Castro Valley BART station, surrounded by parking and low-rise residential. Zoning such low densities around rapid transit is no longer legal under SB 79.
OK, the headline is a little exaggerated, but California’s Senate Bill 79, authored by Senator Scott Wiener and just signed by Governor Newsom, is a game-changer. It prohibits most cities from forbidding dense development near rapid transit stations.
All over America, we have built rapid transit systems and then allowed local governments to prohibit dense development around their stations, thus limiting how many people can take advantage of the transit service. The result is not just a crisis of affordable housing but one of affordable living. Not owning a car can be liberating, for a lower-income person especially, but only if they are allowed to live in a place where public transit gives them ample access to opportunity.
For much of the late 20th century, the solution to low income housing was dense developments on cul-de-sacs nowhere near anything. This development pattern assumed that everyone would need a car, thus impoverishing the residents further. Because not everyone in those developments had cars, transit agencies were then forced to run inefficient services to these places that were designed without transit in mind. We deal with this problem in almost every US network redesign we work on.
SB 79 overrides local zoning just in the areas around rapid transit stations (rail or high-end Bus Rapid Transit). This is not nearly enough places, and it’s not all the places where transit can provide for a liberated life without cars. But it’s a start.
SB 79 passed the Legislature by the narrowest of margins. The City of Los Angeles formally opposed it. It cleaved the Democratic Party’s activists from some of its more self-interested donors. And it has some silly carve-outs: cities below 35,000 population (read: Beverly Hills) and counties with fewer than 15 rail stations (read: Contra Costa County). It applies to only a quarter-mile radius of rapid transit stations, when the real benefit area is a radius of at least a half mile. The legislative process is never neat, and usually has some of these indefensible exceptions. But that doesn’t change the fact that a real line has been crossed and a new way of thinking about our public transit resources is becoming essential.
Is SB 79 all good news? No, it’s bad news that it was necessary. It’s bad news that in the midst of a historic crisis of homelessness and housing affordability, so many California local governments were still happy to wring their hands and demand that the problem be solved somewhere else. I support the right of local communities to express their own values in their governance. But when values harden into denial about an urgent crisis of housing and affordable living, the state must step in, and it has.
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