This week in affordable housing news…:

State update:

• New Assembly housing committee chair Buffy Wicks (D-Richmond) shared her legislative priorities for the year with CalMatters and the Los Angeles Times in this month’s new ‘Gimme Shelter’ podcast. At the top of her list, after the housing roundtable series organized this fall by the Assembly Housing Working Group: More stable, ongoing funding for affordable housing. “We just did a big housing tour in the fall across the state,” Wicks said: “There was a constant drumbeat of a need for a dedicated continued long-term funding source for affordable housing.” Among Wicks’s other priorities: More rent relief funding in the budget, expanded homeownership opportunities and tenant protections for lower-income people of color, and stopping the anti-housing constitutional amendment moving toward the November 2022 ballot. “My hope is that it doesn’t make it onto the ballot, we’ll see,” she said. “But if it does, I think we need to fight it at every turn.”

• The San Jose Mercury News reports that California’s $5.2 billion in COVID rent relief funds are now oversubscribed as demand has increased—and state officials estimate they will need an additional $2.5 billion to support all of the requests for rent relief. “California will need significantly more funding from future federal reallocations in order to continue to meet the needs of low-income California renters impacted by COVID-19,” said Lourdes Castro Ramirez, secretary of the state’s Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. The Mercury News reports that the state requested an additional $1.9 billion from the federal emergency rental assistance program to cover landlord and tenant debts, but last week received just $62 million in additional funds. California’s tenant protections end in March, when landlords will be able to resume evictions for nonpayment in most cities. The federal government is expected to redistribute additional, unused renter relief funds later this spring. More information about applying for rent relief funds is available here.

• CDLAC voted this week to distribute $3.7 billion of this year’s $4.3 Private Activity Bond allocation to affordable housing, reserving the remainder (roughly $500 million) for other exempt facilities, including a seawater desalination project in Huntington Beach and an electric rail project connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Bloomberg notes that housing advocates at the meeting said they anticipate a need for “about $9 billion” in bonds this year for affordable housing alone. “Without infrastructure, we can’t build more housing,” said Treasurer Fiona Ma, chair of the board, who initially proposed giving $600 million of the state’s allotment to non-housing projects, but reduced that amount slightly after a request from the Newsom administration to use a portion of funds for a veterans housing program.

ICYMI – Top news stories:

Newsom has big plans to get rid of California’s homeless camps. Will they work?
San Jose Mercury News
After pouring an unprecedented $12 billion into homeless housing and services last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom now is turning to the massive tent camps, shanty-towns and make-shift RV parks that have taken over California’s streets, parks and open spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. Local officials and nonprofit leaders, who have been battling a growing homelessness crisis for years with little help from the state, are grateful and hopeful. But, they say, the money won’t be nearly enough. Focusing on encampments is a smart political move by the governor, they acknowledge, but getting people out of camps and into temporary shelters isn’t a solution if there is no affordable housing.

Dear Karen Bass and others, L.A. needs a real homeless plan we haven’t heard before
Los Angeles Times – Column by Steve Lopez
In the city of sprawling encampments, broken promises and simmering frustration, the mayoral derby is under way. Eric Garcetti, after 20 years in power as a councilman and mayor, will soon be leaving City Hall here in the homeless capital of the United States. Out of the gates and in the front of the pack are Rep. Karen Bass, City Councilmen Kevin De León and Joe Buscaino, and City Atty. Mike Feuer, among others. A lot of people seem to think Bass is the front-runner. So I was eager to see what Bass had to say about what she rightly called the city’s biggest and most obvious challenge. And I know it’s early, but I was expecting something a little more dynamic, or different, at least.

Housing advocacy group sues S.F. over supes’ rejection of 500-unit housing tower
San Francisco Chronicle
The legal arm of housing advocacy organization YIMBY Action filed a lawsuit on Thursday against San Francisco, alleging that the city violated state housing laws in connection with the 469 Stevenson project. The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, alleges San Francisco officials violated a number of laws—such as the California Environmental Quality Act, the Housing Accountability Act, the Housing Crisis Act of 2019, and the Permit Streamlining Act—when the Board of Supervisors rejected the 469 Stevenson housing project after four years of planning and approval by the Planning Department. The project would have created nearly 500 new housing units in a tower near Sixth and Market street.