This week in affordable housing news…:

State Update:

• Does California need a new state agency to successfully respond to the affordable housing crisis? A new report from SPUR says emphatically yes, arguing that to achieve the state’s climate, transportation, and housing goals, major reforms are needed to integrate fragmented systems of land use planning, housing needs assessment, and project financing. “The only way to move California forward is through state-level reform,” the report concludes, recommending the creation of a stand-alone state housing agency, a new climate and housing planning agency, an updated RHNA process, and a one-stop shop for affordable housing financing. Read the full SPUR report here.

• One in five women who become homeless in California have left their homes to escape violence from a domestic partner, with a lack of shelters causing many women to experience even more violence in homeless encampments, according to a new study from the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco. “That system is completely overwhelmed,” Margot Kushel, director of the research group and co-author of the report, told the Los Angeles Times, noting that two in five women who have left their homes due to domestic abuse in the last six months report being victimized again while homeless. The report includes several policy recommendations: More domestic violence shelters, better coordination of the intake system to those shelters and other services, and more permanent housing to create a path out of shelters. Read the full BHII report here. 

ICYMI – Top news stories: 

Affordable housing gets boost in Congressional tax reform proposal
Bloomberg
Amid rancorous partisan battles and the start of what promises to be a tumultuous US election year, Republicans and Democrats in the US Congress have come together around a framework for tax reform. The roughly $80 billion package includes a break for business research and development costs, a child tax credit and several changes designed to benefit affordable housing. It’s a move many housing analysts predicted months ago: Even as a particularly chaotic Congress careened through Republican leadership fights, support around the bipartisan Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act (AHCIA) continued to grow.

Approaching Bay Area deadline a ‘test case’ for California’s housing crisis
CalMatters
It’s put up or shut up time for dozens of cities across the San Francisco Bay Area. Last January, local governments across the region were required to submit “housing elements” to state regulators—future development blueprints that spell out how each jurisdiction intends to make room for its share of the more than 2.5 million new homes the Newsom administration wants to see built across California by the end of the decade. One year later, on Jan. 31, many of those same jurisdictions are now required to turn key components of those blueprints into law. Whether Bay Area local governments comply—and how the state responds to those that don’t—could indicate just how seriously the Newsom administration takes its ambitious housing goals.

Gavin Newsom’s Project Homekey dodges a bullet, but long-term legal threat remains
San Francisco Chronicle
A judge declined this week to block San Mateo County from purchasing a hotel in Millbrae and converting it to low-priced rental housing, granting at least a short-term reprieve to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s statewide plan to fund housing for the homeless. But San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Nancy Fineman said she would still consider Millbrae’s argument that the state Constitution—specifically the much-maligned Article 34—requires approval from the city’s voters for the purchase of the La Quinta Inn. That claim, if upheld, could undermine a state law that is crucial to Newsom’s Project Homekey. A measure to repeal Article 34 will go before voters on the November ballot. Until then, the Millbrae court case remains a potential threat to the Homekey program.