Every week Next republishes an article from City Manager Oliver Chi’s Weekly Newsletter
This past Wednesday, November 4, the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) approved the City’s SB 79 Exclusion Ordinance (Ordinance No. 2861), which the City Council adopted on July 28, 2026. With the State’s approval now secured, the delay of SB 79 implementation until 2030 is confirmed for six of Santa Monica’s seven Transit Oriented Development (TOD) zones.
By way of background, SB 79 took effect on July 1, 2026, and it sets minimum height, density, and floor area standards for qualifying housing projects within a half mile of a TOD stop. The law also allows cities to temporarily exclude TOD zones where enough parcels already allow for certain development standards, with the exclusion lasting until one year after the jurisdiction’s next Housing Element is adopted (for us in Santa Monica, that means 2030). The Council chose that path so that we have time to plan for growth near transit on our own local terms, to be studied as part of our next Housing Element cycle. Of note, under State law, any local SB 79 ordinance is subject to HCD review, which makes the approval we secured this past week relevant and important in furthering the City’s policy goals on this front.
The one zone not covered by the approved ordinance is Expo / Bundy, where the station sits just across the border in Los Angeles, and where too few parcels on the Santa Monica side met the State’s threshold. To address that situation, the Council adopted Ordinance No. 2865 on September 22, 2026, amending development standards for 89 single-unit parcels so that the Expo / Bundy zone can also be excluded from SB 79 until 2030. That ordinance was submitted to HCD on September 24, and the State’s review deadline is December 24, 2026. We’re monitoring this particular situation closely at the staff level and will share additional details as they become available following the State’s review.
More to come on this front moving forward, especially as we get ready to launch our next Housing Element update process. In the meantime, for additional information about this matter (including finding maps of the TOD zones and more about SB 79), feel free to head online here!
