Where Are All the Cranes?

A California YIMBY hopepill.

Lately, there has been a bumper crop of posts calling into question whether the YIMBY movement in California has failed.

On the one hand, this is a strange case to make now: California YIMBY’s signature wins are either less than six months old (the CEQA infill exemption only took effect in June 2025) or haven’t even taken effect yet (SB 79 comes online in July 2026). And with increasingly fewer exceptions, California’s governing class has come to embrace YIMBYism.

On the other hand, I get it: We’ve been at this for a decade, yet overall permitting in California hasn’t really budged, and prices in many parts of the state keep going up. The state is still losing population, and thus, still on track to lose Congressional representation in 2030. The mixed blessing of representing YIMBYs in Sacramento is that we don’t care about symbolic wins like the number of bills passed—we want outcomes, and we want them now.

I could give the usual excuses: A lot of this reform has come online amid a chaotic macroeconomic environment.¹ We’ve made progress on some aspects of the problem—zoning and streamlining—while losing ground on others—impact fees, inclusionary zoning, and transfer taxes.² Furthermore, some key legislative changes have yet to take full effect. It can take years before a housing law results in new certificates of occupancy being issued.

But in this post, I would like to take a different approach: I believe that skeptics are missing the existing mounting evidence of YIMBY success. In those areas of California where—substantively and geographically—YIMBY wins have been long-standing and thoroughgoing enough to actually mean anything, a lot of housing is already starting to get built.³

Chin up, YIMBYs. It’s working.

Accessory Dwelling Units

Before 2016, accessory dwelling units (ADU) were effectively illegal everywhere in California.⁴ That year, legislators embarked on the project of legalizing them statewide, passing over a dozen bills over the span of a decade and building out arguably the most complete ADU framework in the world.⁵

As a result, nearly 150,000 new ADUs have been permitted, of which approximately 80,000 have been built. Each of these units represents a home that would have been illegal to build before YIMBY reforms took effect.⁶ These ADUs now account for a quarter to a third of the housing units permitted in cities like Los Angeles, and they have allowed for rental housing production in even the most exclusionary suburbs—often for the first time since we started collecting permit data.

You know this is a good chart because the line goes up. (M. Nolan Gray)

The ADU boom shows no signs of slowing down. But why were these reforms so successful? Because they represent the most complete vision of the YIMBY reform program:

1. Remove zoning barriers to a certain type of housing.

2. Massively streamline the entitlement and permitting process, making it quick and easy to get shovels in the ground.

3. Ensure feasibility, exempting these projects from high impact fees and unfunded inclusionary zoning mandates.

I suspect most people outside of YIMBY circles don’t realize that, thanks to ADU law, California now has de facto fourplex zoning: on any residential lot in the state, you can build a primary residence, attached ADU, detached ADU, and junior ADU (JADU), and all of these units will be entitled to the strongest protections available in California housing law.⁷ This year, we hope to add yet another unit into the mix.

In a literal sense, we have successfully allowed Californians to say, “Yes in my backyard.”

State Density Bonus Law

Most people by now know that ADUs have been a big success. But I find that very few people realize just how many units the state density bonus law (SDBL) has helped to facilitate. The idea is simple: if a developer sets aside a share of units in a given development as deed-restricted units renting to low-income households, they are entitled to build even more units overall.

There’s always an Alfred Twu graphic! (Circulate Planning & Policy)

Better yet, developers are entitled to receive the regulatory relief needed to make these bigger project feasible: based on the size of the project, they can request waivers from the zoning standards that make additional units physically infeasible—such as setbacks and height limits—and concessions from mandates that make them financially infeasible—such as local open space and parking requirements.

While California has had some form of statewide density bonus since 1979, reforms adopted in 2020 and 2023 significantly scaled it up. According to a new report by Circulate Planning & Policy, these reforms have facilitated the construction of over 140,000 units since 2020, of which half were deed-restricted at rents affordable to low-income families. Using SDBL is now a standard feature of development in California.⁸

You know this is a good chart because the bar gets taller. (Circulate Planning & Policy)

The genius of the state density bonus law is that, rather than expecting policymakers to have perfect knowledge, it lets developers identify—and remove—the barriers to their particular project. (It also avoids tedious fights over design standards, to the extent that they don’t need to be codified.) By rewarding developers for including deed-restricted affordable units, it has also helped to backfill the feasibility hit of unfunded local inclusionary zoning requirements.

As with ADU reform, the SDBL building boom shows no signs of slowing down.

Local Building Booms

Recently, I was chatting with a YIMBY colleague on the East Coast, and he made an off-handed remark about how Berkeley was a hive of Left NIMBYism. I understand why he said it, as this used to be the case. Indeed, YIMBYism was partly born on the cauldron of Berkeley public hearings. But as of 2026, he is wrong: Berkeley has gone from permitting almost nothing to permitting thousands of new homes in the past few years.

Total residential permits issued for Berkeley and San Luis Obispo. (housingdata.app)

The same is true in San Luis Obispo, another college town that was once a bastion of Left NIMBYism. In Silicon Valley, high-cost cities like Menlo Park, Mountain View, and Santa Clara have started permitting housing at scale for the first time ever. In cities like Sacramento and San Diego, hegemonic YIMBYism has facilitated a steady flow of new units, such that rents keep falling in those cities.

Total residential permits issued for Menlo Park and Mountain View. (housingdata.app)

For all the focus on bad actor cities like Huntington Beach, many California cities are getting their act together. While the glacial pace of the regional housing needs assessment (RHNA) and the inconsistent adherence to the Housing Accountability Act (HAA) have been frustrating, these policies have forced most cities to overhaul local policies, and this will soon result in permits.

Total residential permits issued for Culver City—founded as an exclusionary sundown town. This is just the beginning: local YIMBYs recently won a majority of city council seats and are gearing up to faithfully implement SB 79. (housingdata.app)

I suspect that best is yet to come: In old NIMBY havens like Culver City and Santa Monica, YIMBY council majorities are gearing up to kick off a building boom. Even Los Angeles—the final boss of California NIMBYism—seems poised to elect a YIMBY mayor later this year. And in the gubernatorial race, the top Democratic candidates are competing over who is the most YIMBY candidate.

No Really, The Best Is Yet To Come

A few years ago, I read Land Use and the States by Robert G. Healey. (It’s more interesting than it sounds.) Published in 1976, the author occasionally doubts that the raft of bottom-up, state-level, anti-growth policies of the 1960s and 70s would amount to anything. Aren’t California’s environmental reviews just an empty book report? Won’t developers still find a way around growth controls in Hawaii and Vermont?

Of course, most of these policies would go on to radically restrain housing production, laying the groundwork for the very housing crisis that YIMBYs seek to end.⁹ What did the author—and perhaps contemporary YIMBY skeptics—miss? I think there are two things:

1. Policy is an iterative process. The nature of the legislative process is that the first cut at nearly any policy is weak—it is “clean up” legislation and court decisions that do the heavy lifting. We see this today: with each passing HCD advisory memo and AG victory, California’s pro-housing policies get stronger.¹⁰

2. Anti-growth partisans didn’t return to their metaphorical ploughs after passing their legislation, nor did they wilt when they failed to immediately get everything they wanted. They knuckled down: They staffed up planning agencies. They voted in aligned candidates. They sued their opponents. A similar YIMBY long march through the institutions is already underway.

In recent weeks, there has been a lot of (understandable) frustration with various cities—particularly Los Angeles—attempting to thwart SB 79 implementation. I sympathize. It’s a bummer we had to phase it in to get it passed.¹¹ Was it all just a waste of time?

It was not. To delay an even bigger upzoning, Los Angeles had to adopt the largest upzoning in the city’s history. In 2029, the full SB 79 upzoning will take effect either way. In the meantime, the current governor has already signaled that he plans to throw the book at the city if they don’t do more than the bare minimum, and the current best bet to be the next governor was an early supporter of the law.¹²

There is still a lot of work to be done on zoning and streamlining in California.¹³ But at California YIMBY, our policy focus in the coming sessions is shifting toward making housing financially feasible to build. It’s all well and good if zoning allows housing, and the permitting process is reasonably fast and predictable. But if projects don’t pencil, none of this matters.

Toward this end, we are backing bills to fix up condominium defects and presale law. In coming years, we will be overhauling California’s exorbitant impact fees and unfunded inclusionary zoning mandates. It won’t be easy. But if 2025 was any indication, this movement has a way of making things that seem impossible start to seem inevitable.

If you’re coming down off the high of the big wins last year, splash some cold water on your face and get it together. Get involved in your local YIMBY group. Come to YIMBY lobby day. Vote for, donate to, and knock doors for YIMBY candidates. And if you’re still convinced that YIMBYism in California has failed, spare us the simple sabotage tactics and go join another movement.

Generational shifts in policy don’t happen overnight. But with enough sustained effort, they do happen.

Thank you to Ned Resnikoff for the helpful feedback. All errors remain my own.

1. High interest rates, unpredictable tariffs on construction materials, and chaotic mass deportations don’t exactly inspire the confidence needed to finance or develop big new projects.

2. Indeed, I think some of the progress we made on zoning and streamlining came at the cost of feasibility, to the extent that these reforms often required unworkable mandates to pass. We plan to fix this in the coming years.

3. In this post, I’m limiting my claims of “success” to cases where we can draw a direct line between laws changing and permits being issued. This understates the case. How many units exist because the HAA made permitting more predictable? How many units exist because AB 2097 unlocked surface lots for housing? How many units are in development because SB 684-1123 streamlined townhouse development? We don’t actually know, but the correct answer is presumably a lot more than zero.

4. Otherwise known as granny flats, mother-in-law units, or casitas.

5. I’ve written in greater detail about this here and here.

6. When I characterize this and other reforms as a “YIMBY” reforms, I do not mean to suggest that it occurred purely because of my organization, California YIMBY. (Though we’ve done a lot of work on this.) For example, Casita Coalition deserves special recognition for their work on legalizing ADUs. I only mean to suggest that the ideas were inspired by YIMBY ideas and heavily backed by people who would identify as YIMBYs.

7. Indeed, I suspect this is why SB 9 was such a flop: why build an SB 9 duplex when you can effectively build a fourplex with far stronger protections using ADU laws? With AB 1033, you can even condoize ADUs in many jurisdictions, creating a for-sale product.

8. Circulate Planning & Policy—formerly Circulate San Diego—also played a key role in fixing up this area of California housing law.

9. The notable exception here being Florida’s growth control framework, which was altogether scrapped.

10. It was court cases, not legislative reform—example, example, example—that turned CEQA from an empty book report into the keystone of California NIMBYism. Hence the essential role of groups like the California Housing Defense Fund and YIMBY Law.

11. If you think we could have passed SB 79 without this “phase in” compromise, I would remind you that this bill passed every single policy committee and floor vote with the bare minimum of votes needed to pass. This is the strongest bill that could conceivably have been passed. If you want stronger legislation, elect more pro-housing candidates.

12. For the remainder of the Sixth Cycle of RHNA, HCD can review and toss out SB 79 implementing ordinances on a discretionary basis. Beginning with the Seventh Cycle, this review becomes mandatory.

13. For my part, I think that—in the coming years—the Starter Home Revitalization Act (AKA SB 684 and SB 1123) framework that we helped to pass could kick off a townhouse and small-lot home building boom on the scale of ADUs.