Chelsea Byers Says WeHo’s SB 79 Critics Are “Irrational.” Her SCAG Vote Proved She Meant It

On April 15, West Hollywood City Councilmember Chelsea Byers stood before a room of urban planners and academics at a UCLA housing summit and made her position on SB 79 clear. On June 4 she acted on it. Problem was her committee wasn’t buying it.

The SCAG committee voted 32-3 the other way.

SCAG — the Southern California Association of Governments — is the regional planning agency responsible for mapping which cities fall under SB 79’s reach.

The map under consideration determines which cities face SB 79’s upzoning requirements when the law takes effect July 1. Cities on it must allow buildings up to eight or nine stories near qualifying transit stations, by right — no public hearing, no council vote. West Hollywood’s planned K-Line stations aren’t on it, which means the City is off the hook for now. Byers wanted to change that. She represents West Hollywood as District 41 on SCAG’s Community, Economic, and Human Development Committee and chairs the Westside Cities Council of Governments. 

WEHOonline obtained a copy of the video from the April 15th UCLA summit. “When SB 79 came around, and I had the opportunity as a council member to indicate support for it, it was obvious to me,” Byers told the room. “To act as a small city in good partnership with the state, was a decision I chose to make emphatically.”

She had little patience for residents pushing back. “That level of fear is so irrational and sometimes so offensive in the language that is being used, that it’s creating a toxic politic,” Byers said. “Arguments like that are really coming in bad faith, trying to undo this coalition that’s really become more powerful.”

“Regardless of SB 79, the future is in denser, taller, more interconnected communities,” Byers said.

Asked in a lightning round what West Hollywood would look like in 2046, she said: “It’s West Hollywood. It’s gonna continue to be a walkable, queer utopia, and I think SB 79 is really gonna help us build that for a bigger generation moving forward.”

Same Room. Different View.

At the same summit, just before Byers took the stage, former Los Angeles City Councilman and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky offered a different read on what’s been happening in Sacramento.

“The state has basically hijacked land use policy in the state, especially in the urban part of the state,” Yaroslavsky said. “And they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They’re being driven by people who have an agenda.” “One of them is in my old council district, my own supervisorial district, the one that the MTA just approved, the extension of the K Line from the Crenshaw line to West Hollywood,” Yaroslavsky said. “And that project, if it ever gets built, will not get built for at least a quarter century or more. But the bill says, if it’s in the regional plan, it triggers densification on a massive scale.”

“This has been an objective of some of the members of the legislature, led by Scott Wiener, from day one, which was to really declare war on single family neighborhoods and low density neighborhoods,” Yaroslavsky said. “SB 79 passed 24 hours before the bill was voted on by the state legislature. There was a provision slipped into the bill that said SP 79 would be triggered if a project was within a half mile of any rail line that was in the regional transportation plan.”

“There is good planning, and there is reckless planning,” Yaroslavsky said. “And it may take a little longer to do good planning, but you got to let the people who are on the street, who understand the communities, what good planning is.”

False Narrative

UCLA Luskin Distinguished Professor Michael Storper, whose research on housing affordability framed the panel, put it this way. “We’re being sold a planning bill that does something very radical, which is to override community control of its destiny in the name of the supposedly overriding higher public good of affordability,” Storper said. “Except that the story they’re telling is false.”

Storper’s research examined what happens when cities go through construction booms — the supply-side argument at the core of YIMBY politics, which holds that building more market-rate housing at the top will drive down prices for everyone through a filtering process. His team modeled the most generous assumptions possible. The results weren’t encouraging. “At the lower bound, you’re talking about 150 years,” Storper said, referring to how long filtering would take to meaningfully reduce housing costs for the bottom 60 percent of earners. “In between the two of them is not a pretty picture.”

He said developer behavior explains part of why. “For market rate building, developers are actually not motivated to build in a way that floods the market and causes prices to decline,” Storper said. “They are more and more careful not to drive their rate of return down.” And upzoning, he said, doesn’t automatically produce the building boom its proponents promise. “Up zoning does not equal building boom,” Storper said. “And that’s actually what the accumulating evidence shows.”

The real problem, in his telling, is on the demand side. “Yimby politics has sucked up all the air in journalism, in the public debate,” Storper said, “and it’s crowding out the debate that we need to have about smoothing out demand so that we can empower the almost two thirds of the population that is affordability impacted and needs more purchasing power for housing.”

The Vote

At Thursday’s special SCAG CEHD Committee meeting, Byers voted against the SB 79 transit map that keeps West Hollywood’s planned K-Line stations off the state’s upzoning list. The map is the one WeHo residents have spent months at town halls and council meetings fighting to stay off of. Their representative voted to put them on it.

Byers had the usual backing. Callers affiliated with Abundant Housing LA, Streets For All, and YIMBY groups argued that SCAG was misreading the statute and that unbuilt stations like the K-Line ought to qualify anyway. West Hollywood Planning Commissioner Andrew Solomon said he was calling in as a “private citizen” and made the same case. “Please adopt a methodology that aligns with state law,” Solomon said. “There will be many legal challenges to this, and it will only create more confusion.” Solomon was appointed to the Planning Commission by Byers. There was the undeniable threat of lawsuits that would follow if SCAG held its position.

Not everyone who called in backed that position. West Hollywood renter and community advocate Victor Omelczenko urged the committee to stand firm. He said a single K-Line stop triggers a 502-acre zone in a city of 1,216 total acres. “Triggering automatic overrides decades before a subway is funded or built will not create equity,” Omelczenko said. “It will cause mass displacement of renters.”

The committee voted 32-3 to recommend the map. Byers then moved a substitute motion to strip the environmental clearance requirement from the methodology, a change that would have put West Hollywood’s K-Line stations on the map. It got no second. There’s an irony in that. Byers has worried in the past about lawsuits from not following HCD guidance. The environmental clearance she wants stripped is the same process that would assess the La Cienega corridor’s historically high water table before SB 79 allows dense development on top of it. Let’s not forget La Cienega means “the swamp.” There’s a reason for that. Skip the environmental review, skip that assessment. That’s a different kind of lawsuit swamp entirely.

Byers made a brief statement before the vote. “We were one of the first cities to sign support for SB 79, anticipating that these two dual realities would come into our landscape,” Byers said. “I’m concerned that the guidance and the recommendation today before us is leaving us with less certainty, less predictability, and greater vulnerability to the types of plans that we were trying to prepare for.” It’s worth noting Byers was not speaking for the full Council. When West Hollywood voted on whether to support SB 79, Councilmembers John Heilman and Lauren Meister did not vote to approve it, raising concerns about displacement and tall buildings replacing rent-stabilized housing. They were outvoted 3-2. Many of the city’s residents have opposed the law since.

The vulnerability she’s talking about actually has two parts. One is legal. Cities that don’t follow HCD guidance on SB 79 mapping leave themselves open to lawsuits, something she’s said at ZIP meetings and one the pro-housing callers made repeatedly Thursday. The other is financial. West Hollywood’s plan to fund the K-Line relies on an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District, a mechanism that captures property tax growth near future stations and converts it into construction money. SB 79 upzoning near those stations drives development, development drives property values up, and higher values feed the EIFD. Stay off the map, get less development, generate less tax increment.

The Record

At the last West Hollywood City Council meeting on May 18, Byers said a seven-story baseline near transit makes sense across the city, and she’s argued that West Hollywood’s Zoning Improvement Program works as a TODAP equivalent under SB 79, meaning the City doesn’t need to file one separately. City Staff told the Council otherwise, directly and on the record. Nick Maricich, the City’s Director of Community Development, has confirmed to WEHOonline that ZIP can’t override SB 79 where state law applies. They’re not the same instrument.

West Hollywood City Council meets June 15, the last scheduled session before SB 79 takes effect July 1, and residents who’ve been pushing the City to file a TODAP say they’re planning to show up.

“The state should not be in the land use business,” Yaroslavsky said. “It’s not accomplishing what they say they want to accomplish.”

What Happens Next

SCAG takes corrections through June 12. The full Regional Council votes July 2. That’s one day after SB 79 kicks in, but SCAG says final revisions will be done by July 1.

The lawsuit threat is real. Inner City Law Center said at the meeting that papers are already being prepared. Sacramento’s regional agency took a different approach and mapped unbuilt LPA stations. SCAG didn’t. That gap is what the challengers are going to court over. The map has legal protection under SB 79, but that protection isn’t ironclad. Courts haven’t settled which reading of the statute is right. This takes time. The map almost certainly holds through July 1.

West Hollywood is off the list for now. No upzoning July 1. But the map gets updated every year. The K-Line goes on it once it has full environmental clearance or construction funding. That’s years off at minimum. When it gets there, SB 79 follows. June 15 is the last City Council meeting before July 1. The TODAP question comes with it.