Housing element: prohousing designations: prohousing local policies.

Senator Wahab, with Assembly Member Garcia as a coauthor, advances a measure that retools how California allocates incentives for housing progress by broadening the set of local policies deemed prohousing and tying those policies to competitive state programs that fund housing and infrastructure. The proposal foregrounds policy tools that jurisdictions may use to support housing production and retention, while coordinating with the state’s larger housing-element framework and related incentive structures.

Key provisions center on expanding what counts as prohousing local policy to include strategies that keep people housed, alongside traditional production tools. Examples highlighted in the bill include targeted approaches such as expanding access to housing through reduced parking requirements, enabling more sites and higher densities, expediting permits, and creating mechanisms to convert existing properties for housing (adaptive reuse). The measure also explicitly adds programs that reward jurisdictions with enhanced scoring for competitive state-funded housing and infrastructure initiatives, encompassing major housing and infill programs as well as related climate and infrastructure grants, provided the jurisdiction has housing elements found to be in compliance and has adopted qualifying prohousing policies. The framework envisions annual designation reporting and ongoing oversight by the administering departments, with a defined role for emergency versus permanent regulations in implementing the policy.

A distinguishing feature is the bill’s dual operative path: one version would apply to jurisdictions with substantial compliance and another would hinge on insubstantial compliance, creating a sequencing dynamic tied to companion legislation. The text also introduces targeted provisions for small rural jurisdictions, offering the possibility of streamlined evaluation for prohousing policy evidence, a four-year minimum renewal horizon for designations, and careful caps on how much extra incentive value can be awarded. Additionally, the bill preserves the existing emergency-regulation approach for implementing the policy while planning for permanent regulations, and it calls for annual publication of the programs eligible for incentives.

In its broader context, the measure situates prohousing incentives within a formalized, incentivized framework intended to influence how state resources are awarded for housing and related infrastructure. It does not create new appropriations, but it expands the toolkit jurisdictions can deploy to qualify for favorable scoring in state programs, potentially affecting the distribution of state funding and the administrative workload of housing agencies. The legislation also interacts with AB 36, prescribing a specific sequencing condition for when certain amendments take effect, which could shape the timing and scope of changes in jurisdictional incentives and designations.