Housing advocates in San Diego and across the state scored a win last week after a bill targeting a controversial law about condominiums cleared a key vote before lawmakers broke for a month-long summer recess.
But in the push to slash regulations for building more housing, rifts surfaced among Democrats over two separate approaches to addressing California’s long-standing condo shortage.
For this week’s report, we’ll return to the fight over how to make it easier to build more condos — often considered California’s most affordable path to homeownership — and where San Diego lawmakers stand on those efforts.
A Right to Repair
State lawmakers last week OK’d a measure, Assembly Bill 1093, to change a state law that gives condo owners the right to sue developers to fix any construction defects up to 10 years after construction.
Experts and housing activists have long pointed to the policy as a major culprit for California’s condo crisis because it frequently leads to costly lawsuits.
The bill proposes to absolve developers of responsibility for defects one year after they’re fixed, although more sweeping reforms were proposed in earlier versions. It still allows homeowners up to 10 years to file construction defect claims.
Condos historically are cheaper than most comparable-sized single-family homes — about 20 percent cheaper in Southern California. However, fewer and fewer are getting bought or built.
Industry-wide issues such as skyrocketing building costs and insurance premiums are some of the reasons for the decades-long slowdown, but condo building took an even bigger hit than single-family homes after the Great Recession.
Today, California builds about 3,000 condos a year compared to tens of thousands more than two decades ago, according to a 2025 UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation study.
Called the “Right to Repair Act,” the 2003 law was meant to encourage builders to fix construction defects such as crooked roofs or incorrectly installed sliding glass doors to avoid litigation.
But more lawsuits, not less, have cropped up in their place as an industry of attorneys who specialize in pointing out defects big and small sprang up. As many as 80 percent of new condos over the past 25 years have been sued for defects, the UC Berkeley study estimates.
And fixing defects before there’s a lawsuit often doesn’t stop many homeowners or their associations from suing anyway.
It’s made building and financing condos more costly compared to single family homes, housing experts and backers of the bill say. The city of San Diego supports the legislation, as do San Diego’s housing commission and regional chamber of commerce.
The current system “forces the homeowners to sit with defects sometimes for years even when a simple fix would make sense for everyone,” Democratic Oakland Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, the bill’s author, said at June committee meeting.
Builders now will often wait until they’re sued to fix even simple defects so they can recoup the costs after their liability insurance policies kick in, Wicks said.
Housing and environmental groups supporting the bill say changing construction defect laws will make condo construction more appealing to developers who’ll be better able to sidestep onerous lawsuits.
Workers with Habitat for Humanity said after building 30 affordable housing condos in Fremont, the nonprofit was sued for millions of dollars after one owner noticed what the builders described as minor water damage.
“To this day, litigation has prevented us from addressing that one minor repair,” advocate Patti Wang Cross said.
While the bill unanimously advanced from the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, several consumer and real estate groups testified in opposition, alongside individual homeowners concerned they would lose the power to get major problems fixed.
“We certainly do not want to have the balcony Berkeley collapse happen in a condo or, heaven forbid, something like the Surfside condominium collapse,” California Consumer Attorneys lobbyist Nancy Drabble said at a hearing last month.
Nearly 100 people died when a Miami condo building called Surfside crumbled in on itself in the middle of the night five years ago. In 2015, six students died after the balcony they were standing on in a fourth-floor Berkeley apartment building collapsed during a birthday party. Later reports found significant structural flaws in both buildings.
Wicks agreed to make more changes that would shrink the bill’s overall scope — such as how builders address flaws across a few units versus an entire building — before it passed unanimously from committee.
‘Favor the Little Person’
As housing reform continues to be a priority for lawmakers, Democrats walk a tightrope in seeking to balance the need to make it easier for construction companies to build while protecting the financial interests of current homeowners.
Recent efforts to crackdown on HOA fees, for example, are broadly popular in the Legislature, but one bill proposing to cap fee increases has fractured support among Democrats, who worry about what such changes could mean for property values and for future financing.
That dynamic was on display last week when a separate approach to boost condo development from San Diego Assemblymember Chris Ward, a Democrat, died when he pulled Assembly Bill 1406 from a scheduled hearing.
That bill sought to increase how much developers could take from the security deposits of buyers who backed out of a deal, increasing it from 3 percent to 6 percent.
Ward and San Diego housing groups supporting the bill said the changes would allow developers to access more money for skyrocketing construction costs, which would then make it easier to build condos.
But numerous Democrats and homeowner groups feared the 3 percent increase would be too much for most new condo buyers, many of whom are first-time owners, to bear.
It barely squeaked by the Assembly earlier this year, getting the minimum support needed to advance despite Democrats’ supermajority.
Twenty Democrats, including San Diego Assemblymember Darshana Patel, a Democrat, discreetly opposed the legislation by not voting on it.
Ward said in a statement that he killed the bill once he learned the committee chair, Sen. Thomas Umberg, would not support it.
“I think they are concerned that in our move to get more housing built, that you have to be careful about tilting the balance too far” in favor of developers, senior California Realtors Association lobbyist Sanjay Wagle said on why Ward’s proposal fell flat with some Democrats.
“We are California. Our general mode of operation has been to favor the little person, in a way. The consumer against the entity with more power.”
California’s Building Industry Association has donated tens of thousands to lawmakers who sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee that approved the construction defect bill, according to CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database, including San Diego Sen. Akilah Weber, a Democrat who sits on the committee.
The California Association of Realtors, which opposes efforts to change the right to repair law and how much developers can take from buyers’ security deposits, also gives tens of thousands of dollars to lawmakers every year.
In Other News
Just before breaking for summer recess, a bill to exempt a planned San Diego sports arena from state environmental rules advanced with unanimous support.
Three Assembly Democrats — Al Muratsuchi of Torrance, Gail Pellerin of Santa Cruz and Damon Connolly of San Rafael were the only lawmakers who did not vote for it. They abstained from voting.
Senate Bill 958 awaits an Assembly vote next month.
What I’m Reading Now
ICE detention center company GEO Group agreed to pay a $100k settlement over poor living conditions in a Central Valley facility, CalMatters reports.
San Diego flip flops on street vendor enforcement as the city waits out a legal challenge against local ordinances, from KPBS.
One Covid-era relic might be disappearing soon to the dismay of high schoolers everywhere. UCs are now heavily considering requiring SAT and ACT scores for admission again, the Los Angeles Times explains.
Thanks again for reading the Sacramento Report! Please reach me at nadia@voiceofsandiego.org for any tips or comments.
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