: Why a pro-housing group says California’s pro-housing laws aren’t producing more

By Ben Christopher | CALmatters Network One California law was supposed to flip defunct strip malls across California into apartment-lined corridors. Another was designed to turn under-used church parking lots into fonts of new affordable housing. A third would, according to supporters and opponents alike, “end single-family zoning as we know it.” Fast-forward to 2025 and this spate of recent California laws, and others like it intended to supercharge the construction of desperately needed housing, have had “limited to no impact on the state’s housing supply.” That damning conclusion comes from a surprising source: A new report by YIMBY Law, a pro-development nonprofit that would very much like to see these laws work. The analysis, released today, studied five state laws passed since 2021 that have swept away regulatory barriers to building apartment buildings and other dense residential developments in places where such housing has been historically barred. The laws under review include: SB 9 from 2021, which allows people to split their single-family homes into duplexes, thus ending single-family-home-only zoning across California. In practice, according to the report, building permits for only 140 units were issued under the law in 2023. AB 2011 from 2022 was designed to make...