Status: Dormant
Assembly Bill 1623 (Davies)
What the bill does:
AB 1623 authored by Assembly member Laurie Davies, and cosponsored by HAC and Student Homes Coalition allows cities to receive RHNA credit for certain categories of student housing, letting those developments count toward a jurisdiction's lower-income Regional Housing Needs Allocation. Currently, student housing occupies an awkward position in the RHNA process: it houses real residents with real housing needs, but jurisdictions don't get consistent credit for it toward their state-mandated housing targets, which can discourage cities from prioritizing it even where it's badly needed near campuses.
By formally recognizing qualifying student housing in the RHNA count, AB 1623 gives cities a direct incentive to plan for and approve it rather than treating it as housing that doesn't help them meet their obligations. That matters most in the college towns and university-adjacent jurisdictions where student demand puts real pressure on the broader rental market, since housing that isn't built for students often ends up absorbed by them anyway, tightening the market for everyone else.
Why this bill matters:
Student housing sits in a strange gap in California's housing system: it houses real people with real needs, but jurisdictions have historically gotten inconsistent credit for it under RHNA, which can push cities to deprioritize it in favor of housing types that count more cleanly toward their state targets. That gap has real consequences. UC campuses on average only have enough on-campus housing for roughly a third of enrolled students, and system-wide, sizable shares of UC, CSU, and community college students report having been homeless or housing insecure at some point during their education. When campuses can't house their own students, those students get pushed into already-tight local rental markets, which drives up costs for students and longtime residents alike. AB 1623 matters because it removes a disincentive for cities to plan for and approve student housing that's badly needed regardless of how it's counted.
AB 1623 lets cities count certain categories of student housing toward their lower-income RHNA allocation. That reclassification gives jurisdictions, particularly college towns and university-adjacent cities, a direct incentive to zone for and approve student housing rather than treating it as housing that doesn't help them meet their state-mandated targets. It doesn't create new funding or a new construction program; it changes the accounting so that housing already being demanded and often already being built gets recognized in the process that's supposed to track whether a city is meeting its housing obligations.
Contact Ali Sapirman at Ali@housingactioncoalition.org for more information.
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