In politics, as in life at large, timing matters. The last day in California’s 2025 legislative calendar for Governor Newsom to veto or sign bills passed by the Legislature before September 12 was Oct. 12. SB 79, arguably Scott Wiener’s most audacious housing bill, had been presented to Newsom Sept. 23. Housing wonks all over the state—indeed, the country—waited to see if and, as was more likely, when the governor, defying among others the mayor and council of Los Angeles, would sign SB 79 into law.
At 9:56 AM on Friday, October 10, California Yimby tweeted:
[VICTORY ALERT] Governor Newsom has signed SB 9, which expands HCD’s enforcement authority over local ADU ordinances.
In its excitement over this event, California Yimby misstated the number of the bill.
At 10:07 am, Newsom’s press office posted a celebratory tweet:
HUGE NEWS!! YIMBY’S [sic] REJOICE!!
California is making historic strides today as @CAGovernor signs #SB79—streamlining the building of more housing across the Golden State. No, it does not supersede local control as some have falsely claimed. No it is not one-size fits all. And no, this is not some “land grab” by the state. This action sets the state up for success in addressing the affordability and building crisis happening right now!
Some time later on October 10, under the headline “SB 79 is now law. But California still has work to do to fix the housing crisis and meet its climate goals,” the Chronicle posted an op-ed by planning guru William (Bill) Fulton.
Fulton, 70, is a former mayor of Ventura, former planning director of San Diego, author of the Guide to California Planning (just out in its seventh edition) and five other books, editor of the California Planning and Development Report, and writer of “The Future of Where” Substack. He’s currently “Professor of Practice” in UC San Diego’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, as well as a Terner Center Fellow.
Like the Yimbys, Fulton is adamantly pro-growth and anti-CEQA. But unlike the Yimby commentariat, he brings to the field a knowledge of planning history, a familiarity with many actual places, and a lively if variable empirical bent. Plus, he’s a good writer.
His October 10 op-ed in the Chronicle raised big questions—not about mandating voluminous upzoning around major transit (he’s all for that) but about the effectiveness of SB 79’s specific enhancement of transit-oriented development [TOD]:
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Now state law, SB79 doesn’t just make transit-oriented housing easier. It actually puts big transit agencies like BART and Caltrain in the housing business by giving them zoning power over land they own near major transit hubs, so they don’t have to get city approval for housing projects. The idea is not only that more housing will be made available, but that people will also be more likely to ride transit, securing the future of those much-needed systems, while reducing their carbon footprint.
This could have been written by any Yimby pundit. Not so the next sentence: “Yet in some ways, this bet on housing near transit stations could not come at a worse time”—nor the rest of the piece, which marked disconnects between SB 79 and the dismaying realities of transit ridership, transit agency capacity, and the financial feasibility of TOD.
Fulton observed that
- “transit ridership is still below pre-pandemic highs—especially on the rail systems that SB 79 focuses on, which are running at just over half of pre-pandemic levels.”
- “the transit agencies are themselves struggling financially, and significant budget cuts in the near future are almost certain, which of course would undermine the whole idea of [TOD]”
- “Newsom and the Legislature declined to act on a bailout package for transit”
- SB 63, which authorizes a five-county transit sales tax election in the Bay Area next November, also became law—but the money—assuming that it passes, won’t be available “anytime soon”
He detailed concerns about the readiness of BART, Caltrain, the Valley Transit Authority, and other transit agencies “to go whole-hog into the land use business.”
They’ll have to focus not only on finding developers for their property, but also on creating zoning rules, providing and paying for infrastructure, and all the other aspects of land-use planning that cities usually take care of.
Plus, “as recent commuting patterns suggest, there’s no guarantee that people who will live near the transit stations will actually use them to commute.” Indeed, the long hoped-for “shift in culture” whereby “Californians value transit and ride it” has been an elusive goal.
To be sure, the upzoning authorized by SB 79 will “undoubtedly…increase the value of the land that transit agencies own, meaning that they could cash in.” The twofold catch: “affordable housing requirements likely will reduce the potential financial windfall,” and “land-use planning and real estate development take a long time to bear fruit.”
Now he tells us
None of this is news. Several 48 hills authors have flagged problems with TOD for years. They were most recently noted by Michael Barnes in his devastating critique of SB 79 (Manila densities, anyone?) posted on September 22. Barnes cited a piece that had appeared on CP & DR:
This bill is a cynical effort to resurrect Transit Oriented Development (TOD), an idea whose time has come—and gone. In the June 19, 2023, issue of The California Planning and Development Report [“Will TOD Survive The Transit Downturn?”], reporter Josh Stephens stated:
UCLA urban planning professor Michael Manville noted that the average resident of TODs, especially those that include large numbers of market-rate units [which will be the case with SB 79-supported developments], are not likely to use transit very often under the best of circumstances. Nonetheless, transit orientation gives developers a host of benefits—including density bonuses and, following the 2022 passage of AB 209, the opportunity for significant parking reductions, all of which can make projects pencil out for developers.
So it’s not as if Fulton just thought of the questions he posed on October 10, right after SB 79 became law. He knew about them a good two years ago. He could have raised them while the bill was moving through the Legislature.
Indeed, he could have posed them in 2018, when the Legislature was deliberating a precursor of SB 79, AB 2923. Authored by then-Assemblymember, now-SF City Attorney David Chiu, and signed into law by Jerry Brown, AB 2923 transferred zoning and development authority over BART stations in Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Francisco Counties from the host cities to BART.
Questions about the viability of AB 2923 were raised in 48 hills in March 2018—by myself.
I’ve searched the Internet for Fulton’s comments on AB 2923 and found nothing. Perhaps I missed them; if so, I’d appreciate his filling me in.
Now he tells us 2.0
Fulton raises even bigger questions in the article that he posted on his Substack column on October 13.
Its title: “Are We Near the End of the Anti-NIMBY Legislation Era?”
The subhead: “California’s SB 79 has YIMBYs over the moon. But if it doesn’t move the needle on housing production, we may finally have to look at the other reasons housing isn’t getting built.”
Nodding to Yimby triumphalism, Fulton wondered: “[W]ill [SB 79] do what it’s supposed to do? After all, California has passed hundreds of laws to encourage housing production in the last decade, and housing production hasn’t gone up.” The new law, he warned, “won’t succeed automatically. Implementing it effectively faces major challenges.”
He reprised the doubts about transit agency capacity that he expressed in his Chronicle op-ed.
More concerning, though, is the fact that “it is becoming increasingly clear in California that getting projects approved is not the same as getting them built.” Fulton cited the stalled construction of housing projects approved on an expedited basis through LA’s Transit-Oriented Communities ordinance and Mayor Bass’s Executive Directive 1. “This may simply be a time lag, but it may also mean that there are other, non-regulatory impediments to housing development to in California.” Besides the questionable link between proximity to transit and transit ridership, especially for “residents of deed-restricted affordable housing,” he cited high interest rates, the shortage of construction workers in the state, the cost of construction materials, the last of these exacerbated by Trump’s tariffs.
The “bottom line”: “[W]e are beginning to understand that there is more to building housing in California and elsewhere than just overcoming NIMBY opposition.”
This was broaching heresy, and Fulton immediately backpedaled:
The YIMBY movement was birthed in opposition to NIMBYS—it’s a basic part of their “creation myth”….And there’s no question that NIMBY opposition is a huge impediment to more housing production.
But everything he’d already written demonstrated that NIMBY opposition is a minor impediment to more housing production. If it were a huge barrier, the state’s housing starts would have soared, because such opposition has been stifled by a decade-long torrent of Yimby legislation. Instead, as Fulton had observed, housing production is “stagnant.”
Breaking the “pro-housing” stranglehold
When Fulton wrote that “we are just beginning to understand that there is more to building housing…than just overcoming NIMBY opposition,” he implied that he’s on to something new. If by “we” he meant the purveyors of the “pro-housing” rhetoric that dominates public discourse in the U.S., that’s true.
But a growing body of dissident research already challenges the Yimby claim that onerous local regulations are the root cause of the housing crisis:
- “Housing urban growth and inequalities: The limits to deregulation and upzoning in reducing economic and spatial inequality,” by Michael Storper and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Urban Studies, 2019/2020
- “Blanket Upzoning—A Blunt Instrument—Won’t Solve the Affordable Housing Crisis,” interview with Storper, The Planning Report, 2019
- “Dodging the burden of proof: A Reply to Manville, Lens, and Monkkonen,” by Storper and Rodríguez-Pose, Urban Studies, 2020
- Sick City: Disease, Race, Inequality, and Urban Land, by Patrick Condon, 2021
- “Zoning Change: Upzonings, Downzonings, and Their Impacts on Residential Construction, Housing Costs, and Neighborhood Demographics,” Yonah Freemark, Journal of Planning Literature, 2023
- “The Minneapolis Miracle,” by Kevin Erdmann, Erdmann Housing Tracker, 2024
- “Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities,” by Schuyler Louie, John A. Mondragon and Johannes Wieland, National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2025
These inquiries variously note the factors that Fulton checked off: the TOD mirage, high interest rates, fraying supply chains, labor shortages.
But they also address two conditions he didn’t note: the wealth effect and the profit motive. As 48 hills editor Tim Redmond wrote in his overview of the NBER paper: “The price of housing in urban areas has less to do with the supply than with the number of rich people moving into the area.”
In other words: focus on demand, not on supply—on the growing gap between the incomes of people moving to the Bay Area and the rest of the population. Private developers build for the most profitable market—and that means those who can afford to pay the most. Current talk of a “mansion shortage” in San Francisco notwithstanding, what the Bay Area faces is a crisis of housing affordable to people of modest means.
Exacerbating the affordability crisis is the fact that even amidst a tech boom, private developers only build housing when doing so is sufficiently profitable. That’s why, as Barnes explained in June, 73,776 approved housing units are stuck in San Francisco’s “housing pipeline.” And why even as UC Berkeley’s enrollment explodes, the headline in a June article posted by Berkeleyside read: “Downtown Berkeley housing construction has stalled, creating empty, blighted lots.”
Which brings us back to hundreds of “anti-Nimby” laws passed in CA in the past decade. The “pro-housing” tag is a decoy. This legislation was not designed to stoke housing production but rather to maximize the discretion of private developers and state officials while decimating home rule and grass-roots democracy. That’s what it’s really “supposed to do”: create a housing policy regime that legitimizes and enables authoritarian capitalism. On that count, it’s huge success.
I invite Fulton to engage the research, expert and journalistic, that’s delved into “the other reasons housing isn’t being built” besides Nimby opposition.
And the next time he has doubts about a California housing bill, I hope he publishes them, preferably in the Chronicle, while the measure is being deliberated in Sacramento, not after it’s been signed into law.
