California needs more affordable housing — quickly. 1.8 million homes by 2025 to be exact. What the state will actually do about is becoming clearer after a Thursday decision to advance Senate Bill 9, a measure that would allow for multi-unit development on suburban lots previously reserved for single-family dwellings, in the state assembly and (hopefully) to the desk of Governor Gavin Newsome ahead of his September 14th recall election.

The vote comes after years of legislative attempts to unstick the state from its current housing predicament. Since 2010, California has been able to add only one housing unit for every five new residents to the state, which only began to contract in the last year owing to a variety of economic and environmental factors.

The squeeze has produced attendant problems like increasing homelessness and a debilitating loss of younger professionals who can no longer afford to live in certain areas. Some cities have proposed building below-market housing specifically for public school teachers, or else allowing housing subsidies for public employees. But the Senate bill is perhaps the greatest and most effective measure to date, creating a scenario that could add 700,000 new units to the state’s housing stock, according to the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. 

“This is a strong statement that says we cannot live in a world in which we lock off the vast majority of residential land,” Ben Matcalf, the Terner Center’s Managing Director told the New York Times. “Our communities need to be able to change and grow because we are going to grow as a country, and it can’t all be in the urban core and periphery — we need to open up all communities.”

S.B. 9 now joins another bill, S.B. 10, that was passed Monday and would allow developers to shirk environmental reviews in an effort to speed up the building process. Opponents have mainly focused on the increased density as a cause for their disapproval. To that score, proponents have promised a “gradual density” and claimed that the generational wealth among other things outweighs whatever negatives that could be ascribed to the increased density. 

The predominantly Democratic effort now faces one last hurdle in the form of a concurrence vote before finally heading off for approval by the governor. The full text of the bill can be viewed here.