When California legislators voted in 2021 to eliminate zoning laws that require neighborhoods to have only single family homes, supporters celebrated it as a tool to alleviate the state’s crippling housing shortage. Opponents said it heralded the end of homeownership in the state. Two years after the law went into effect, fierce resistance from local officials, as well as complex hurdles for homeowners to add multiunit buildings to their properties, have kept neighborhoods of only single-family homes dominant in the Golden State.
Fewer than 500 property owners have sought to subdivide their land under the law known as SB9, according to state data. The number of new housing units completed is in the dozens.
“The purpose of SB9 is homeownership but we’re not even allowing that to really bloom,” said Muhammad Alameldin, policy associate at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “We wrote the law with too many ways in which local governments could prevent the actual home-building.”