California starter home laws reshape small home building

California lawmakers have passed a dizzying array of laws over the past several years to ignite construction of more homes, particularly smaller, more affordable ones.Small homebuilding and development firms must sift through a byzantine list of options to make sites work profitably. Some projects are working through the process now. Others have been built. Both signal that the bills have produced mostly positive results. Still, even experienced developers say the pace of change is hard to stay current with. “We try to keep up, but we also get confused,” AJ Puthanpurayil, principal and managing partner at Los Angeles-based Dreamwork Development, said in an interview with HousingWire TBD. “The same law will have a different name after a few months because they will revise something on it.” Puthanpurayil keeps building. Dreamwork has several small projects in the pipeline and completed others, taking advantage of different laws. Trenton Klatte, CEO and cofounder of West End Construction, told HousingWire TBD that Senate Bill 1123 is “creating the most amount of density in most projects that we’ve seen for those kinds of subdivisions.” That law is the second iteration of the Starter H...