A message from our friends at United Neighbors

12/4/25

Hi All,

We are all back but Christmas is right around the corner. Let’s get started.

There are a lot of moving parts to addressing how to properly move ahead with SB 79.

There is a legislative approach (new bill), a legal approach (a lawsuit) and a local implementation approach ( how will the City Council and the Mayor implement SB79). None of the implementation options available to the city will protect us from needless new density and the destruction of neighborhoods. The options merely offer short term deferrals for some communities (still need approval from the state) and no deferral to others.

SB 79 is full of problems:.

Misunderstood impact:

Trust us when we say that SB 79 impacts are not fully understood by either our City Council or the mayor. While they realize it will allow 6-7 story apartments in about 150 single family and duplex neighborhoods throughout the city, they have no idea what the full impact will be on our neighborhoods, our City’s infrastructure or the financial liability for the city. Even the Planning Department doesn’t fully understand the impacts and are trying to present their findings to the City Council by next month. For something as impactful as SB 79, this lack of knowledge is reprehensible.

Uncertainty:

With little time for the City to determine how to move forward, there is confusion on what transit stops are impacted by SB 79. Our Southern California Association of Government (SCAG) has the final word on determining what transit stops qualify and they have not yet released their full findings. That delays our Planning Department’s ability to fully understand the impacts of this bill and affects their ability to present informed recommendations to the City Council.

Public Safety:

A state law passed in 2018 asks cities to study their emergency evacuation capacity on their streets before adding new density and LA (of all cities) hasn’t done that. So under SB 79 we will potentially be adding as much as 5 million housing units in LA without even knowing if any of us will ever be able to evacuate our neighborhoods safely. Can our neighborhoods go from 100 people to 1000 people and safely evacuate?

False promise:

State law allows a city to come up with its own Alternate Plan for SB 79 but the State gives a very small window of time to successfully accomplish this. A city as large as LA requires a lot of time and money to submit a new comprehensive Alternate Plan. The reality today is LA has not been given enough time to offer an alternate plan. Shouldn’t we have that time?

All this leads us to agree with a recent article in CalMatters that states, “California legislature has a bad habit of writing new laws in the moment and paying little attention to its potential consequences.”

We are working with lots of different people and agencies so we can fully understand the most responsible and effective manner to move forward. We don’t want to stop housing production, we want to stop the carelessness and stupidity of “new laws that pay little attention to potential consequences”.

We feel that no neighborhood should become collateral damage from this bill. Our neighborhoods matter, so does the need for more affordable housing. Our Housing Element did everything the State mandated while being responsible for how to add more density.

We feel the city needs to fully understand SB 79 before moving forward. The State needs to give us that time.

More to come soon.

Best,
Maria, Cindy, Jeff, Marc