Now that SB 79 is the law of the land (thanks, LA City Council!), cities across California are scrambling to figure out how to implement it. The law is a sprawling beast - it was amended 15 times as it wound its way through the state legislature. If you need a refresher, Aaron Eckhouse and Nolan Gray of California YIMBY wrote a great breakdown of what’s in the law, and Streets For All made the best map of where in LA it will likely apply.

Some of the most complex amendments address Imelda Padilla’s number one job - local control. Cities get five years to craft their own tailored transit-oriented zoning plans that would supersede SB 79’s blunt instrument. In the meantime, they can choose to exempt some parts of their city from the law. Here are the places cities can exempt for the next five years:

• Fire zones

• Sea level rise zones

• Historic buildings

• Low-income neighborhoods

There are also a couple provisions that give cities credit for transit-oriented zoning they’ve already done (like CHIP here in LA). For the next five years, cities can exempt:

• Individual parcels that are already zoned for apartment buildings at least half the size that SB 79 allows.

• The entire area around transit stations that are already zoned for 75% of the building capacity that SB 79 allows (40% if the area is mostly low-income).

All these five-year deferrals are optional - cities can use them or not. But they have to decide by July 1st of next year, when the law takes effect. And the deadline is more like March, because the state housing department has to approve cities’ deferral choices, which can take up to 120 days. That means LA has about four months to decide where SB 79 will apply for the next five years.

In LA, these potential deferrals are a big deal. Streets For All calculated that about 2/3 of the SB 79 parcels in LA are eligible for deferral - that’s over a million potential new homes at stake. The biggest chunk is low-income neighborhoods, which covers around half of parcels - the A, B, and E Lines, and the under-construction East Valley light rail line all pass through a bunch of low-income parts of the city.

So what will City Council decide? Which parts of LA will SB 79 take effect in next July, and which parts will have to wait until 2031?

The low-hanging fruit

• Fire zones - No way City Council doesn’t defer them. Since the January fires, the misinformation spread about how SB 79 upzones the Palisades (it doesn’t) makes fire zones even more of a political hot potato, and deferring them is an easy layup. Ironically, deferring fire zones for five years will have no impact on the Westside - it will mostly affect Northeast LA, including parts of Highland Park and Eagle Rock.

• Sea level rise zones - Not applicable here, at least until LA gets high-quality transit at Venice Beach (pretty please?).

• Historic buildings - Will definitely get deferred, and this is a bummer for me, as it will impact much of the D Line, especially the new stations opening on Wilshire in March, which are right next to multiple historic districts full of single family houses.

The reason deferral of historic buildings is a slam dunk? A quirk in how the law was written. In the alternative plans that cities get five years to craft, they are allowed to exempt historic buildings, but only up to 10% of the parcels around each station. That means the city will be forced to pick favorites, choosing which historic buildings are exempted in the final plan and which aren’t - a highly charged effort that surely nobody is excited about. The obvious choice for now is to defer everything for the next five years while some poor souls in the Planning Dept. lead an extensive outreach program to pit homeowners against each other in a battle to see whose 1923 Spanish Revival bungalows survive and whose get sacrificed on the YIMBY altar.

Low-income neighborhoods

Housing justice groups like ACT-LA advocated for cities’ ability to defer low-income neighborhoods for five years while they craft their local plans. ACT-LA argues in a letter that the extra time will give low-income folks a chance “to learn about the law and engage in a deliberate, community-driven planning process ahead of SB 79 taking effect.” Their biggest concern is protecting existing tenants in those areas from being displaced by new development.

Others argue for letting SB 79 take effect in at least some parts of low-income neighborhoods. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents many of these neighborhoods, is known to covet more market-rate development for his district and may want to see apartments built on its commercial corridors. Abundant Housing LA, who wrote their own letter, advocate for going further by also applying SB 79 immediately to single-family areas in low-income neighborhoods.

The political pressure to defer low-income neighborhoods will be enormous, especially for single-family areas. In some parts of South LA, like this neighborhood near the Expo/Western E Line station, about half of houses are renter-occupied. Homeowners and tenants fighting for the same thing? Good luck going up against that. As for low-income commercial corridors, it ultimately depends what individual councilmembers think about CHIP.

CHIP away?

Commercial corridors across LA already got upzoned by CHIP, the big set of incentive programs adopted in February to try to meet our state-mandated housing targets. The program that upzones near transit stations is called Transit-Oriented Incentive Areas, or TOIA. In most cases, TOIA allows bigger buildings and requires a higher percentage of affordable apartments than SB 79 does. ACT-LA is advocating for all TOIA-eligible sites across the city to be deferred, arguing that letting developers use SB 79 instead would create “a lose-lose result where SB 79 encourages slightly smaller projects with less affordable housing.” Greg Bonett of Public Counsel, who helped draft the ACT-LA letter, told me this is “not a super close call” - TOIA requires roughly double the affordable housing set-aside than SB 79, so letting developers use SB 79 would cost the city a bunch of affordable homes, unless way more projects are built using the looser SB 79 rules.

Scott Epstein of Abundant Housing takes a different view. “More tools are good,” he told me. Until this year, the two upzoning tools used most by developers in LA were the city’s Transit Oriented Communities (TOC) program and the state density bonus law. Epstein noted some projects worked better with one program, some with the other. “You focus on abundance in as many tools as possible - that’s the way to get as many affordable units as possible.”

The problem with this debate is that it’s all theoretical. TOIA is a brand new program - we don’t know if developers can afford those stricter affordability requirements in this economic environment. The Planning Dept. announced in July that they had received pre-applications for 14,800 total homes through CHIP in four months - a lot! - but they’ve provided few details, including how many were proposed through TOIA. How can we compare it to SB 79, also a brand new program?

Greg Bonett argues that because both programs are unknowns, we should stick with CHIP, since it’s easier to change than SB 79, which requires going back to the legislature. If developers don’t end up proposing enough new apartment buildings through TOIA, Bonett says, City Council can tweak it until it starts producing.

The factor neither advocacy group mentions is pride. Many City Councilmembers stuck their necks out to vote for CHIP. Only a few did the same for SB 79. Katy Yaroslvasky specifically said she opposed SB 79 because we have CHIP, calling SB 79 “a blanket approach that overrides the targeted, context-sensitive local planning system tools we have just implemented here in Los Angeles.” CHIP is City Council’s baby. Most Councilmembers aren’t yet ready to give that baby a new little sibling.

Entire stations

Now for the juiciest part. The provision letting cities defer entire station areas if they’re already upzoned gives opportunistic City Councilmembers a chance to game the system. Take Wilshire/Fairfax, the one near all the historic districts.

Those diagonal streets at upper-right are Park La Brea, home to a bunch of 13-story apartment buildings that, along with the generous zoning along the Miracle Mile on Wilshire, could very well add up to 75% of the density allowed by SB 79. That existing capacity could give Katy Yaroslavsky the opportunity to defer the entire station area, including the upper-left part of the station, Beverly Grove, which is a neighborhood full of wealthy single-family homeowners, including that of one of LA’s most famous NIMBYs, Paul Koretz.

For SB 79 supporters, this is the nightmare scenario - City Councilmembers delay the law from taking effect in a bunch of the city’s wealthy single-family neighborhoods that happen to be located near bigger buildings. You can bet that homeowners in these neighborhoods are already running the numbers and lobbying their councilmembers to get their neighborhoods deferred. As Scott Epstein told me, “Rich people always find a way of getting around [stuff].” Both Abundant Housing and ACT-LA are gearing up for a fight on this front - both of their letters insist that SB 79 should take effect in wealthy areas right away.

Annoyingly, that fight will have to wait a few months while we await guidance from the state housing department. The problem is that it’s tricky to figure out what the zoned capacity is in an area. Consider this: nobody’s going to redevelop Park La Brea or the office towers on Wilshire. Should the 75% capacity calculation include those buildings - what’s already been built around a station - or only what could realistically be built in the future? Experts I’ve talked to are divided on what the law says. I’m hearing the housing department won’t even look at this issue until after the new year. Until then, all we can do is speculate.

What’s the point?

Why does SB 79 allow these five-year deferrals at all? Ostensibly it’s about giving cities time to write their own alternative plans. In those plans, cities will be allowed to shift the density around a bit, as long as every parcel allows an apartment building between half to double the SB 79 size, and the area around every station is upzoned at least the same total amount as SB 79 does. No matter what, almost all the deferred areas will end up getting upzoned in 2031.

So how will this work in practice? The city defers some of the more “sensitive” parts of town while writing its plan, and for the first five years all the development happens in the richer, less sensitive parts of town. Except, as we’ve seen, plenty of rich neighborhoods could get deferred too.

If you’re thinking this wasn’t super well thought out, you’re on to something. The deferrals weren’t added for policy reasons. They were added to get legislators’ votes. Unfortunately, the deferrals create a perverse incentive - they give constituents in deferred areas five years to lobby the state legislature to amend the law and exempt them permanently. People getting around [stuff]. If that happens, we could lose over a million new homes never built near our best transit. SB 79 supporters should go into this fight clear-eyed - the conversation might be about temporary deferrals, but the players might really be playing for keeps. What gets deferred now may never come back.