How a Housing Law Became a Reason to Kill Transit

A law designed to build housing near transit is giving cities a reason to block transit before it's built.

Several years ago, someone in my neighborhood floated the idea of a community garden in an empty lot on our block. Folks liked the idea. A few people offered to help. Then someone mentioned it would require removing two street parking spots.

And, the thread turned.

Nobody was actually that upset about the parking. But once it was linked to the garden, the garden became the problem. The community garden proposal died because it got bundled with something else, and now it had new enemies.

I thought about that thread when I read about SB 79, and especially LA’s objections to it.

There's a version of this story where everyone is right. Housing advocates are right that California needs more homes near transit. Transit agencies are right that building rail in LA is already a political nightmare. And state legislators are right that without a mandate, none of this moves.

Everyone is right. And yet the law is making things worse.

What SB 79 does

Signed in October 2025, SB 79 automatically up zones land within a half-mile of major transit stops across California up to seven stories near heavy rail. It applies to planned lines as well as the existing ones.

So, the moment a transit project reaches a planning milestone, neighborhoods along the proposed route become eligible for dense development today. (Owens, 2025)

The part nobody expected (or at least I did not)

That future-line trigger changed the political math of the upzoning process. Communities along a proposed route now have two things to fight: the transit project and the up zoning that automatically follows.

In some communities, local officials have signaled reluctance to pursue new rail stations or high-frequency bus upgrades mainly because of the housing density that would follow (Streetsblog CA, Feb. 2026).

In Glendale (Close to downtown LA) officials have reportedly vowed to stop a Bus Rapid Transit project to avoid the NIMBY backlash once station areas get upzoned. (Future Is LA, Jan. 2026)

A law designed to build housing near transit is giving cities a reason to block transit before it's built.

LA Metro's argument (and its contradiction)

In January, the LA Metro Board voted formally to oppose SB 79. Their staff report said "SB 79 has become a catalyst for local opposition to Metro's transit projects." (LAist, Jan. 2026) They recommended exempting LA County entirely, or limiting the law to the Bay Area as a pilot. And, frankly, considering a pilot program is a good idea.

Advocates for housing called this absolutely ridiculous. More people near Metro stops means more riders … Metro is arguing against its own revenue base.

Housing advocates are not wrong. But Metro's real problem is structural. The LA Metro Board is composed almost entirely of local elected officials. the same people whose day job is responding to constituents who oppose density. (Future Is LA, Jan. 2026) They're not irrational. They're wearing two hats that were always going to conflict, and SB 79 made that contradiction very visible.

What this has to do with trust

I advocated for SB 79 (and other previous iterations of the bill). The state got the policy right. It come with real affordability requirements, anti-displacement provisions and other reasonable requirements. And yet the rollout is fracturing the coalition that would need to make it work.

Metro's self-interested recommendation (i.e. pilot it in the Bay Area first) is actually a good idea. The Bay Area has willing partners, established TOD precedent, and fewer single-family strongholds. Running the experiment there, demonstrating real outcomes, then expanding would have produced the same policy with evidence behind it. Yes, the context is different. But, success stories matter in gaining the buy in.

Instead, the state went statewide on day one and handed every reluctant jurisdiction a ready-made reason to block transit. The frustration with NIMBYism is legitimate. Many of us are frustrated with it. Years of local obstruction left Sacramento with little patience for incremental steps.

But frustration isn't a strategy.

Gradual implementation, paired with clear incentives and honest tradeoff conversations, would have gotten further.

This is the pattern. Governments can be right on the policy and still lose on implementation because they skipped the part where they brought people along.

What a better path looks like

Pilots don't have to mean timid. They can be ambitious but still bounded. The design matters as much as the intent.

A well-designed SB 79 pilot would have started with a small number of willing jurisdictions, paired upzoning requirements with real incentives: infrastructure funding, technical assistance, fast-tracked state grants for cities that hit housing targets near transit corridors. Make it attractive to participate early, not just legally required to comply eventually.

That sequencing does two things. It builds an evidence base (e.g. actual units built, actual ridership gains, actual displacement data) that makes the statewide expansion harder to argue against. And it creates early adopters whose experience becomes the story.

This isn't a novel idea. It's how most durable policy change actually happens. That’s how Medicaid expansion happened or how building codes got refined after major disasters. ADU reform in California is a good example. It happened through years of incremental loosening before the statewide preemptions, and landed with less friction than critics predicted.

The community garden in that neighborhood never got built. Last time I checked, the parking spots are still there. I'm not even sure they get used.

The cost of skipping the conversation was low. For transit policy in the most car-dependent county in America, it's a lot higher.

Nader Afzalan, Ph.D.

Founder and CEO, The Triangle

Program Director, Sustainable Environmental Design, UC Berkeley