Los Angeles has released its first detailed look at how the city may implement SB 79, the statewide law that upzones land near transit starting July 2026. The new report and presentation, produced in response to a motion from Councilmember Traci Park, outline a set of options that would slow the law’s rollout for years and carve out broad exemptions across the city. After months of public messaging from Park built on dubious claims about what SB 79 does, the implementation framework now reflects the same skepticism and caution that defined her opposition.
As SB 79 wound its way through the state legislature, Park emerged as one of the law’s most vocal critics, advancing a series of talking points that experts and the bill’s authors repeatedly clarified as incorrect. She argued that SB 79 would override fire safety rules and force high rises deep into the Palisades, even though the bill explicitly allows cities to exempt Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones with a simple ordinance. She claimed the law would upzone Venice Beach despite there being no qualifying major transit stops west of Lincoln. She suggested it would invite state density mandates onto environmentally sensitive land even though the bill defers to existing safety standards and prohibits streamlining in those areas. These arguments now frame the motion guiding its implementation.
The Planning Department’s new report adopts many of Park’s premises and treats them as starting points for policy. The department recommends drafting an ordinance for a broad delayed effectuation of SB 79 in all eligible areas including fire zones, one foot sea level rise areas, local historic districts, low resource neighborhoods, sites more than a mile from station entrances, industrial hubs, and any site where existing zoning meets the state’s thresholds for delay. This mirrors the carve outs Park wrote into her motion, now formalized as Planning’s recommended path forward .
Planning’s analysis also stresses the challenges of implementation in ways that echo Park’s earlier claims. The report highlights the number of eligible station areas in fire zones, citing six that fall entirely within Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones and nineteen that partially overlap. While SB 79 explicitly allows cities to delay these areas and does not require towers in hillside neighborhoods, the report frames the fire zone issue as reasons for broad caution and weighted more toward political pressure than the bill’s actual text. The same dynamic appears in discussions of historic resources and low resource neighborhoods, where Planning again foregrounds delay and exemption over implementation.
SB 79 would open up roughly 150 transit station areas in Los Angeles, allowing five to nine story buildings on parcels currently zoned for far less. Even single family lots near transit would see meaningful increases. Under the law, a typical five to eight thousand square foot lot could support between nine and twenty nine homes depending on proximity to a station. The law also pairs with SB 35 and SB 423 streamlining, which means eligible projects could secure by right approval if they meet affordability and labor requirements. These are the types of outcomes the law was designed to encourage, but the implementation motion sharply narrows the possibilities.
Instead of describing how to apply SB 79, the report focuses primarily on how to pause it. It prioritizes delayed effectuation as the city’s default path and instructs staff to pursue both the delay ordinance and a potential future alternative plan that would supersede the state framework. Planning emphasizes the need for extensive modeling, new mapping tools, technical support contracts, and other prerequisites before any real application of SB 79 can begin. All of this points toward a timeline in which Los Angeles may avoid implementation until 2030 or later .
Park’s earlier statements about SB 79 also preview which neighborhoods stand to benefit from this cautious approach. During council debate she leaned hard on fears in high income, low density areas, insisting the law threatened hillside communities and coastal enclaves. These are the very places where delayed effectuation is easiest to justify under the bill because they fall in fire zones or historic districts. Meanwhile, the report presents delay in low resource communities as a technical option rather than a policy choice, even though advocates have warned that blanket delay in both high opportunity and low income areas would neutralize the law entirely and preserve existing patterns of exclusion.
The result is a framework shaped more by political anxiety than by the purpose of the law. SB 79 was written to steer growth toward transit, expand access to jobs and services, and reduce both emissions and displacement pressures by providing more homes in the places people need them. The City Planning report acknowledges these goals but places them behind years of modeling, exemptions, and procedural hurdles, turning what could have been a straightforward transition toward predictable zoning near transit into another long detour.