Beverly Hills just blinked on a 15-story Builder’s Remedy tower, and that might reset what “impossible to build” means in some of California’s richest neighborhoods.
Welcome back to California Housing Today — it’s Friday, April 24, 2026. We’re spending the next few minutes on the California fights that decide whether homes, transit, and growth actually get built.
Yeah — fewer sacred cows, more permits.
Let’s get into it.
From Maher Commercial Realty: Beverly Hills Builder's Remedy Reversal Signals New High-Rise Development Reality
This is one of those local land-use stories that could travel statewide. Beverly Hills rescinded its denial of a 15-story, 27-unit residential tower on South Camden Drive, a project filed when the city did not have a certified housing element. That matters because the Builder’s Remedy can let projects leap past local zoning limits if affordability thresholds are met. In this case, the proposal includes six on-site affordable units and an automated underground garage.
From Maher Commercial Realty:
When a city like Beverly Hills rescinds its denial of a 15-story residential tower, sophisticated investors ask a sharper question: has the entitlement risk profile for high-density multifamily in prime submarkets permanently shifted? The answer, increasingly, is yes. This is not simply a project-level procedural correction. It is a signal that even highly restrictive jurisdictions may no longer be able to rely on delay, incompleteness findings, or discretionary processes to contain density once a Builder’s Remedy application is properly in play.
Right — rich cities can’t do the “have you tried another form?” routine forever.
Exactly, and that’s the part worth watching. If courts and state housing law keep punishing procedural obstruction, lenders can actually price that in, and more projects get financed because the risk is clearer.
And once Beverly Hills has to eat one tower, every “neighborhood character” speech in California sounds a little less magical.
Maybe a little less magical, yeah. But residents will still argue about scale, traffic, and design — and some of those concerns are real. The difference is they may not add up to an effective veto when a city missed its housing obligations.
Next, a much smaller-city story, but one that shows how local rules can open surprising doors.
From Blogspot: Santa Cruz History Blog: 2026
This roundup from the Santa Cruz History Blog points to two upcoming virtual community meetings for mixed-use proposals, at 617 Water Street and 930 Mission Street. It also flags what looks likely to be Planning Commission approval for the Neptune Apartments parcels on Pacific Avenue. The interesting wrinkle is the policy trade: Santa Cruz allowed one project at 201 Front Street to go 100 percent market-rate in return for 100 percent below-market-rate units at another location.
From Blogspot:
As noted in the earlier post, ". . . this development will have 100% "affordable" (below-market-rate-rent) units. That's happening because of a recent city rule that allowed the development proposed for 201 Front Street to be 100% market-rate, in return for 100% below-market-rate in another location."
Honestly? Good. If the deal pencils and you get actual below-market units, I can live without the purity lecture.
Yeah, there’s a practical case for that. Cities often act like every parcel has to solve every policy goal at once, and that can kill projects. A paired approach can produce more total housing — and in this case, deeply affordable housing — if it’s structured carefully.
The main thing is not to drown it in process after inventing the workaround.
Exactly. A clever policy doesn’t help much if every follow-on permit still takes forever. Santa Cruz is interesting because it looks like a city trying flexibility instead of just saying no in fancier language.
Stepping back, those two stories rhyme. In Beverly Hills, state law narrows the local veto. In Santa Cruz, local policy creates a path where the old framework might have blocked housing. Different mechanisms, same underlying question: are California cities finally moving from aesthetic opposition to actual production?
And before we wrap, a couple of reactions worth noting from around the housing-and-transit internet.
One came from r/sanfrancisco, where a discussion titled Arbitrary vetoes of new housing are the true moral crisis picked up more than a hundred points. What’s notable isn’t just the rhetoric — it’s that more people are openly framing housing scarcity as an ethical failure created by process-heavy discretionary systems, not as some natural disaster.
From r/sanfrancisco:
My friend and fellow San Francisco YIMBY Leader, Davey Kim, wrote this op-ed, based on a prior op-ed that was published in the SF Examiner by the head of the Marina Community Association.
That quote is just the setup, but the discussion around it points to a real shift in public language. More people are willing to say endless case-by-case obstruction has victims, even if those victims aren’t in the hearing room.
Another one came from r/yimby, on the thread YIMBYism won in the CA Gov Debate. The striking part there is the suggestion that housing abundance politics is no longer niche within California’s mainstream political conversation.
From r/yimby:
Every candidate on stage expressed that building more housing is the solution for high housing prices and that reducing government regs and fees is how to achieve this.
When every politician suddenly loves building housing, that’s good news and a giant “show me.”
That’s the right level of skepticism. The rhetoric has moved fast; the implementation still depends on whether state agencies, courts, and cities actually make noncompliance painful and approvals routine.
If any of today’s stories made you curious, scroll to the show notes — the full articles are right there. And the Beverly Hills piece especially is worth reading in full if you want to understand how legal risk is changing the map for multifamily development.
That’s California Housing Today for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.