State elected officials in Harrisburg are running out of time to pass four bipartisan housing reform bills that won significant support in their respective chambers, but are fast approaching deletion when the session closes at the end of the year.

Two House bills — allowing homeowners to build Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), and lifting local limits on the number of unrelated people who can live together — successfully passed the full House by wide margins back in the spring, and are now waiting in the state Senate.

Two Senate bills — creating a framework for pre-approved housing plans; and tracking and speeding up state agency housing-related permits — passed the full Senate, and are awaiting action in the House.

Three of the bills already have a thematically similar counterpart bill in the opposite chamber, if not an exact companion bill. Those counterpart bills could become legislative vehicles to make amendments, and eventually move all of these forward before the election in November.

In my brief time working to advance multiple state zoning reform bills since 2024, I have been surprised by how often people working in one legislative chamber aren’t always aware of aligned activities happening in the other one. So, just in case you haven’t been paying attention: Four substantive, non-gimmicky bills that are right now standing at the 10-yard line in the Capitol would have a modest but meaningful impact on the most important issue for voters right now: the cost of living.

What these four bills have in common is that each one either adds Go power for housing, or weakens a source of Stop power. ADUs and occupancy reform take away local vetoes over some aspects of what can be built or how buildings can be used. Pre-approved plans and permit tracking give builders a clear, predictable path to Yes.

The last term (2023-24) offered a hopeful glimpse of the possibility of future bipartisan action in the Senate, where now-retired Republican Senator John DiSanto and current GOP Senator Dan Laughlin teamed up with Democrats Tim Kearney and Nikil Saval to advance an omnibus zoning reform package (SB1126). That bill ultimately didn’t get a committee hearing, but it set the stage for further bipartisan cooperation on smaller bills this year. Last term in the House, two zoning reform bills (allowing two- to four-unit buildings on residential lots, and allowing multifamily housing in commercial areas) passed out of committee, but didn’t advance further.

This term has gone much differently and for the better, mostly because a lot of House Republicans flipped to support these moves instead of opposing them on party lines like last year.

What the bills would do

In the House, the ADU bill (HB2186) introduced by Representative John Inglis won over 38 House Republicans on the final passage vote, with only one Democrat — Lisa Borowski of Delaware County — voting no. The residential occupancy reform bill (HB2109), dubbed the “Golden Girls” law by its sponsor Representative Tarik Khan of Northwest Philly, also passed by a wide margin, with 39 Republicans joining in, and 18 Democrats defecting.

The exact roll calls, bill summaries, and a map of the voting geography for each is available at the PA Housing Votes website I created to track activity for around 15 pro-housing bills and cosponsor memos this term.

Those House bills are now in the Senate, where they have not advanced since the spring. The Senate Urban Affairs and Housing Committee passed its own ADU bill (SB 1346) out of committee, which was introduced by current PA GOP chairman Senator Greg Rothman and co-sponsored by Dem Senators Saval and Kearney again, among several others. The list of members of both parties supporting these bills in the Senate has encouragingly continued to grow each session.

There’s a big catch with the Senate version. Pennsylvania’s main land use law, the Municipalities Planning Code, governs zoning in every municipality in the state except Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, which operate under their own separate Home Rule statutes. There isn’t a legal obstacle to including them; it’s just a political choice.

Because the Rothman-Saval bill works by amending the MPC, it would legalize ADUs nearly everywhere except the two largest cities with some of the most intractable zoning politics. The House bill avoids the problem by amending a different part of state law, Title 53, which does cover both cities. If the Senate passes its own version, the two chambers will have to reconcile them, and whether Philly and Pittsburgh get included will be the main fight.

Senator Saval also has a Senate companion bill for the House Golden Girls bill, which currently has 10 cosponsors, including Republican Senator Elder Vogel. The Senate has their choice of passing the Saval bill or the Khan bill, if they wish.

It would be a travesty to let all this good bipartisan deal-making go to waste because of the tight calendar. Sometimes a tight deadline, though, is precisely what our legislators need to get the job done.

The full Senate also passed two Republican-authored bills that now await action from the House.

Senate Bill 1281 from Senator Rothman creates a framework for pre-approved housing plans at the state level, with the idea that these plans can be used repeatedly and bypass some of the planning review and permitting delays involved with regular housing plans, which are usually totally distinct from one another.

A pre-approved plan is a building design (a duplex, a rowhouse, a small apartment building) that gets reviewed once, so builders don’t have to start from scratch every time. The plan is already available on the shelf at L+I for the next builder to reuse. The bigger idea is to add Go power to a system that has far too much Stop power. What you can build in PA changes every time you cross a municipal line, and too often housing here involves a political negotiation instead of a set of clear rules. Every negotiation is another chance for someone to say no.

This bill was weakened by an amendment in committee from Senator Wayne Langerholc that requires that the pre-approved plans are only usable in cases where they already conform with municipal zoning codes and comprehensive plans, removing any preemption possibilities. This is too bad, as the driving idea is to achieve some level of statewide standardization of housing plans, and municipal codes are anything but standardized. Even so, it’s a big step in the right direction, and it passed the Senate unanimously.

Philadelphia is the extreme case. Councilmanic district overlays have made it nearly impossible to pass housing laws that actually apply citywide. Council can pass a good reform, and half the district members can simply exempt their districts from it. This happened with a modest 2021 bill that made a very minor change to support ADUs — it passed, but about half the members blocked the change in their districts. That’s Stop power in its purest form, and it’s left the state government as the only possible vector for change in the near term. Unless everyone in City Hall wakes up tomorrow and decides to behave differently than Councilmembers have for decades, state preemption is the only realistic way to get one clear set of rules for the whole city.

One more catch for Philly readers: like the Senate ADU bill, SB 1281 (pre-approved plans) amends the Municipalities Planning Code, so as written it wouldn’t apply here at all. If the House takes it up, extending it to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh should be the first amendment.

The other Senate Republican housing bill, SB 1279, introduced by Senator Kristin Phillips-Hill, would create a new executive branch Commonwealth Regulatory Compliance Officer tasked with streamlining housing permitting across state agencies. Senate Democrats opposed that bill in committee after the Shapiro administration weighed in with some process-oriented concerns. But the final bill passed the full Senate 30–20, with four Democrats joining every Republican except Jarrett Coleman in voting yes.

A lot of new housing developments outside the big cities have to clear state hurdles on top of local ones. A suburban subdivision might need a PennDOT Highway Occupancy Permit to connect to a state road, DEP sign-off on a sewage planning module, and a stormwater permit for disturbing more than an acre of land. Each agency runs on its own clock, and there’s nobody responsible for the whole timeline. SB 1279 would create one official accountable for getting to yes, which is Go power the state has never had. Philly rowhouse infill rarely touches any of this, so the benefit for the city is more of a bank shot: More housing getting built in the suburbs eases price pressure across the whole region.

SB 1279 has no House counterpart. SB 1281 has a loose House cousin in Representative Jared Solomon’s HB 2434. His cosponsorship memo pitched it as a pre-approved plans bill, but the bill itself only fast-tracks approvals for housing that local zoning already allows, and it creates no set of approved designs. The House could use it as a vehicle, or simply take up the Senate bills as-is.

We’re quickly running out of pre-election session days for all this to get done in time, but there’s still some sand left in the top of the hourglass. This is the farthest Harrisburg has gotten so far in their various recent attempts to address the housing headwinds from land use and zoning laws, or permitting, all of which were part of the focus of Governor Shapiro’s Housing Action Plan.

It would be a travesty to let all this good bipartisan deal-making go to waste because of the tight calendar. Sometimes a tight deadline, though, is precisely what our legislators need to get the job done. With rising housing costs top of mind for voters, our legislators owe it to us to get this important work across the finish line this fall.

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