California passed an astounding 209 laws between 2017 and 2025 to address the state’s housing crisis. While these legislative efforts are welcome, the volume of new laws has made it increasingly challenging for housing developers, planners, and community advocates to navigate the legal landscape. SPUR’s guide details nearly 100 laws that impact four key aspects of housing policy: project approval, affordability, density, and design standards. Our comprehensive analysis clarified interactions among the laws, the types of projects they affect, and the circumstances where they apply, empowering stakeholders with the knowledge to harness these legislative tools for effective housing solutions. Accompanying the guide, our California Housing Laws Database covers these laws in greater detail.
Key takeaways from the guide:
• California needs to build more dense, affordable housing to address the statewide housing crisis. Fragmented, localized policy decisions have limited housing production, with exclusionary zoning practices reserving land primarily for single-family homes and restricting the development of multi-family and affordable housing. New state laws make it harder for local policies to limit affordable housing, incentivize affordable housing production, increase density through multifamily and infill development near transit, and allow diverse housing solutions, such as accessory dwelling units, in more neighborhoods.
• State housing laws aim to remove bureaucratic hurdles. Recent laws have focused on expediting project approvals and permitting processes, including creating streamlined administrative programs, reforming the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and allowing certain housing projects to be built by right in some locations.
• Local policies and requirements should be transparent and based on objective criteria. Complex approval processes and subjective design standards create significant delays in project approvals, further exacerbating the housing shortage and increasing costs for developers. New state laws aim to ensure that local policies are grounded in objective criteria, evaluated through fair and transparent processes, and subject to reasonable time limits.