Election Update:
As the final votes continue to be tallied this week, a few major election outcomes with implications for affordable housing are coming into focus.

• A new Speaker will lead the Assembly this summer: Assembly Democrats voted for a new Speaker last week, supporting the transition of power from the current Speaker, Asm. Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood), to Asm. Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) at the end of June. The timing of the transition will allow Asm. Rendon to serve as leader through this year’s budget negotiations (a process expected to be increasingly fraught, with the LAO projecting a budget deficit of $25 billion). Asm. Rivas co-chaired the Assembly’s Housing Working Group in 2021 and is widely considered a champion of affordable housing.

• Local housing measures pass, with a few notable exceptions: Voters approved a wave of local housing measures this year, supporting most of the 50-plus housing related proposals on the ballot. This includes a high-profile new “mansion tax” in Los Angeles that could raise more than $900 million a year for affordable housing—and produce roughly 26,000 units of new housing over the next decade. An $850 million local housing bond passed in Oakland that sets aside $350 million for affordable housing; the measure is expected to support construction of 2,200-2,400 affordable housing units over the next 6 years. All five Article 34 measures on this year’s ballot passed, including measures in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento County, and South San Francisco. Some notable failures on this year’s ballot include: A $650 million housing bond in Berkeley and NIMBY measures that sought to slow affordable housing development in Laguna Beach, Santa Cruz, and Menlo Park.

• Legislative majorities take shape: While some races are still too close to call, it’s fair to say this election will do little to change the partisan makeup of the state Legislature. Democrats will continue to hold “roughly three out of four seats” in the Senate and Assembly, according to CalMatters—enough to maintain their supermajorities in both houses. Thanks to a combination of redistricting and term limits, nearly 40 of the Legislature’s 120 members will be new faces when they are seated in December, including record numbers of women and LGBTQ+ members. In Congressional races, after months of campaigning and $340 million spent on both sides, it appears that no incumbents will be unseated—leaving the California delegation with at least 40 Democrats and Republicans with between 11 and 12 (depending on the outcome of uncalled races).

Other top housing election news this week:

EDITORIAL: Californians say ‘yes’ to housing measures. Mostly.
Los Angeles Times
Forget about the red wave or the blue wave. California, it appears, had a housing wave on election day. Up and down the state, voters largely backed pro-housing ballot measures, including taxes and bonds to build affordable housing, and rejected several measures aimed at making it harder to build. That’s good news for a state still mired in a housing crisis that is fueling poverty and inequality and hindering economic growth. And it’s a welcome sign that voters are still eager to do more, even after the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom have passed ambitious laws to spur housing construction and after many communities have passed earlier tax measures to accelerate affordable housing construction.

We ‘have to do more’: Californians poised to say yes on dozens of housing, homeless measures
Sacramento Bee
When it came to homelessness and housing affordability this election, California voters sent a clear message to local governments Tuesday in more than 50 ballot measures: do more. Official results could take days to finalize, but the latest tallies reveal an electorate ready to tax itself for more affordable housing, strengthen renter protections, and reject efforts designed to block new development. “I think there’s a lot of frustration on the part of voters and political leaders are seeing this,” said Lee Ohanian, economics professor at UCLA and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. “They know that they have to do more than they’ve done in recent years.”

A speakership deal: Rendon, Rivas agree on handover
CalMatters
After five months of backroom jockeying and another six-hour meeting behind closed doors, California Assembly Democrats agreed today to a lengthy transition that will see Robert Rivas succeed Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon next summer. Emerging from a ballroom at the Sacramento Convention Center, Rivas, a Hollister Democrat, said the Democratic caucus had unanimously voted to retain Rendon, a Lakewood Democrat, as speaker until the end of June, when Rivas is scheduled to finally assume the influential role overseeing the lower house of the Legislature. “We have such a large caucus here in the state Assembly. Excited that we had the opportunity to walk out of there united,” Rivas said. “This was about unity. It was about bringing our caucus together, about planning for the future.”