Clock Ticking: WeHo Council Revisits Inclusionary Housing Rules Before SB 79 Hits

West Hollywood’s City Council takes up its Inclusionary Housing Ordinance Monday at a study session from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in Council Chambers at 625 N. San Vicente Blvd., ahead of the regular council meeting. There is no vote Monday night. This is a study session, so Council will hear from City Staff, an outside housing policy speaker and members of the public, then give direction on what Staff should bring back in actual ordinance form. The public is encouraged to attend. If you can’t make it but want to submit a comment, you can do so here.

What staff is recommending

For larger projects, 11 units and up, Staff is recommending Option D. The 20 percent affordability requirement stays in place, but it would no longer all sit in one category. Instead, it would be split three ways: 5 percent for extremely low-income households, 10 percent for very low-income households and 5 percent for low-income households. Those units would have to be built on site. No in-lieu fee option. You can’t buy your way out, you gotta build. 

Smaller projects would work differently. For projects with two to four units, Staff proposes a 15 percent requirement paid through an in-lieu fee only. For projects with five to 10 units, the affordable units would have to be built, using a 50 percent density bonus, and any fractional remainder that can’t physically be built would be paid into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

The 270-page briefing packet put six studies in that don’t all point in the same direction. That seemed to be deliberate. One Terner Center analysis says that once inclusionary requirements get pushed too high, you can start cutting into overall housing production because projects stop penciling out. A Georgetown study from 2026, looking at six fast-growing metros, found that renters at the bottom of the market did not see much benefit from that production surge. Another 2026 paper argues that supply-side deregulation can take decades to reach lower-income households in expensive markets. Staff included all of it, while also making clear that putting a study in the packet does not mean the City agrees with it.

The SB 79 clock

The Staff report for Monday never mentions SB 79, at least not outright. It’s just kind of hanging over the whole discussion.

SB 79, the Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act, was signed by Governor Newsom last October and takes effect July 1. The law overrides local zoning near qualifying transit station hubs and allows denser housing by right, limiting local review.

In West Hollywood, three future K Line station areas were effectively locked in by the Metro Board’s March 26 alignment vote: Santa Monica and San Vicente, Santa Monica and Fairfax, and Santa Monica and La Brea.

Earlier this month, Planning Director Nick Maricich confirmed to WEHOonline that West Hollywood’s 2020 Census population of 35,757 puts the city above the 35,000 cutoff in the law. That matters because it means SB 79’s upzoning radius reaches a full half-mile from each station area. The law uses official decennial Census numbers, not newer population estimates. In a 1.9-square-mile city, with three future station areas, that covers a lot of ground. Maricich also said ZIP, the City’s Zoning Improvement Program, cannot override SB 79 wherever the state law controls.

He also confirmed something else that matters here: when a local affordability rule is higher than SB 79’s 7 to 13 percent baseline, the local standard prevails. In other words, West Hollywood’s 20 percent inclusionary standard would still apply to SB 79 projects near the future K Line stops. So what Council is working through Monday is not some abstract policy exercise. It is the rule developers would be dealing with once projects start coming in under SB 79.

Then there’s the calendar. July 1 is just 74 days away. After Council gives direction Monday, the ordinance changes still have to go through a Planning Commission public hearing, which isn’t until at least May 7, and then come back for final City Council adoption. That is a tight squeeze. West Hollywood also will not have parcel-level certainty on its SB 79 exposure until June, when SCAG finalizes the official transit stop map. That’s one month before the law takes effect. Not impossible. But close.

A question the study session doesn’t address

Two weeks ago, at a contentious City Council meeting, Councilmember John Heilman tried to get Staff to come back with a discussion of how SB 79 intersects with the K Line and EIFD projects. That failed on a 3 to 2 vote. Heilman and Lauren Meister voted yes. John Erickson said having that conversation would be “setting the public up for a different outcome than already expected,” referencing the Council’s unanimous April 2025 vote supporting SB 79 before it had even passed the Legislature.

Now that same Council majority is set to shape the inclusionary housing rules that would apply to those same SB 79 projects near future K Line stations. The issue they declined to discuss and the one they are taking up Monday are closely tied, whether the agenda says so or not.

That tension has already come up elsewhere. At a Planning Commission hearing on a project at 948 N. Hayworth Avenue earlier this year, Commissioner Lynn Hoopingarner said, “We have a 20 percent affordable housing standard that has never, not once, been achieved since the state took over.” That project came in at about 16 percent affordable, and a structural issue identified by the commission could push the number lower. The Rent Stabilization Commission landed in a similar place. In April, Commissioner Kaitlin McCafferty said, “There’s no new rent-stabilized units.”

So that is really what Monday is about. The City is trying to adjust an ordinance around a standard that two commissions have already said does not hold up in practice. The research doesn’t settle the argument. Council still has to choose which way it wants to go.