This week in housing news, Governor Newsom met with Sacramento residents struggling to afford their rents even as they hold full-time jobs. As reported in The Sacramento Bee, three women shared their stories that ranged from experiencing homelessness to needing housing assistance to not being able to live in a city they grew up in because of the state and region’s housing crisis.

CALmatters looked at a recent report that found half of adults and voters consider leaving the state due to the cost of housing. Most Californians surveyed support Governor Newsom’s plans to invest in housing production.

Finally, Senator Scott Wiener joined Dr. Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, in a New York Times opinion piece on the connection between housing policy and climate policy. As commutes become longer because people can no longer afford to live where they work, it’s led to an increase in urban sprawl, they said. In urging policymakers to focus on increasing housing where there is transit and jobs, they wrote: “Low-density, single-family-home zoning is effectively a ban on economically diverse communities.”

HOUSING CRISIS

‘I was struggling:’ Sacramento residents tell Gov. Gavin Newsom what it’s like to pay the rent
Sacramento Bee
A Sacramento preschool teacher and her 2-year-old would be homeless without financial support. A 27-year-old woman lives with two roommates in West Sacramento despite having a full-time job. A 71-year old woman says without help she couldn’t afford rent in the city on the less-than $1,000 per month she receives from Social Security. The three women all met with California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday for a roundtable discussion of rising rents and the struggle to find affordable housing in Sacramento.

Poll underscores California’s housing crisis
CALmatters
Two months ago, when the Public Policy Institute of California asked the state’s residents to name the top issues that newly inaugurated Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature should address, immigration was No. 1. Jobs and environmental issues followed, with “homelessness” a distant fourth, cited by just 6 percent of those surveyed. PPIC released its latest poll late Wednesday and it found that housing affordability had zoomed to the top of the public’s consciousness – so much so, in fact, that nearly half of adults and voters say the cost of housing makes them seriously consider moving, even if it means leaving the state.

Bay Area voters: ‘Yes, we’ll pay to fix traffic’ but middling support for housing plan
Mercury News
They’re the twin demons plaguing Bay Area residents: the never-ending grind of bumper-to-bumper traffic and the ever-climbing cost of housing. But in a recent poll, voters said that when it comes to tackling those most vexing issues, they are far more willing to open their wallets to fix traffic problems than they are to support a wide-ranging plan to bring down high housing costs.

HOUSING POLICY

Op-ed: Why Housing Policy Is Climate Policy
New York Times
California has long been seen as a leader on climate change. The state’s history of aggressive action to reduce air pollution, accelerate the use of renewable energy and speed the transition to a low-carbon, climate-resilient economy has inspired governments around the world to set more ambitious climate goals. But there is trouble on the horizon, and California’s climate leadership is at risk. Across most of the state’s economy, greenhouse gas emissions have been trending steadily down.

STATE POLICY

Assembly Democrats want lower threshold to raise local taxes
Associated Press
California voters could decide in 2020 whether it should be easier for their local governments to raise taxes and issue bonds for affordable housing, road improvements and other public projects. A constitutional amendment proposed Wednesday would lower how much voter support communities need to raise money for infrastructure projects from two-thirds to 55 percent. Assembly Democrats say the current threshold allows a minority of voters to derail needed projects.

A change to Proposition 13 that homeowners can get behind
Los Angeles Times
Could a reassessment of Proposition 13 finally be in the wings? Advocates of the long-needed change have their fingers crossed, now that a measure to revise Proposition 13 has qualified for the November 2020 ballot. The initiative wouldn’t involve a wholesale review of the 1978 tax-cutting proposition; that’s still considered a politically impossible lift in a state where property tax breaks have become embedded in millions of homes and apartment buildings.

RENT CONTROL/BALLOT INITIATIVES

Gov. Newsom Says Work Continues On Possible Rent Compromise
Capital Public Radio
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday he’s continuing to work with state lawmakers on what he hopes will be a deal to stabilize California’s rising rents. “We’ve been working behind the scenes with a number of the key parties and participants to see if there is a — forgive the vernacular — a deal on this that could be a constructive first step,” Newsom told reporters after hosting a roundtable on affordable housing in Sacramento. “I’m not wedded to any specific proposal right now.”

LOCAL HOUSING INITIATIVES

Berkeley Looks Into ‘Missing Middle’ Housing
KQED
California’s affordable housing crisis has hit those in poverty and the working poor hard. But it’s also affecting those in the middle. In the city of Berkeley, there’s a push to consider more multiplexes and townhouses. That’s the kind of housing that was once helped middle class residents live there.