With Bipartisan Vote, California Assembly Passes Housing Affordability Legislation to Speed-Up Construction

Sacramento — On Tuesday, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and a bipartisan majority of California Assembly members voted to pass nine bills that will speed-up housing construction and support Southern Californians after this year’s devastating firestorms.

“These bills will alter the trajectory of the housing crisis, making it easier for Californians to build and ultimately resulting in housing that is more affordable,” Speaker Rivas said on Tuesday before the Assembly vote. “These bills will reduce bureaucracy and red tape. They will lead to fewer construction delays or cost overruns. And they will create more certainty for builders and homeowners going through the process. California must deliver quickly on new housing, and these bills are a first step toward putting our state back on this important path.”

Overview of Housing Affordability Legislation

• AB 253 (Ward and Rivas) - Allows homeowners and developers to hire third-party licensed professionals to conduct building plan checks for certain small-scale housing developments, if it takes, or would take, the local building department longer than 30 days to conduct that review.
• AB 301 (Schiavo and Rivas) - Requires state departments involved in the review and approval of post-entitlement housing development permits to adhere to the time limits that apply to local agencies.  Failure of a state department to complete a state-level review or issue a permit within these timelines results in the permit being deemed approved.
• AB 306 (Schultz and Rivas) - Imposes a moratorium on the adoption or modification of new state and local building standards affecting residential units from June 1, 2025 until June 1, 2031, with limited exceptions. These exceptions include, but are not limited to, emergency standards to protect health and safety, and standards related to home hardening proposed by the State Fire Marshal.
• AB 311 (McKinnor and Rivas) - Allows a tenant, with the written approval of the landlord, to permit a person who is at risk of homelessness, as defined, to occupy their dwelling unit notwithstanding the terms of the rental agreement.

Overview of Los Angeles Recovery and Disaster Mitigation Bills

• AB 226 (Calderon and Alvarez) - Urgency measure to provide additional financial tools to the CA FAIR Plan in advance of this summer’s peak fire season. Potential benefits include preventing an assessment on the admitted insurance market, thereby preventing a fee from being passed onto their policyholders. Reintroduction of AB 2996 (2024), which received unanimous support but was not taken up for a vote on the Senate Floor.
• AB 299 (Gabriel and Rivas) - Permits hotels, motels, and short-term rentals to provide shelter for more than 30 days to individuals who have lost their prior housing in a disaster without establishing a landlord-tenant relationship, until January 1, 2031. 
• AB 462 (Lowenthal and Rivas) - Exempts the construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) from the requirement to obtain a coastal development permit in the County of Los Angeles, and in any county subject to a Governor’s proclamation of a state of emergency on or after February 1, 2025, where housing is damaged, destroyed, or made uninhabitable.
• AB 493 (Harabedian) - Requires financial institutions to pay interest to homeowners for insurance proceeds held in escrow following property damage or loss. The bill would apply to homeowners affected by wildfires after January 1, 2026, and those impacted by the LA wildfires whose refunds have not been disbursed. This change is consistent with existing law, which requires lenders to pay interest on escrowed funds for property taxes, mortgage insurance, and homeowners insurance premiums.
• AB 597 (Harabedian) - Strengthens consumer protections for insurance policyholders working with public adjusters. These protections include: ensuring that contracts between policyholders and public adjusters specify the exact claims and coverages they apply to; capping public adjuster fees at 15% of the insurer’s payout when claims relate to catastrophic disasters or states of emergency; and allowing policyholders to void contracts if the adjuster misrepresents or hides important details.

How We Got Here

At the beginning of the 2025-26 Legislative Session, Speaker Rivas urged his colleagues to consider every bill through the lens of Californians’ concerns about affordability, and specifically to focus on building more housing.

“The country looks to California for leadership, and we will continue to lead,” Speaker Rivas said to a packed Assembly chamber in December. “But our ability to protect these essential California values of equality, diversity, and opportunity depends on delivering for constituents in practical concrete ways. Practical solutions like building more housing for lower- and middle-class families. Affordable decent housing isn’t just a policy challenge – it’s the civil rights struggle of our time. Every worker has the right to live near their jobs in the communities they help build, serve, and enrich. And we have a responsibility to make that a reality.”

A longtime housing affordability advocate, Speaker Rivas has prioritized housing solutions since he joined the Assembly in 2018.

Next Steps

The legislation now moves to the state Senate. All nine bills in yesterday’s early action contain urgency clauses, meaning they would become law immediately upon the Governor’s signature.