Who Is Buffy Wicks, the Lawmaker Behind AB 736?

Buffy Wicks, the four-term California legislator who ignited a real estate firestorm this week with a proposal to cap transfer taxes statewide, signaled her priorities months ago.

“In 2026, I’m interested in attending fewer bill signing ceremonies and more ribbon cuttings,” Wicks wrote in a blog on Nov. 24.

Despite authoring 56 bills in the 2025-2026 legislative session — four more than the previous session — Wicks argued that legislative victories mean little if they don’t produce more housing. The true measure of success, she wrote, is “whether homes families can afford actually get built quickly and begin benefiting our working class communities.”

Since then, Wicks has pushed legislation to spur condo development, expand modular home construction, and secure financing for affordable projects. Earlier this week, state leaders agreed to place a $10 billion affordable housing bond — one she helped negotiate — on the November ballot.

But her latest proposal may be her most explosive of the session. AB 736 would cap real estate transfer taxes at 1.5 percent in most California jurisdictions, and at 3 percent in cities like San Francisco and Culver City, where existing transfer taxes already exceed that threshold.

The bill would upend Measure ULA, the controversial “mansion tax” approved by voters in 2022 that imposes transfer taxes as high as 5.95 percent for property sales over $10.6 million. It would also force San Francisco to lower its top transfer tax rate from 6 percent to 3 percent, a change city officials estimate could cost the city $100 million per year. Earlier this spring, Mayor Daniel Lurie floated cutting the city’s transfer taxes to encourage development, before abandoning it amid budget woes.

Wicks’ bill attempts to thread a narrow transfer tax needle. It would undercut the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association’s November ballot measure — the Local Taxpayer Protection Act — that seeks to cap transfer taxes at 0.11 percent statewide while preserving much of the revenue already collected by cities and counties. At the same time, the 1.5 percent cap addresses developers’ complaints that high transfer taxes make it harder to buy and convert commercial properties into housing.

The compromise has earned support from some of the state’s largest developers, such as Hudson Pacific and Kilroy Realty Corporation. Others remain skeptical. Progressives say the bill limits a local government’s ability to tax the wealthy and raise money for affordable housing. Realtors argue it could make homebuying and selling more expensive by raising the transfer tax cap for California’s 361 general-law cities from 1.1 to 1.5 percent. (The state’s 121 charter cities, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, do not have caps). The California Association of Realtors sent out a “red alert” to members on Wednesday, decrying the bill and its potential effect on home sales.

Buffy who?

The pressure is familiar territory for Wicks.

Arriving in Sacramento in 2018, she has become one of California’s most influential — and polarizing — housing lawmakers.

Since her election, Wicks has partnered with San Francisco’s state Sen. Scott Wiener to author some of California’s most ambitious pro-housing legislation.

Together, Wicks and Weiner have become two of the legislature’s leading YIMBY voices, arguing that California’s affordability crisis is fundamentally a housing supply problem. Their legislative victories helped push the once-fringe movement into the political mainstream.

Wicks credits Wiener with reshaping her views on housing — and ultimately inspiring her to run for office. Earlier this year, she told The Real Deal that, while serving as Hilary Clinton’s California campaign director in 2016, she read a blogpost by Wiener that characterized new market rate housing as a key variable in bringing down housing costs. The argument, she said, changed how she viewed California’s housing crisis.

With Wiener campaigning to replace Rep. Nancy Pelosi in Congress this November, Wicks is widely viewed as Wiener’s heir to his pro-housing mantle in Sacramento.

Track record

AB 736 is only the latest marquee housing bill to put Wicks in the headlines.

In 2022, she authored AB 2011, which streamlined approvals for qualifying affordable and mixed-income housing projects on commercial land. The law also exempted those developments from CEQA review, shaving months — or more — off the approval process.

In 2024, Wicks led a compromise on the state’s hotly contested builder’s remedy law. Rather than allowing developers to completely sidestep local zoning rules in cities that fell out of compliance with state housing mandates, AB 1893 required builder’s remedy projects to adhere to local land-use regulations. However, the bill slashed affordability requirements for these projects, allowing them to reserve as few as 7 percent of their units as affordable, down from 20 percent. Projects with 10 or fewer units would no longer be required to include any subsidized units.

In 2025, she and Wiener passed AB 609, exempting urban infill housing projects from CEQA review. The bill represented one of the most consequential changes to the California Environmental Quality Act in decades.