By Marcel Rodarte | Guest Commentary
OPINION – Sacramento is once again positioning itself as the ultimate land-use authority—this time with Senate Bill 79, a sweeping “by right” housing law for virtually any property within a half-mile of a qualifying transit stop.
The sales pitch is familiar: more housing near transit will lower costs, boost ridership, and fight climate change. But peel back the glossy talking points and you find a measure that shifts massive, unfunded infrastructure costs onto local taxpayers, dilutes affordability requirements, and targets growth in the neighborhoods least able to absorb it.
If the promise sounds ambitious, the price tag will bring you back to reality.
Cities would be legally required to approve large-scale developments, but Sacramento offers no plan to fund the infrastructure those developments demand. In effect, the bill hands local residents the invoice for a state-mandated experiment.
And the sticker shock isn’t the only flaw—what you get for the money is far less than advertised.
SB 79 overrides local zoning on a massive scale but sets affordability requirements only at the state’s bare minimum. Decades of research show that blanket upzoning without robust affordability provisions often drives land prices higher and fuels speculation, rather than producing more low-income housing.
We’ve already seen this in Southern California: units get built, rents climb, and the number of vacant homes grows even as homelessness persists. That’s because supply alone, without strategic affordability measures, misses the people most in need.
Worse still, the bill’s impacts will land hardest where they can do the most harm.
In practice, many high-opportunity neighborhoods are shielded by political resistance, meaning SB 79’s growth will be concentrated in lower-income, working-class areas already under housing pressure.
Equity groups such as Strategic Actions for a Just Economy have warned that this will undermine local programs designed to balance growth with affordability, like Los Angeles’ successful Transit Oriented Communities initiative. Sacramento’s “one-size” template erases those protections, risking displacement in the very communities it claims to help.
Local governments have shown they can grow housing responsibly, when they have the tools and the trust.
For over 65 years, the California Contract Cities Association has represented 80 cities committed to collaborative governance. We’ve seen first-hand that when local leaders can align housing growth with infrastructure capacity and community needs, the results are more sustainable, equitable, and fiscally sound.
SB 79 does the opposite. It strips away local discretion, imposes unfunded mandates, and hands down rigid rules from Sacramento that ignore the realities on the ground.
The housing crisis is real, but Sacramento’s shortcut won’t solve it.
California’s shortage stems from decades of underinvestment, regulatory bottlenecks, and economic policies that make affordable construction harder—not from cities refusing to build.
SB 79 fails to fix those underlying problems. Instead, it risks creating new ones: billion-dollar liabilities, weaker affordability outcomes, and deeper inequities.
The state should work with cities, not against them, to ensure housing growth comes with infrastructure investment, affordability guarantees, and equity safeguards. Until then, legislators should vote NO on SB 79 and focus on solutions that empower not override the communities they serve.
Marcel Rodarte is the Executive Director of California Contract Cities Association (CCCA), an organization representing over 80 cities throughout Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire.