California Tackles Housing Costs with Building Code Freeze

In California Governor Gavin Newsom’s budget bill for the state’s 2025-2026 fiscal year, he signed a law with provisions aimed at alleviating the housing affordability crisis by preventing the state from changing residential building codes for the next six years. California home builders celebrate the code pause for its immediate effects in expediting construction of new housing and long-term impacts on larger projects developers take on where they no longer face building code changes during development that could potentially slow down progress. Provisions in the bill also tackle California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) compliance burdens on acquiring building permits, usually made a lengthy and extensive progress that drastically increases completion time thanks to existing legislation, so Newsom’s changes could see CEQA impact lowered through exemptions pushed in the bill.