With the passage of Senate Bill 79 (SB 79), the City of Los Angeles must decide how it is going to implement the new legislation. The law’s provisions are slated to go into effect July 1, 2026, but municipalities are given options to delay effectuation or create alternative plans of their own.

Los Angeles appears poised to delay effectuation of the bill in certain areas including in HPOZs, and is studying additional alternatives as outlined in the legislation.

At a special Monday meeting of the Planning Land Use and Management (PLUM) Committee, Councilmembers deliberated on how the City of Los Angeles will react to this year’s most contentious piece of housing legislation, Senate Bill 79. The City is essentially presented with four approaches, which are not mutually exclusive to each other, whiche are detaiuled in a memo prepared by City Planning.

Approach A would be to fully embrace SB-79 and let it dictate zoning, an option that was firmly rejected by the Committee. Approach B allows for “delayed effectuation” of the bill until 2030 on sites including locally designated historic resources (HCMs and HPOZs), very high fire risk areas, areas of sea level rise, and more.

The other two options may be used to tailor zoning around certain stations to address reinforce existing patterns of development. Approach C gives the city the option to upzone some areas near transit in order to delay effectuation until 2030, and Approach D would to implement an city driven local alternative plan, which will likely be a multiyear effort.

The PLUM Committee appears it may support a combination of both approaches B, C and D, but requested more information from City Planning. On January 5th, City Planning will return with more details and analysis.

The Conservancy supports delayed effectuation of SB 79 in HPOZs and we are awaiting City Planning’s additional analysis to determine in other approaches may be helpful in reducing the impact on historic resources.