Curious whether your neighborhood might be affected by Senate Bill 50, the proposal to allow four- and five-story apartment buildings to rise near train stations?

A new interactive map created by researchers at UC Berkeley shows which neighborhoods in San Francisco and Los Angeles are most likely to be impacted by the bill. In Los Angeles, that includes wide swaths of the Westside and South LA, two regions dominated by single-family homes.

SB 50, which cleared its first hurdle in the state senate last week, would override local restrictions on density and some building heights, allowing multi-family buildings like apartments and condos to go up near “high quality” train and bus stops. (The “upzoning” measures would vary based on how close the project is to the station, and whether the station is served by buses or trains.)

The legislation is Sen. Scott Wiener’s (D-San Francisco) response to California’s housing shortage, which has pushed up the cost of buying and renting to unprecedented levels and helped fuel a surge of homelessness. The situation is especially dire in Los Angeles County, where rent payments eat up more income than in any other major U.S. metropolitan area and 39,826 people live without shelter on streets and sidewalks.

The UC Berkeley analysis is impartial, but Carolina Reid, faculty research advisor for the university’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, says anyone who might be scared by the possibility of taller buildings landing in their neighborhoods should consider that those taller buildings would help alleviate the affordability crisis.

“We want to make sure that all people in the state have housing, and it’s every community’s responsibility to understand they have a role to play,” she says.

Plus, Reid says the critical rhetoric around SB 50 creating a Manhattan in single-family neighborhoods is overblown.

“It’s likely in some of these neighborhoods to be a slow increase in density,” she says.

The analysis and map look at neighborhoods surrounding “high-quality” transit stops and categorize them into five neighborhood types based on existing density and income: high density and high income (blue); high density and low income (green); low density and high income (red); low density and low income (yellow); and low density and diverse (purple).

The two high-density zones (blue and green) already hold a large share of multi-family buildings, “suggesting that SB 50 will have little impact in these neighborhoods.” The three low-density areas (red, yellow, and purple) are more likely to be impacted, because they are “less dense and have older buildings, meaning that it would be possible to intensify land use through upzoning around these stations.”

SB 50 defines a “high-quality” transit station as any served by rail and by buses with certain headways, including headways of 6 to 15 minutes during rush hour (6 to 10 a.m. and 3 to 7 p.m.).

The analysis looks more closely at at the area surrounding Metro’s Soto station in Boyle Heights, and the area around the 603 bus stop at Allesandro Avenue and Oak Glen Place in Silver Lake and Echo Park to determine how much land in those areas might be affected by SB 50.

Since the Silver Lake station is a bus stop, SB 50 would only apply within a quarter-mile radius of the stop, which is designated by the black circle on the map above. The radius for a rail stop is one-half mile.

The study takes into consideration how much land is zoned for residential uses, how much is vacant and “underutilized,” and how many existing buildings are renter-occupied. To help prevent displacement, SB 50 has a provision that exempts buildings that have been occupied by tenants within the past seven years.

Here’s what the researchers found: 57 percent of land in the Boyle Heights case study area and 63 percent of land in the Silver Lake case study area could be impacted by SB 50.

“Some of our case study neighborhoods had a significant share of their land area—between 20 to 50 percent—comprising parcels over 5,000 square feet with no buildings on them. This offers up a real opportunity for additional housing, including affordable units,” the researchers write.

SB 50 would require cities and counties without certain affordable housing requirements to include affordable units in buildings with more than 10 units. In buildings with more than 351 units, for example, 25 percent would have to be set aside for low-income tenants.

Developers could also opt to pay an in-lieu fee for affordable housing off-site, although that has been noted as an area of concern from a coalition of affordable housing advocates.

Reid says this analysis is just a starting point. Researchers are already deciding which neighborhoods to look at next.

“We’re planning to do more,” she says.