California Legalized the Housing. It Just Didn’t Get Built.

California has the legal tools to build far more housing. It just isn’t using them. Since 2021 the state has legalized duplexes, lot splits, and apartments on millions of parcels where they were long banned — and almost none of it has been built. SB 9, the 2021 law that was supposed to end single-family zoning, opened 6.1 million parcels to new housing and has produced 266 projects: a utilization rate of 0.004%, closer to a rounding error than a policy.

And SB 9 is the success story. Two companion laws meant to open commercial land (SB 6) and faith-owned land (SB 4) to housing have no recorded projects at all. California passed five landmark streamlining laws; together they have produced almost nothing.

None of this happened by accident. Cities did not defy SB 9 so much as neutralize it: in the two years after it passed, YIMBY Law counted 140 local ordinances that, in the report’s words, were designed to reduce or prevent the law from working on the ground — not by banning duplexes outright, which they no longer could, but by burying them in conditions.

The same YIMBY Law report that tallied those ordinances, published in February 2025, traced what became of the laws themselves and found “limited to no impact on the state’s housing supply to date.” The legislature responded with cleanup bills. Meanwhile — for reasons rooted in interest rates, not zoning — California permitted 10,000 fewer homes in 2024 than it had in 2023, and the new laws were nowhere near big enough to offset the drop.

The numbers are not improving.

The Baseline

Start with SB 9, the law that was supposed to allow duplexes and lot splits across millions of California parcels. Those 266 projects were permitted or completed by the end of 2023. UC Berkeley’s Center for Community Innovation reviewed the same data and concluded simply: “Despite high expectations, SB 9 has produced very little new housing thus far.”

SB 6, which lets market-rate housing be built on commercially zoned land without a rezoning — though, unlike its companion AB 2011, it provides no streamlined, ministerial approval pathway of its own — had produced no recorded projects since taking effect in mid-2023.

SB 4, the “Yes in God’s Backyard” bill that was supposed to unlock an estimated 171,000 acres of land owned by faith institutions and nonprofit colleges for affordable housing, had no recorded projects as of the February 2025 report — even after philanthropic funders gave grants to advocacy organizations specifically to drive uptake. Dozens of congregations have since begun exploring projects, but the early pace has been slow.

Of the five laws, the commercial-conversion tool AB 2011 is the partial exception. The same YIMBY tracking found eight AB 2011 projects approved in 2024 — a small number, but more than SB 6 and SB 4, which recorded none — and land-use attorneys report rising interest since a 2024 amendment broadened its reach. The “almost nothing” verdict lands hardest on SB 9, SB 6, and SB 4.

That was the state of play in February 2025. The months since have not improved the picture.

The Direction of Travel

Roughly 102,000 new homes were permitted in California in 2024, according to Census Bureau data — about 10,000 fewer than in 2023, a decline economists attribute mainly to high mortgage rates and construction costs rather than to any housing law. (The size of the drop varies by source; some permit series show 2024 closer to flat.) The state authorized housing at a rate of 258 units per 100,000 residents, well below the national average of 435. Texas built at 722. Los Angeles alone saw a 23% drop in housing permits in 2024. The slide continued into 2025: California issued just 49,400 permits in the first half of the year, its lowest first-half total since 2014, and the state’s own budget projects only about 100,000 a year through 2028.

The legislature passed additional cleanup bills in 2024: SB 450 (strengthening SB 9’s shot clock), SB 1123 (expanding SB 684 to single-family lots), AB 2243 (expanding AB 2011’s scope), SB 1037 (new housing enforcement tools). Most took effect January 1, 2025.

Then, in 2025, the legislature went bigger still — what advocates and the governor called the most consequential housing session in state history. It passed SB 79, which upzones land near transit in California’s biggest metro counties (effective July 1, 2026), and the AB 130 and SB 131 reforms, which exempt most infill housing from environmental review. These are real tools. But they widen what is legal without closing the gap between what is legal and what actually gets built — the gap this whole story is about.

Same Cities, Same Playbook

The method is rarely a flat refusal. SB 9, like most of the streamlining laws, is ministerial: it strips a city of the discretion to reject a project that qualifies, so the city cannot simply say no. What the law leaves in local hands is the power to define what “qualifies” — the objective zoning, subdivision, and design standards a project must satisfy before the counter will accept it. Cities have turned that single lever into a chokepoint. They write the standards so demanding that few projects can meet them and few owners can afford to try: minimum lot dimensions that make a split impossible, setbacks and design mandates that shrink a duplex below what pencils out, affordability covenants that erase the return, extra sign-offs that stall the clock. The duplex stays legal in theory. It just can’t be built in practice.

Dana Point shows how this plays out. It appeared by name in the YIMBY Law report as one of the worst SB 9 offenders — banning flag lots, requiring perpetual affordability deed restrictions, demanding HOA approval before the city will even process an application. SB 450’s new 60-day “deemed approved” shot clock was supposed to end the stalling.

On June 13, 2025, an applicant submitted an SB 9 second-unit application to Dana Point — a resubmission, after the city had denied an earlier version that March. The 60-day clock ran out with no decision. Under the statute, that silence carries a consequence: the application is “deemed approved” automatically. The applicant flagged the lapse to HCD, and on September 15, 2025, HCD sent Dana Point a formal technical assistance letter confirming the project was approved by operation of law and reminding the city of its 60-day obligation.

So the shot clock’s self-executing remedy worked — this applicant got an entitlement without the city’s sign-off. But that is a thinner victory than it looks. The remedy only rescues someone sophisticated enough to track the deadline and escalate to Sacramento; it leaves the rest of the playbook intact. The city paid no penalty for blowing the deadline, can still impose post-entitlement permit conditions, and has every incentive to stall the next applicant who isn’t watching as closely. The state’s response to a city it had flagged for years was a letter, not a sanction — and a letter is not a deterrent.

Why Enforcement Keeps Failing

YIMBY Law’s report identified three enforcement routes: HCD, the Attorney General, and private nonprofits like YIMBY Law and California Housing Defense Fund. All three are underdeployed relative to the scale of the problem. HCD didn’t get explicit SB 9 enforcement authority until 2024. Since then, it has issued technical assistance memos, not lawsuits. The AG has taken action against specific cities but cannot monitor every city in the state. Nonprofits have filed hundreds of enforcement actions but lack the capacity for systematic coverage.

The pattern repeats because the consequences remain low. Cities pass ordinances that frustrate state housing law. HCD writes letters. Nonprofits file complaints. Most cities comply enough to avoid a lawsuit, then find the next legal ambiguity to exploit. The people who needed those 6.1 million eligible parcels to produce housing are not organized enough or politically powerful enough to make defiance cost more than compliance.

What the Legislature Could Do

The YIMBY Law report’s recommendations remain the right ones: eliminate owner-occupancy requirements for SB 9 lot splits, preempt HOA covenants that block duplexes, cap impact fees at ADU-equivalent levels, allow SB 9 units to be sold as condominiums by right, expand income eligibility in SB 4 and AB 2011 to open more financing structures. The legislature has passed cleanup bills addressing some of these. It has not addressed the enforcement gap.

SB 1037, one of the 2024 cleanup bills, already created penalties of $10,000 to $50,000 a month — but only after the Attorney General or HCD wins a lawsuit, which is exactly the slow, discretionary path that lets most cities off the hook. The state needs penalties that attach automatically when a city misses a shot clock, not ones gated behind years of litigation. It needs funding for HCD’s Housing Accountability Unit at a scale that matches the number of cities defying state law. And it needs to make the cost of non-compliance immediate and visible.

California has proven it can pass the laws. What it hasn’t proven is that it will enforce them.