Housing activists believed this would be the year they would finally conquer the California coast.

In the spring, Democratic lawmakers and their supporting Yes In My Backyard activists introduced a series of bills designed to make it easier to build homes and accessory dwelling units along California’s heavily regulated coast and make it harder for the independent and influential California Coastal Commission to slow or block housing projects. The 15-member group oversees nearly all of the state’s 840 miles of coastline, a stretch of land that nearly a million Californians call home.

The building sector initiative built on the coalition’s success last year, when lawmakers passed a major housing bill that — contrary to longstanding legislative tradition — did not make an exception for the coast. This year’s legislative package was designed to cement and expand on a new political reality in which the 48-year-old Coastal Commission no longer has as much influence over housing policy.

Fast forward to mid-August, and these new bills have either failed or been watered down so much that they no longer offer the promise of an expanded coastline. Whatever happened last year, the California Coastal Commission is still a force to be reckoned with.

“Californians value their coastline and care deeply about protecting it. Bills that seek to weaken coastal protection will face strong opposition,” said Sarah Christie, head of the Legislative Affairs Commission.

Since the 1970s, the California Coastal Commission has tightly regulated all construction and demolition within California’s coastal zone – a narrow strip of land that lies between 180 and 5 miles inland from high tide. While many recent state housing laws require predictable, rule-based approval of proposed developments, the commission remains a bastion of discretion. Commission supporters say that’s a good thing, because the coast’s enormous public value, its fragile ecosystems and its vulnerability to sea rise require holistic and individualized protection.

On Thursday, San Diego Democratic Rep. David Alvarez withdrew his bill, AB 2560, which was designed to ensure that California’s density bonus law applies in the coastal zone. That law allows developers to build higher or denser or meet fewer local requirements in exchange for reserving some units for lower-income renters or owners. He said in a press release that recent changes to the bill made it “ineffective for building more housing.”

That amendment came from the Senate Natural Resources Committee, which heard the bill in late June, just before the legislature’s summer recess. The amendment would have subjected any density bonus project to the additional protections of the California Coastal Act. The committee is chaired by Senator Dave Min, a Democrat from Irivine.

The change “defeats the purpose of the law,” said Will Moore, policy director at Circulate San Diego, a nonprofit that co-sponsored the bill. The only reason to move forward after such changes would have been “if we were just in love with the number 2560 or something,” he added.

Min’s Natural Resources Committee proved to be a key defender of the Coastal Commission this year.

In April, the committee also made major revisions to two coastal housing bills by Senator Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas. One of them would have exempted backyard cottages, also known as accessory dwelling units, from Coastal Commission review. Amendments from the Secretary’s Committee revised the bill to require the commission to only provide guidance to local governments on approving accessory dwelling units.

A second Blakespear bill would have shortened the appeal period for coastal housing projects. Min’s amendments changed the deadline to require the commission to submit only a report to the Legislature by 2026. (The bill was defeated in a subsequent Finance Committee last week.)

Blakespear accepted these changes at the time, but was not happy with them, which led to a testy exchange at the April hearing.

“To be clear, you were not forced to accept any changes, you agreed to them,” Min said.

“I am absolutely compelled to accept these changes,” Blakespear replied. “I do so voluntarily, but I do not wish to.”

Over the past half-decade, a majority of the state’s legislators have come to terms with the idea that lowering housing costs in California will require a significant increase in housing supply. California housing officials are pushing local governments across the state to approve 315,000 new housing units annually by the end of the decade — a pace of construction that is unprecedented in California.

Housing advocates point out that the coastal zone runs through many urbanized centers and that its population is disproportionately wealthy and white. This, they argue, has made the Coastal Commission an instrument of elite exclusion.

However, supporters of the Coastal Act argue that the goals of making the state’s beach properties more accessible and protecting the coast are not mutually exclusive.

“There are a number of ways we can increase workforce housing in the coastal zone without undermining the Coastal Act,” Christie said. That could include requiring local governments, which in many cases are charged with enforcing the law, to approve housing projects that do not endanger coastal resources. The commission has also long wanted the state to give it the authority to require developers to reserve housing for low-income residents, a power the agency was stripped of in the early 1980s.

This debate has currently come to a standstill in Parliament, but is likely to resurface in some form next year.