Public Land for Public Good: Demystifying the Surplus Land Act and AB 1486

California’s housing affordability crisis is growing. But there is a potential solution hidden in plain sight: public land. Public land is an underutilized asset that municipalities across the region, in urban and suburban areas, can use to mitigate land costs and take advantage of developable sites in order to build affordable housing close to public transportation, schools, and jobs, and keep it affordable from one generation to the next. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Workforce Housing Action Plan stated that public parcels offer enough land to build 35,000 units of affordable housing near transit--and that isn’t even a full accounting of regional public land. Developing this unused public land would not only help meet local housing, transportation, and equity goals, it would advance our state’s environmental and economic targets by increasing affordable, infill development near transit and jobs.

This month, changes to California’s Surplus Land Act were made through AB 1486 to help ensure that unused public lands can be more efficiently transformed into affordable housing, parks, and open spaces that can serve our communities for generations. What are these new changes, and what will they mean for agencies and organizations working throughout the region to address our housing affordability crisis?

Join the Great Communities Collaborative and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Community Development Department as we dig into the Surplus Land Act and AB 1486 to answer this question. The discussion will bring together public officials, agency staff, policy and legal experts, and advocates to shine some light on how the Surplus Land Act and AB1486 can be implemented to expand the use of public land for public good. You’ll learn how agencies can be better prepared to implement this new law in service of expanding housing affordability in high opportunity areas.