Summer housing roundup and the end of parking minimums in NC

Halina Bennet has a summer housing roundup at Slow Boring: Beyond the already-covered ROAD Act, California's Governor Newsom signed AB 179, replacing the state's notoriously fragmented affordable-housing financing with a single application and penalizing localities that charge development impact fees on state-funded projects (saving $60,000–$70,000 per home). San Francisco slashed its unfunded inclusionary housing mandate from 15% to 5% after a court-ordered feasibility study found that even 5% could render projects infeasible under current costs and rates. Massachusetts folded a "YIGBY" (Yes in God’s Backyard) provision into its economic development bill, letting religious institutions build multifamily by right on land they've owned for three years. Finally, Zillow's latest census analysis, estimating a “national housing deficit” by comparing the number of doubled-up families to the available housing supply, held essentially flat in 2024 for the first time since the post-2008 underbuilding era began, driven by a 50-year high in multifamily completions. Even these crude accounting-based proxies for housing underproduction (which do not directly consider relative prices or inter-metropolitan mobility) nonetheless find the 4.7-million-unit deficit remains concentrated in the usual suspects: New York, LA, Boston, SF, DC.

Separately, North Carolina just became the first state to eliminate nearly all mandated parking minimums statewide. Governor Stein signed HB 162 (the Parking Lot Reform and Modernization Act) taking effect January 1, 2027. The coalition story is remarkable for most legislation but typical of the greatest YIMBY wins: the bill united environmentalists, farmers, developers, and business leaders. Reason notes the liberalization covers commercial uses too, not just housing, which again is unprecedented in statewide parking reform. The bill started as a stormwater management bill and the bipartisan framing (focused on stormwater regulatory relief first, and urbanism second) is what got it through a Republican-controlled legislature. Whatever the ideological context and framing, it remains fascinating to see parking relief laws begin to leap forward in car-heavy red states while trundling along incrementally in transit-rich blue states.