This week in affordable housing news…:

State Update:

• California’s response to the homelessness crisis was the subject this week of a joint hearing of the Senate Housing Committee and the Senate Human Services Committee, with members hearing testimony on the state’s rising homelessness numbers (now climbing past 170,000 people) and state and local efforts to help unhoused residents get off the streets. “We don’t have more addiction or mental health problems than other states. We have fewer homes,” Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said as the hearing began: “We need to address mental health & addiction, and I’ll continue focusing on them. But until we start to make a dent in the 2 million unit housing shortage, homelessness will persist.”

• Would a constitutional right to housing help more Californians access affordable housing? Asm. Matt Haney (D-San Francisco) introduced a bill this week, ACA 10, that will seek to put the question before voters. “If you look out at what’s happening in our state, not only is it intuitive that housing is a fundamental right for all of us and our families and our neighbors, but it’s also intuitive that our state is failing right now,” Haney said at a news conference this week. A constitutional right to housing was proposed by Attorney General Rob Bonta when he was in the Assembly in 2020 and again by Asm. Autumn Burke (D-Inglewood) later that year. Bonta’s measure did not advance, and Burke’s proposal was vetoed by Gov. Newsom, who cited the high cost of implementation. 

• The state of California and the city of Huntington Beach sued each other this week as a months-long dispute over the city’s response to the housing crisis finally boiled out. Attorney General Rob Bonta and HCD claim in their lawsuit that the city is violating state housing laws by not accepting new applications for ADUs. “As our state faces an existential housing crisis, we won’t stand idly by as local governments knowingly flout state law meant to protect our communities and bring much needed affordable housing to the people of California,” Bonta said in a statement. The city announced this week that it had filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that state housing laws were an “unbridled power play” to turn the city into a “high-density mecca.” “I sure don’t want Sacramento telling us to how to rezone our neighborhoods,” Councilmember Pat Burns said this week.

ICYMI – Top news stories:

California has nearly 100 new housing laws. Are they fixing the affordability crisis?
San Jose Mercury News
Facing a massive affordable-housing crisis pushing Californians out of their hometowns and some onto the street, state legislators passed law after law to boost housing production. Now, Sacramento is asking itself the million-dollar question: Is it working? The answer: not as quickly as anyone hoped. Nearly 100 housing bills have been signed into law since 2016 as legislators, in the midst of intense pushback from some growth-resistant city officials and residents, made supercharging the state’s housing supply a top priority. Despite that monumental effort, housing production has remained relatively stagnant, according to data tracked by the state Department of Housing and Community Development.

What’s working and what’s next in California’s fight for affordable housing?CapRadio
California lawmakers have spent the first part of the year taking stock of the money and laws approved in recent years to address the state’s lack of affordable housing. A litany of problems plaguing the state—from homelessness to the high cost of purchasing a home—can be traced back to one thing: an extreme shortage of affordable housing. Estimates say that shortage is anywhere from 1 million to 3.5 million units. A joint hearing of state lawmakers from the Senate and Assembly looked at what’s working and where the state continues to fall short on housing affordability. “We’ve done an enormous amount of work in the last seven years,” Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said after the hearing. “We’ve passed some very impactful bills that are making a difference, but it’s not fast enough and there’s still work to be done.”