Child daycare facilities.

Assembly Member Ávila Farías grounds a proposal that would treat daycare centers colocated with multifamily housing as residential uses by right, and would bar local charges for the privilege of operating such centers. The measure would add a new provision to California’s Health and Safety Code, applying statewide—including charter cities—and would require ongoing compliance with state building, fire, and licensing standards.

Key elements establish use-by-right for daycare centers colocated with multifamily housing (defined as five units or more) and prohibit local jurisdictions from imposing charges, taxes, or fees for a business license or equivalent permit in this context. Local restrictions related to the daycare center could be imposed only to the extent they are identical to those applied to the colocated multifamily housing, with additional allowances for building heights, setbacks, lot dimensions, health and safety standards, and nuisance abatement measures—so long as those measures are identical to those applied to the housing component. The framework preserves compliance with state life-safety requirements and licensing, while allowing design review in some cases, provided such review does not constitute a “project” for purposes of CEQA.

Definitions anchor the regime: a daycare center uses the same meaning as defined elsewhere in the Health and Safety Code, “multifamily housing” means five or more residential units, and “colocated” means operating within or on the same grounds as multifamily housing. The bill also clarifies that use-by-right is a local-review concept constrained by a prohibition on discretionary approvals that would create a project, and that the arrangement applies to all cities, including charter cities, as a matter of statewide concern. Enforcement would rely on existing state and local mechanisms, with no new appropriation attached to the measure.

In context, the proposal builds on current provisions that already treat small and large family daycare homes as residential by right and exempt them from certain local fees and CEQA considerations. The new provision extends the same regulatory parity to daycare centers colocated with multifamily housing, linking the daycare’s regulatory treatment to the housing component in specified respects while maintaining essential safety and licensing requirements. The result is a statewide framework that aligns permitting and fee treatment for colocated centers with the surrounding housing environment, subject to outlined limits and ongoing state standards.