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California Housing Consortium urges Treasurer Fiona Ma to take “swift action” to get billions of dollars in approved funding out the door quickly to promote affordable housing

Affordable housing coalition urges State Treasurer to direct $4 billion in existing private bond funding to shovel-ready affordable housing developments

SACRAMENTO – The California Housing Consortium (CHC) and a coalition of affordable housing organizations urged California State Treasurer Fiona Ma this week to immediately allocate $4 billion of state private activity bonds to affordable multifamily housing.

“Without this action, thousands of shovel-ready units across the state will be delayed and the state will fail to leverage billions in available federal housing resources to provide more safe, affordable homes for struggling Californians,” CHC and its partners said in a letter to Treasurer Ma.

While voters and state leaders have acted decisively in recent years to address California’s shortage of 1.4 million units of affordable housing, the state has not taken all of the steps needed to get billions of dollars in approved funding out the door quickly to promote affordable development.

One major issue identified by CHC in this week’s letter: For the first time in 15 years, the state has an insufficient amount of private activity bond volume to support growing affordable housing demand. Affordable housing projects must receive an allocation of these privately-funded bonds before accessing billions of dollars of public funding—including $6 billion approved in 2018 by voters through Propositions 1 and 2, $2 billion for affordable housing in the 2019-20 state budget, and $500 million from the newly-expanded Low Income Housing Tax Credit.

In order to put all of these dollars to work—and to leverage billions in federal funds—CHC and its partners have asked Treasurer Ma to increase the amount of private activity bonds available for affordable housing. This week’s letter requests allocating $4 billion, just under the state’s existing bond volume cap:

The California Debt Limit Allocation Committee is estimating overall demand for all uses of about $10 billion, more than double the existing cap. According to our analysis, at least $4 billion is needed to pair with today’s state-funded affordable housing programs—and to ensure all of the recently approved resources targeting the housing crisis can be used to quickly and efficiently produce new affordable units.

Allocating these resources to affordable housing will not only help the state address the top crisis facing Californians, it will also provide important leveraging opportunities to tap federal housing resources: Unlike other uses of private activity bonds, every dollar of bonds used in an affordable housing development leverages at least 50 cents of additional federal funds that would otherwise go unused.

To access the full letter to Treasurer Ma, please click here.

The letter was co-signed by the following affordable housing organizations:

California Housing Consortium
Housing California
California Housing Partnership
California Coalition for Rural Housing
California Council for Affordable Housing
San Diego Housing Federation
Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California
Southern California Association of NonProfit Housing
Sacramento Housing Alliance
The Kennedy Commission
California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation
Western Center on Law and Poverty

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