Will California legislators make changes to contentious new housing law?
Changes could soon be coming to a hotly-debated new California law meant to encourage denser housing developments near transit stops before it even goes into effect.
State Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Hayward, put forward a measure this week that would exempt mobile home parks from the new law, Senate Bill 79, which she said unintentionally put them at risk of demolition.
Mobile homes provide affordable housing for many, Wahab told the Senate Housing Committee Tuesday, “and in order to battle the ongoing housing crisis we need to be preserving every housing unit possible.” She said half of the 10 largest mobile home parks in the state are in her district.
SB 79 generally requires cities to allow housing projects near bus, rail and other transit stops and restricts what limits those communities can put on the height and density of those developments. It narrowly passed the Legislature last year before it was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Much of the law goes into effect in July.
Currently, SB 79 does not apply to a site that would require the demolition of a rent controlled property or one where a property with more than two units was torn down in recent years.
Gail Rubino, 77, who lives in a mobile home park near San Jose, told senators Tuesday that the bill left her and other residents “vulnerable to displacement by failing to extend anti-demolition protections to mobile home parks not covered by local rent stabilization ordinances.”
Wahab’s measure passed out of the committee Tuesday and the full Senate will need to vote on the bill before it moves to the Assembly. She wants each chamber to approve the measure, known as Senate Bill 722, by two-thirds so it can go into effect immediately.
“Yes, we want to develop,” Wahab told her colleagues, “but we also need to protect the people that are there already, that are struggling, that do not have a lobbyist in this building to work 24/7 in their interest.”
Also Tuesday, state Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat who authored SB 79, said he plans to introduce a bill later this year to make more changes to the law.
There are concerns and confusion about which communities the law will apply to and how it would be implemented.
Wiener said the goal of the follow-up bill will be to address those types of concerns but that it “is not about gutting the bill, or reversing all of the decisions the Legislature made last year,” he told the committee. “That will not happen with any bill with my name on it.”
Wiener said he would bring the future bill forward in the coming months.
This story was originally published January 7, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
