California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) signed 56 housing bills designed to be an aggressive measure to tackle the state's housing crisis. The bills' language specifically aims to protect tenants, streamline cities' housing approval processes, and rezone land owned by religious and non-profit colleges.

Yahoo Finance Reporter Dani Romero joins the Live show to break down the bills signed by Newsom and how they could manage affordability concerns in the state's housing markets.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Video Transcript

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AKIKO FUJITA: Well, California Governor Gavin Newsom, signing a slew of new bills to tackle the state's housing issues with California seeing the highest housing costs in the country. The median sales price is now close to $850,000. That's at least according to the California Association of Realtors. That is up 3.2% year over year. Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's reporter, Dani Romero, to talk more about how these bills are streamlining housing construction and protecting tenants. At the end of the day, is this going to bring down costs?

DANI ROMERO: Akiko, California has a housing problem from not in my backyard politics to the lack of tenant protections. Governor Gavin Newsom has had enough. He's becoming aggressive in tackling the state's housing crisis. Governor Newsom signed a 56 housing bills this week designed to add more housing supply and protect tenants against evictions, and also most importantly hold cities accountable for their fair share of housing. If you've gone to any city council meeting or covered any city council meeting as a reporter, those meetings can be lengthy, so time consuming.

And at times, could even take years to resolve just one issue, especially if that means a development going into a neighborhood, and those neighbors are against it, forget about it. That prolongs the housing supply that that market needs. Now, there are two bills-- SB 4 and SB 423, that are allowing developers of multifamily housing units to bypass some of the lengthy approval processes and pull forward some of that housing supply. There's a study from UC Berkeley that found SB 4 bill would open up 171,000 acres of land across the state for affordable housing.

Another bill to really highlight is the AB 1033, which allows homeowners, property owners to sell their ADU, the accessory dwelling unit, also known as the granny flat, separately from their home. And there's also a big push to add more budget, state budget for those ADU programs. And lastly, the other bill that really stood out is the AB 12. And that allows-- that actually prevents landlords from taking more than one month's rent from as a security deposit. And that law is expected to go into effect of next year. But

Akiko, it's also important to highlight that California has already passed some housing bills that have streamlined a lot of the multifamily housing units. I've spoken with developers on the ground about the bill, the SB 330 that was passed in 2019. And these developers have said that that actually has streamlined a lot of the housing production to the market. So these new 56 bills that have been passed will-- that have been signed by Governor Newsom will just add more to that effect.