Eleven Housing Bills Now Sit With Newsom Until September 30

The Legislature passed its last bills of the two-year session on August 31, and at least eleven of them change something specific about housing here. Governor Newsom has until September 30 to sign or veto. Here is the part almost nobody writes down: if he does neither, they become law anyway. Under Article IV, Section 10 of the state constitution, a bill passed before September 1 that the governor does not return by September 30 becomes a statute without his signature.

So the useful question this month is not whether Newsom signs. It is which of these actually reaches a house you own or want to buy. Five of the eleven do. The rest is plumbing.

The five worth your attention:

• AB 956 would let you build two detached backyard units on a single-family lot instead of one, and would void HOA rules that block them.
• SB 1117 would keep impact fees off any accessory unit of 750 square feet or less, and charge larger ones only on the square footage above 750.
• SB 1014 would force cities to hand you an itemized list of required improvements within 30 business days instead of discovering them for you later.
• SB 1301 would give you 90 days of notice before an insurer can non-renew your policy, and 90 days to fix whatever they flagged.
• AB 1684 would stop an HOA from blocking you when you want to install air conditioning.

What is actually sitting on his desk

We tracked this set in early August, when most of it was still stuck on the Senate appropriations suspense file and a good deal of it looked unlikely to survive. This is where it landed. Every bill below cleared both houses before the August 31 cutoff. Some have already been formally presented to the governor, and the rest are in engrossing and enrolling, which is the clerical step before presentation rather than a live question.

One caveat on that table. There is no official published list of everything that cleared in the final 48 hours, and the advocacy recaps have not landed yet. Read it as the eleven that matter most to a Bay Area household, not as the complete set.

The two ADU bills are the ones that reach an ordinary lot

If you own a house with a backyard in San Jose, Oakland or anywhere with a driveway you do not use, AB 956 and SB 1117 are the two bills on this list that could change what you do next spring. AB 956 raises the cap from one detached accessory unit to two on a single-family lot, and it voids covenants in common interest developments that prohibit or unreasonably restrict them. It cleared its final concurrence vote 60 to 2 on August 27.

SB 1117 is the money one. Current law already exempts accessory units of 750 square feet and under from impact fees. The bill closes the trap on the other side of that line, where a 900-square-foot unit could be charged fees on all 900 feet. Under SB 1117 a city could only charge on the 150 square feet above the threshold. The Senate signed off on the Assembly version 38 to 0 on August 25, and it was presented to the governor at six in the evening on August 30.

That is a real number in a region where a detached cottage runs from roughly $120,000 for a garage conversion into the high six figures for new construction. We walked through what the 2026 ADU laws already let you build in July, and these two are the 2027 chapter of the same story.

SB 1116 is aimed at the small house that stopped getting built

SB 1116 rewrites the Starter Home Revitalization Act, the small-lot subdivision law that was supposed to produce modest for-sale houses on infill parcels and has produced very few. It measures building height in feet rather than stories, lowers minimum parcel sizes for multifamily, allows lot averaging, and makes some restrictive covenants unenforceable against qualifying projects. It also instructs that the ministerial approval provisions be read liberally in favor of producing the maximum number of units, which is unusually blunt drafting for a housing statute.

It applies to applications received on or after January 1, 2027, with the first local reports due April 1, 2028. In other words, nothing you can see for two years.

SB 1014 puts a clock on the number that kills small projects

The thing that sinks a small infill project is rarely the entitlement. It is the improvement list, the sewer upsizing and the frontage work and the offsite storm drain, arriving late and priced after the budget is set. SB 1014 would require a preliminary estimate of required improvements within 30 business days of a request, and an itemized list of every onsite and offsite improvement within 30 business days of a post-entitlement permit being deemed complete.

It is procedural and it is the bill a small builder in this region would pick first.

The two quiet bills are really about SB 79

SB 677 and AB 2576 both circle the transit upzoning law that has been reshaping this region since summer. SB 79 was signed October 10, 2025, and its substantive standards became operative July 1, 2026. SB 677 is the cleanup, redefining a joint powers authority jurisdiction, letting the State Treasurer approve residential rental bond issuance without a second agency signing off, and narrowing who may appeal a subdivision map. AB 2576 runs the other direction, pulling contributing sites in historic districts and individually listed resources out of SB 79 coverage.

Watch that second one. Every carve-out written into a transit law lands on a map, and the places with the strongest historic inventories are usually the places with the most political capacity to use it. The highest scoring neighborhoods in our own data are exactly those places: Graystone at 4.3 of the 112 San Jose neighborhoods we score, Crocker Highlands at 4.3 of 130 in Oakland, and Sea Cliff and Presidio Heights at 4.2 of 92 in San Francisco. Low density, high demand, and heavily represented at hearings. Bay Area implementation is already uneven, which we covered when cities split on how to comply. HCD approved San Jose exclusion ordinance on June 4, 2026.

AB 2074 is the one three big cities will feel

AB 2074 would require major transit cities to designate at least one regional transit hub district by July 1, 2027, and inside it downtown housing becomes a permitted use with ministerial rather than discretionary approval, subject to labor standards. It cleared the Senate 40 to 0 on August 28 and the Assembly concurred two days later. We wrote about what that would change downtown in August.

The honest caveat is that the exact threshold defining a major transit city is worth reading in the enrolled text before anyone plans around it. Different summaries this year have described it as the seven largest transit cities and as cities above a population line, and those are not the same list.

The insurance bill runs on a slower clock than you want

SB 1301 is the bill most Bay Area homeowners would actually feel, and it is the one that arrives last. It would require 90 days of notice before a residential policy is non-renewed or coverage is cut, up from the current 45 to 75 days. It would require a plain-language explanation of the grounds, an inspection report within 15 days on request, and at least 90 days for the owner to correct a fixable condition before the non-renewal stands. It would bar denials based solely on certain claim histories, prior inquiries, or roof age, with exceptions. Insurers would report non-renewal data to the Insurance Commissioner annually.

Most of it is operative January 1, 2028. That is two fire seasons away, which is the trade-off the Legislature made to get it through. It also had the closest votes of anything on this list, 29 to 7 on the final Senate concurrence on August 31.

AB 1680 runs alongside it and takes the other half of the problem, the FAIR Plan itself. It rewrites how the California FAIR Plan Association is overseen and gives the Insurance Commissioner real enforcement authority, including penalties when the association fails to correct a violation. It passed the Senate 39 to 0 on August 31. For a growing number of Bay Area hillside owners the FAIR Plan is not a backstop any more, it is the policy, and how tightly it is regulated is now a mainstream homeowner question rather than a niche one.

Three bills for anyone who answers to an HOA

This is the group nobody covers, and in a region this dense with common interest developments it is the group with the widest reach. AB 1684 would establish a right to install a cooling system in a common interest development, which limits how far an association can go in saying no. It passed on concurrence 76 to 0 and went to the governor on August 27. AB 739 would regulate what managing agents can charge, including the document fees that land on a seller at closing, and it cleared concurrence 79 to 0. And the HOA half of AB 956 voids covenants that prohibit or unreasonably restrict accessory units on single-family lots.

None of those three will be in a headline. All three change a bill somebody pays.

What is already law, so stop waiting on it

Three things that get mixed into this conversation are already done. Newsom signed the $11.25 billion Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act on June 25 as Chapter 16, and it goes to voters in November. He signed AB 179, the housing budget trailer bill, on July 13, which the administration estimates trims $60,000 to $70,000 per unit off affordable construction and creates a $100 million disaster rebuilding fund. And SB 1036, which adds impact fee credits for site redevelopment and limits demolition, water and sewer fees, was signed June 30.

What died, including the one that mattered most for condos

AB 1903 died on the Assembly floor. That was the construction defect liability rewrite aimed at making condo construction insurable and financeable again, and its death is the biggest housing story of this session that nobody is covering. Entry-level for-sale supply in this region is condos or it is nothing, and the insurance math on condo construction is why so little of it pencils. AB 1070, which would have let the Residential Code apply to three to ten unit buildings, was held in committee. SB 492, the scaled-back wildfire liability bill, died in the Assembly on August 31 without a vote.

So the honest read on this session: the bills that survived are the small procedural ones, and the two that would have moved the most housing did not.

The dates between now and the end of the month

September 30 is the decision point, and silence counts as a yes. January 1, 2027 is when almost all of this takes effect if it survives. July 1, 2027 is the AB 2074 designation deadline. January 1, 2028 is when the insurance protections start. And November 3 is when the bond, the largest single number in this whole story, goes to voters.

If you own a house with room in the back, the practical move is to price an accessory unit against both fee schedules and see how much of the gap SB 1117 closes. That is the kind of question we built Houseberry to make answerable at the level of your actual block rather than the state as a whole, and it is the reason we read these bills for what they do to one lot rather than what they do to a press release. The median in San Jose was about $1.63 million in August 2026 and about $974,000 in Oakland, and at those numbers a second unit in the yard is not a hobby.

Sources

• California Constitution, Article IV, Section 10
• AB 956 bill status, California Legislature
• SB 1117 bill status, California Legislature
• SB 1116 bill status, California Legislature
• SB 1014 bill status, California Legislature
• AB 2074 bill status, California Legislature
• SB 677 bill status, California Legislature
• AB 2576 bill status, California Legislature
• SB 1301 bill status, California Legislature
• Governor Newsom signs the 2026 housing bond, June 25, 2026
• Governor Newsom signs the 2026 housing affordability reforms, July 13, 2026
• Holland and Knight, tracking SB 79 implementation, June 2026
• California YIMBY, 2026 legislation outcomes
• Capitol Weekly on gubernatorial bill action deadlines