California · Davis-Stirling Act

The covenants that stopped a second home on the lot.

Two sections, four years apart, doing the same thing from different directions: taking out of the governing documents the provisions that would block housing California's planning law has already allowed.

Accessory dwelling units

§ 4751(a): any covenant, restriction or condition in a deed or other instrument of transfer affecting an interest in a planned development, and any provision of a governing document, that either effectively prohibits or unreasonably restricts the construction or use of an accessory dwelling unit or junior accessory dwelling unit on a lot zoned for single-family residential use is void and unenforceable.

Two limits are built into that sentence and both are easy to miss. It applies to a planned development, not to every common interest development. And the ADU must meet the requirements of the Government Code articles the section names — the state ADU provisions. A unit that does not qualify under the planning statute gets no protection here.

§ 4751(b) preserves reasonable restrictions, and defines them more tightly than the Act's usual formula: restrictions that do not unreasonably increase the cost to construct, effectively prohibit the construction of, or extinguish the ability to otherwise construct an ADU or JADU consistent with those Government Code provisions. Three ways to fail, and an architectural guideline only has to fall into one of them.

The section was last amended by SB 477 in March 2024 — a renumbering bill that moved the state ADU law into its current Government Code articles, which is why the cross-references read as they do.

Eligible housing development projects

§ 4747 is the less familiar of the two and works the same way at a larger scale. A covenant or governing document provision affecting an interest in a planned development is void and unenforceable if it effectively prohibits or unreasonably restricts an eligible housing development project from using the floor area ratio standards authorised by Government Code § 65913.11.

§ 4747(c)(1) does not define the project itself — it points at Government Code § 65913.11(b) and adopts whatever qualifies there. § 4747(c)(2) defines reasonable restrictions with the same three-limb test as § 4751: not unreasonably increasing the cost to construct, not effectively prohibiting construction, not extinguishing the ability to build using those standards.

§ 4747(d) closes with a finding rather than a rule, and it is there for a reason. The Legislature declares that providing adequate housing, given the severe shortage at all income levels, is a matter of statewide concern and that the section serves a significant and legitimate public purpose. That language is what answers a charter-city or freedom-of-contract objection: it is the Legislature setting up the argument that this provision overrides local and private arrangements.