Push to build more homes on California coast stifled after lawmakers derail housing bills

Housing advocates thought that this was going to be the year when they finally cracked the California Coast.

In early spring, Democratic lawmakers, and the Yes In My Backyard activists backing them, rolled out a series of bills aimed at making it easier to build apartments and accessory dwelling units along California’s highly regulated coast  and to make it more difficult for the independent and influential California Coastal Commission to slow or block housing projects. The 15-member group oversees almost all of the state’s 840 miles of coastline, a stretch of land that just under a million Californians call home. 

The pro-construction push built off last year’s success for the coalition when the Legislature passed a major housing law and — breaking from long-standing legislative tradition — did not include a carveout for the coast. This year’s pack of bills was meant to cement and build off a new political reality in which the 48-year-old Coastal Commission no longer has quite so much say over housing policy.

Fast forward to mid-August and those new bills are either dead or so severely watered down that they no longer carry the promise of a more built-out coastline. Whatever happened last year, the California Coastal Commission is still a force to be reckoned with.

“Californians really treasure their coast and they feel very strongly about protecting it and bills that seek to weaken coastal protections are going to run into some strong headwinds,” said  Sarah Christie, the commission’s legislative affairs director. 

Since the 1970s, the California Coastal Commission has closely regulated any construction or demolition within the California coastal zone —  a narrow band of land that varies from 1,000 feet to 5-miles inland from high tide. While many recent state housing laws have required predictable, by-the-book approval of proposed developments, the commission has remained a redoubt of discretion. The commission’s defenders say that that is as it should be, since the coast’s enormous value to the public, its fragile ecosystems and its vulnerability to searise require holistic and individualized protection.

On Thursday, San Diego Democratic Assemblymember David Alvarez pulled his bill, AB 2560, written to ensure that California’s density bonus law, a policy that allows developers to build taller, denser or meeting fewer local requirements in exchange for setting aside some units for lower income tenants or owners, applies in the coastal zone. As he explained in a press release, recent amendments tacked onto the bill would have made it “ineffective at building more housing.”

That tweak came out of the Senate Natural Resources Committee, which heard the bill in late June, just prior to the Legislative summer recess. The amendment would have subjected any density bonus project to the added protections of the California Coastal Act. The committee is helmed by Sen. Dave Min, an Irivine Democrat. 

The amendment “undid the point of the bill,” said Will Moore, policy director at Circulate San Diego, a nonprofit that co-sponsored the bill. The only point in continuing to move forward after such changes would have been “if we were just in love with the number 2560 or something,” he added.

Min’s Natural Resources Committee emerged as a vital defender of the Coastal Commission this year. 

In April, the committee also substantially revised two coastal housing bills by Sen. Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas. One would have exempted backyard cottages, otherwise known as accessory dwelling units, from Coastal Commission review. Amendments out of the Min’s committee revised it to simply require the commission to offer guidance to local governments on how to permit ADUs. 

“Californians really treasure their coast and they feel very strongly about protecting it and bills that seek to weaken coastal protections are going to run into some strong headwinds.”

Sarah Christie, legislative affairs director, California Coastal Commission

A second Blakespear bill would have sped up the appeal deadline for apartment projects in the coastal zone. Min’s amendments changed it to simply require that the commission submit a report to the Legislature by 2026. (The bill died in a subsequent fiscal committee last week.)

Blakespear accepted those changes at the time, but not happily, which led to a testy exchange at the April hearing.

“To clarify, you were not forced to take any amendments, you agreed to take them,” Min said. 

“I am absolutely forced to take these amendments,” Blakespear responded. “I am doing that willingly, but I do not want to.”

Over the last half decade, a majority of state lawmakers have come to embrace the idea that bringing down the cost of housing in California requires a significant increase in the supply of homes. California housing regulators are pushing local governments across the state to permit 315,000 new units every year until the end of the decade — a pace of construction without precedent in California. 

Housing advocates note that the coastal zone passes through many urbanized centers and that its population is disproportionately wealthy and white. That, they argue, has made the coastal commission a tool of elitist exclusion. 

But Coastal Act defenders argue that the goals of making the state’s beachfront property more accessible and protecting the coast are not mutually exclusive.

“There’s a variety of ways we could increase workforce housing in the coastal zone without undercutting the Coastal Act,” said Christie. That might include requiring local governments, which are in many cases tasked with enforcing the act, to approve housing projects that don’t jeopardize coastal resources. The Commission has also long called for the state to give it the power to require developers to set aside units for low-income residents, authority that was taken away from the agency in the early 1980s. 

That debate is dead in the Legislature for now, but it’s likely to resurface again in some form next year.