New California housing laws will make it easier to build in proximity to transit. 

In construction, time is money. This year, to help lower the cost of building new homes, California lawmakers passed many new laws to reduce delays in planning approvals, building permits and inspections.

Here are some of the more significant ones:

This year’s flagship bill was Senate Bill 79, which will allow more housing near transit. A look at places that already allow mid-rise housing near transit suggests three types of buildings are likely to be built under the new law.

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Commercial zones and transit station parking lots, where large plots of land are available, are where developers can build large rental apartment buildings and for-sale townhouse complexes. The area around stations in Redwood City, Dublin, Milpitas or South Hayward shows what this can look like:

In residential zones, lots are usually too small for mid-rise apartment buildings. A common lot size in the Bay Area is 5,000 square feet. Once the space needed for the stairs, elevator, hallway and yards is subtracted, there’s not sufficient room left to build enough apartments to make a profit. Garages are also hard to fit on small lots efficiently.

Instead, what replaces a house on a single lot are a few townhouses or freestanding houses with small yards. While rare in the Bay Area due to the limited number of small developers that do this size of project, this type of building is popular in the Los Angeles area, where they are known as “small lot........

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