Tangela Babbitt, a senior project manager and consultant in Elk Grove who previously spent more than 11 years working for Sacramento County’s Department of Human Assistance, says she saw the problem from inside the safety net system. Her work included helping administer CalFresh, CalWORKs and Medi-Cal benefits for residents in crisis.

Babbitt points to the case of a Sacramento County mother facing eviction who spent two months calling 211 and the county for help. Each agency directed her back to the other, with neither able to clearly identify what assistance was available or who was responsible for guiding her through the process.

The woman, Babbitt said, was not simply lost in a bureaucratic gap. Rather, the system was structured in a way that allowed agencies to operate separately while assuming another office had the answer.

That concern has implications across California, including in Southern California and the Inland Empire, where rising rents, limited affordable housing and evictions continue to pressure low-income families.

A UC San Francisco study found that one-third of unhoused adults in California had previously held long-term leases and had been evicted, many for the first time. The research also found that an eviction order increases the likelihood of homelessness by more than 300%.

Those findings, Babbitt argues, show that California understands a major pathway into homelessness but has not built a coordinated prevention system capable of intervening before families lose housing.

The state has funded several rounds of homelessness prevention and response programs, including the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program. But Babbitt says the state has not consistently required measurable outcome reporting tied to continued funding.

In other fields, she noted, organizations typically do not approve repeated rounds of funding without evidence that earlier phases worked. California, she argues, has distributed billions of dollars without creating a uniform statewide accountability system to measure results.

The California Interagency Council on Homelessness was created to help provide that oversight. In 2021, it was directed to gather statewide data on homelessness programs. But according to a state audit cited by Babbitt, the council produced one report and then largely faded from public view.

Babbitt said the result is a system that often measures activity rather than success. Dollars awarded, shelter beds funded and programs launched may show movement, but they do not answer the central question: whether people are still housed six months or a year later.

She emphasized that frontline workers are not responsible for the failure. Instead, she said the problem stems from decisions made at the policy and program-design level.

One proposal, Senate Bill 1160, would require county courts to report eviction outcomes by ZIP code. Babbitt called the bill an important step, but said better data will not be enough unless the state also changes how it governs funding and measures results.

She argues that California should require outcome reporting as a condition of ongoing homelessness prevention dollars, give the interagency council a more active oversight role, and measure success by what happens to people in crisis — not simply by how much money is distributed.

In the case of the Sacramento mother, Babbitt said the calls eventually stopped. She does not know whether the woman kept her home, entered a shelter or became homeless.

The larger problem, she said, is that California’s system did not require anyone to find out.

Original source: CalMatters

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The two-day event drew nearly 500 nonprofit leaders, policymakers, and advocates from across Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and even beyond, under the theme “Common Ground for the Common Good.” Conversations throughout the summit were framed by the “vital conditions” — seven interconnected pillars for building thriving communities: basic needs for health and safety, humane housing, meaningful work and wealth, lifelong learning, reliable transportation, belonging and civic muscle, and a thriving natural world.

During a humane housing panel, California Assemblymembers Dr. Corey Jackson and Robert Garcia tackled the Inland Empire’s affordability crisis head-on. Jackson stressed the need for government, nonprofits, and the private sector to end siloed work and coordinate strategies. 

“There isn’t a single report, study, or recommendation that doesn’t say we have to stop operating in silos,” Jackson said. “If we’re all serving the same population, we should be coordinating, sharing information, and creating spaces where nonprofits, government, and business can hear the same message and work together. That’s when we can truly call ourselves a community and deliver for the people we profess to care about.”

Pressed on why developers continue building larger, costlier homes, Jackson pointed to the economics of land value and profit margins. He highlighted his bill, AB 317, which incentivizes smaller, more affordable homes so younger generations can buy in the communities where they grew up. 

Garcia said decades of underbuilding are a key driver of high housing costs. “Housing is the issue of our time right now. It is increasingly more and more unaffordable for many families,” Garcia said. “One of the solutions is the supply side — the reason housing is so expensive is because we do not have the units that should have been built decades prior. But, with the recent legislation that was passed is to streamline the development for rental housing and single family homes. The Inland Empire is definitely a place where we can build more housing and make it affordable.”

Jackson pushed back on the stigma surrounding affordable housing. “The biggest misconception is that affordable housing is going to lead to crime and all kinds of other things that you should be afraid of. And it’s absolutely not true. If you want a safe community, you want to make sure everyone has housing they can afford,” he said. He also placed responsibility on bad actors in the housing market, singling out slumlords for failing to make repairs, ignoring sewage issues, and allowing infestations and mold to persist. “Anyone doing business in the housing market… has a responsibility, and those are not negotiable,” he said.

He also addressed “not in my backyard” opposition. “We need to stop saying we want housing, but I don’t want ‘that type of housing near me’ because that type of housing is going to ‘bring those kinds of people,’” Jackson said. “To be honest, those kinds of people don’t want to live near you anyway.”

The discussion expanded beyond housing to food insecurity, with Jackson noting recent federal cuts to SNAP benefits. He said he hosted a statewide listening session to prepare for the impact and secured funding to keep California’s food bank support at $60 million instead of dropping to $6 million. He also addressed environmental concerns about streamlined housing legislation potentially paving the way for unchecked warehouse or industrial development, saying, “We’re in a crisis. The status quo is no longer acceptable. If we see people taking advantage of it, there’ll be bills to close those holes — but we cannot be afraid to act.”

Following the panel, Inland Empire Community News sat down with Jackson one-on-one. He reiterated his call for coordinated, cross-sector action, stressing that housing, homelessness, and food insecurity are deeply interconnected. “We have to stop working in isolation,” he said. “Government, nonprofits, and business all need to be hearing the same message and working from the same plan.”

Throughout the summit, speakers linked humane housing to the broader vital conditions, arguing that neglect in one area — whether transportation, education, jobs, or environmental health — can cascade into others. The event challenged leaders to align policy, funding, and grassroots efforts to reinforce one another, rather than work in silos.

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Another was designed to turn under-used church parking lots into fonts of new affordable housing.

A third would, according to supporters and opponents alike, “end single-family zoning as we know it.”

Fast-forward to 2025 and this spate of recent California laws, and others like it intended to supercharge the construction of desperately needed housing, have had “limited to no impact on the state’s housing supply.”

That damning conclusion comes from a surprising source: A new report by YIMBY Law, a pro-development nonprofit that would very much like to see these laws work. 

The analysis, released today, studied five state laws passed since 2021 that have swept away regulatory barriers to building apartment buildings and other dense residential developments in places where such housing has been historically barred. 

The laws under review include:

• SB 9 from 2021, which allows people to split their single-family homes into duplexes, thus ending single-family-home-only zoning across California. In practice, according to the report, building permits for only 140 units were issued under the law in 2023.  
• AB 2011 from 2022 was designed to make it easier for developers to convert office parks, strip malls and parking lots into apartment buildings. In 2023, developers on just two projects were given local regulatory approval to start work under the law. In 2024, the total was eight. The report found no projects that have made use of SB 6, a similar bill passed that same year but with stricter labor requirements.
• SB 4 from 2024, the so-called Yes In God’s Backyard law, which lets churches, other houses of worship and some schools to repurpose their land for affordable housing. The report found no takers on that bill too.

“It’s grim,” said Sonja Trauss, executive director of YIMBY Law. Though she acknowledged some of the laws are still new, she blamed their early ineffectiveness on the legislative process which saddled these bills with unworkable requirements and glaring loopholes. 

“Everybody wants a piece,” she said. “The pieces taken out during the process wind up derailing the initial concept.”

What are these requirements and loopholes that have prevented these laws from succeeding? Maybe not surprisingly, they are the frequent objects of critique by YIMBY Law and the Yes In My Backyard movement more generally. 

One is the inclusion of requirements that developers only hire union-affiliated workers or pay their workers higher wages. 

Another are affordability mandates which force developers to sell or rent the units they build at below-market prices.

A third is the strenuous opposition by local governments and the failure of these state laws to override it. In the two years following the passage of SB 9, for example, YIMBY Law tracked 140 local ordinances that, in the view of the report, were “designed to reduce or prevent” the bill from working on the ground. They included tight limits on the size of buildings, affordability requirements, or restrictions on which types of owners can make use of the law. 

Last year, the state Legislature passed a “clean up” bill meant to void some of these local add-ons.

There are plenty of other possible impediments to construction in California, which may explain why these bills have seen such tepid uptake. Sky high interest rates, chronic shortages of construction workers and high material costs (all of which could be exacerbated by current or expected changes to federal tariff, immigration and fiscal policy) all work to make residential housing development a less appealing financial proposition. Insufficient public funds and expected cuts to federal housing programs may weigh down on the affordable housing sector too.

But the report is not the first to point to the preconditions and omissions included in so many of the state’s legislative efforts to goose housing development as the reason for their lack of impact.

In a recent law paper, UC Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf and UC Santa Barbara political scientist Clayton Nall wrote that the relative success of California’s efforts to boost the construction of accessory dwelling units is the exception that proves the rule. Over the last decade, a cavalcade of state laws have stripped local governments of their ability to subject backyard cottage projects with environmental review mandates, significant fees, affordability mandates, union-hire rules, confining size or aesthetic limitations or added parking requirements. 

“The ADU boom stands alone. No other form of housing production took off in California during this period,” the authors wrote. A likely reason why, they argue, is that ADU projects don’t come with nearly as many strings attached as other forms of dense development permitted by various California laws.

In 2023, the state permitted more than 28,000 ADUs, according to state data.

The history of ADU legislation in California is instructive, said Trauss. “It took about like five years of revisions before they were really getting going.”

The YIMBY Law report is based on self-reported permitting data submitted by cities and counties to the California Housing and Community Development department. The nonprofit complemented that messy database with its own internal collection harvested from its own litigation and activism. That means the data on what is actually getting built — and therefore how effective any of these laws really are — is imperfect. 

That fact isn’t lost on many legislators. 

The Assembly housing committee’s first hearing of the year was dedicated not to new legislation, but to evaluating the state’s existing “pro-production” laws.

“We shouldn’t just keep passing more and more bills just because we can,” Chair Matt Haney, a San Francisco Democrat, said. “We should actually look at what is working, why it’s working, how we can do more of what’s working and if it’s not working, we should do more to fix it or change it.”

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When the government announced it would give rent vouchers, Aguilar, who wears her hair in a loose knot, felt relieved. But her landlord asked for cash instead.

Worried she would lose the home it had taken her a few years to find after she moved to the United States from Mexico to earn money to be able to pay for the education of her five children whom she had left behind, Aquilar contacted Catholic charities for rent vouchers. But the landlord would not accept those either.

Instead, she told Al Jazeera that the landlords’ employees stood in the building hallway, shouting insults and making it hard for her to pass through to her apartment.

At first, she slept with a stick, afraid they would break in and of the rats that scurried around her apartment. When she felt the landlords’ employees looking through the broken keyhole in her apartment door at night, Aguilar stopped sleeping. By November 2021, fear and sleeplessness got to her, and she moved out.

It began a three-year-long journey to find affordable housing in the city. Aguilar started living in her car by the city’s Dolores Park when she couldn’t find another place she could afford to rent. “I didn’t know any laws then, or I would never have left my house, whatever the situation,” Aguilar said.

Later, she learned that once she vacated her apartment, the landlord could charge a new tenant a much higher rent, according to a California law called Costa-Hawkins, which was passed in 1995.  It exempts single family homes, condominiums and post 1995 construction from local rental control laws which would limit the extent and frequency of rent increases. The law also allows landlords to charge higher rent from new tenants when rent-controlled tenants, like Aguilar, vacate the place.

The repeal of this act, to allow more expansive rent control, will come up in the November 5 ballot. Those opposed to it, mainly large developers and landlords, have raised more than $124m in the last year until October 28, California’s Secretary of State figures show, to fight this ballot measure. This is more than twice as much as the funds raised by the campaign to continue having rent-controlled housing.

An Al Jazeera analysis of campaign finance records found that much of the $124m was raised by large corporate real estate companies, such as the Blackstone Group, the Essex Property Trust, Equity Residential and Avalon Bay, which have investments from the California Public Employees Retirement System, the California State Teachers Retirement System and the San Francisco city employees’ retirement fund.

This fund flow from real estate companies allowed increased spending on flyers and advertising, skewing the battle for rent control in an election season where polls show that the cost of housing is the second-most important economic concern for voters after inflation.

Both presidential candidates have announced plans to tackle the housing crisis, including building more homes and making home buying easier. Vice President Kamala Harris has said she will bring laws to fight abusive corporate landlords whom she blames for rent increases.

Given that nearly half of all California residents and some other states are renters and often burdened by the costs, the battle over Costa-Hawkins will suggest whether supporting builders to make more homes or helping tenants stay in rent-controlled housing will be more beneficial to the average US resident.

The ballot measure to bring in rent control comes at “a difficult moment in many cities, with many people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity”, said Mathew Fowle, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Housing Initiative.

This is particularly prevalent in California, “which has more renters than any other state,” said Maria Zamudio, the executive director of the Housing Rights Committee, a tenants’ rights organisation. “And this law leaves them at a razor’s edge,” she added.

Those who defend the law believe that prohibiting rent control will encourage developers to build and maintain more homes. A possible repeal would “hamper the construction of affordable housing, exacerbating California’s housing crisis”, say pamphlets opposing the proposition, dubbed Proposition 33.

The ballot measure also came up in 2018 and 2020 and was defeated. Fundraising by landlords this time has outstripped that on previous occasions when $76m and $95m were raised, respectively. On those occasions, too, the California Apartment Association Issues Committee, which is raising funds to oppose the proposition, outraised those supporting rent control by far, thanks to large real estate groups that get funds from California public employees and teachers’ pension funds.

“This is a very conflicted situation for pension funds,” said Eileen Appelbaum, the co-director at the Washington DC-based think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). While retired public school teachers and employees are likely experiencing high rents, their pension funds are invested in real estate companies that fund the campaign against rent control, she said.

Bankrolling the opposition

Of the $124m raised by the lobby against the ballot measure, more than $88m was raised by a committee funded by the California Apartment Association Issues Committee, according to the California Secretary of State’s website. It got $32m from Essex Property Trust and $22.3m from Equity Residential, two of the largest corporate landlords in the state.

The Blackstone Group, the country’s largest private equity real estate company, gave $1m. It gave another $1.88m through Air Communities, a company it recently acquired. Avalon Bay, another large corporate real estate company, gave $20.135m. Carmel Partners, another private equity real estate company gave $1.48m.

Three other committees together raised $36m to oppose the ballot measure. Large real estate companies also funded some of these.

All of these companies have investments from Calpers, the California Public Employees Retirement System, a review of the Calpers 2023 portfolio showed. They also have investments from CalSTRS, the California State Teachers Retirement System. While the San Francisco Employees Retirement System does not publish its investment portfolio online, press releases said it had recently invested in Blackstone and Carmel Partners.

Spokespeople for Calpers and CalSTRS told Al Jazeera they had nothing to say on the issue. The other organisations did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

In essence, the private equity funds used the pension funds of California public employees, public school teachers, San Francisco municipal employees and state public employees to bankroll the opposition to rent control.

This funding allowed the campaign against the ballot measure to put out flyers against Proposition 33 across the state as well as advertisements claiming that a repeal of Costa-Hawkins would lead to cities setting rent boards that would “dictate what you can charge to rent out your own home”.

Dean Preston, a city supervisor in San Francisco and former tenant rights lawyer, told Al Jazeera that while the campaign against rent control “talks of small landlords, there is a range of landlords. We have seen corporate landlords being much more aggressive in evicting tenants.”

The ballot measure has come at a time when Unlawful Detainers, notices asking tenants to vacate homes within days, doubled, Preston said. More than 2,800 such notices were sent in the fiscal year 2023, up from 1,428 the previous year, according to city data, after a statewide moratorium on evicting residents for non payment of rent during the pandemic period ended. These were expected to rise further in 2024.

“We had set off an alarm to say that the health pandemic should not become a housing crisis,” Preston said in an interview at his San Francisco City Hall office. The city began a large rental assistance programme. “But we did see a wave of evictions.”

Susie Shannon, the policy director for Housing is A Human Right, the group that has sponsored the ballot measure to repeal Costa-Hawkins, told Al Jazeera the group sponsored it again because “wages have been stagnant for a while and rents have been going up. People are struggling. Some are couch surfing and others are homeless.”

Her campaign to support Proposition 33 raised a little more than $50m, funded largely by the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF). The Foundation works in healthcare worldwide, including selling low-cost drugs, which are sourced through government discounts and sold at its pharmacies. It has also expanded into housing, buying single-room occupancy hotels to rent out to the unhoused. However, the Los Angeles Times has reported that these homes often have faulty plumbing, heating and electricity.

The battle over rent control has led to large landlords and real estate companies backing and funding a proposition requiring AHF to spend its revenues from discounted drug sales on patient care rather than funding rent-control measures. The California Apartment Association Issues Committee gave more than $40m to support this proposition to curb the AHF.

Evictions a tool to ‘raise rents’

One night, when Aguilar was sleeping in the backseat of her car near Dolores Park, she was awakened by policemen shining flashlights into her face. They searched her car and checked her papers. They left after finding her to be above board and unable to make rent.

After nearly a year of living in her car, Aguilar’s car was towed for illegal parking and she began living on a street by the park. She stayed up all night to keep an eye on her belongings and made sure to stay out of fights and more police trouble. “I was so scared,” she said, recalling those months.

Three months later, in January 2023, she found a shared room in South Francisco’s Daly City. It cost her twice as much as her old apartment had.

Aguilar regretted leaving her apartment in San Francisco City, thinking she should have suffered for a roof over her head.

“Some landlords have made it a business practice of evictions to raise rents,” Preston said about the Costa-Hawkins provision allowing landlords to charge higher rents from new tenants. Aguilar later believed this had led to her being forced out of her house.

The California Apartment Association, which opposes Proposition 33, says in its pamphlets that not allowing rents to rise when a new tenant comes “would dramatically reduce the flexibility to adjust rents between tenancies. Imagine never being able to bring your rents to market rates.”

But tenant activists believe allowing landlords to charge higher rents from new tenants encourages them to push out older ones, such as Aguilar.

“If people are evicted, all they have left is sidewalks and underpasses,” said Carol Fife, a city supervisor in Oakland. Fife had received an Unlawful Detainer notice, threatening to evict her within days for not paying one month’s rent. While she was able to fight against the notice and stay on, not all tenants are able to do so.

Alexander Ferrer, a researcher with Debt Collective, an organisation that created the Tenant Power Toolkit to help tenants fight eviction cases in court, found that such notices were being issued with less than two months rent due, threatening to force many residents out of their homes.

Living under a battery light

It has also meant that tenants cling to rent-controlled homes when they have them, as Aguilar wishes she had.

Valente Casas was out one December night last year when he heard that there had been a fire in the home below his in Oakland. The electrical fire in the double-storied house led to the power and gas going out in both storeys, never to return.

Casas works as a cleaner for businesses, but many of the offices he used to clean have shut down as employees work from home, cutting his income and hurting his ability to rent a new home. So, Casas has stayed in his unit, devising an elaborate system to live without power or gas. He has one battery-powered light he charges at work, buys small amounts of groceries every day since the fridge does not work, cooks on a camping stove, accumulates gas cans to light his stove, and watches shows on his mobile phone for as long as the battery holds out.

Then he sits on his bed in the dark until he can fall asleep.

At these times, “I think about what a stressful life this is,” Casas told Al Jazeera. He has lived in the apartment for 15 years. “But if I leave and look for a new place, my rent will go up at least 100 percent.”

Christian Dominguez, who lived in the apartment that caught fire, slept in his car for nearly three months after the fire. With the light of his mobile phone, he walks through the burned unit his family moved into the day he was born, two and half decades ago. The house had a beautiful fireplace, his father had fixed new flooring and cabinets, and Dominguez received his own bedroom. The fire gutted it all.

Dominguez and his father Narciso, who sells hot dogs at the Oakland Coliseum, have rented another place while this one stays ruined, even as Dominguez continues to spend time there. The landlord offered them no help other than to encourage them to move out, Dominguez and Valente said. They believe if they do, the landlord can fix the place and get a new tenant at a higher rent, making the repair worth the money. They have not had any interaction with city inspectors either.

Not far from Dominguez’s and Casas’s home, Marco Cajas’s apartment block also had a fire one January evening. The power did not come back for a month and a half, during which time Cajas showered at a relative’s place and shared meals with them. While power has now returned to his unit, it still is not back in some of the others, which get electricity through a generator parked in the compound. It spews smoke that has made the children sick.

Cajas and other residents have sued their landlord but stayed in the building because they know an affordable new place would be hard to find.

Aguilar, meanwhile, has begun volunteering for tenants’ rights groups, including the South East Tenants Association and Housing Rights Committee, to support tenants such as herself. She visits low-income tenants in San Francisco and helps organise them into unions. She photographs their broken windows, doorbells, faucets with no running water, and elevators that do not work. She sends them to building managers, asking for them to be fixed.

She is also part of a volunteer army that tenants’ rights organisations hope will help reach voters to counter the other sides’ extensive funding in the fight to repeal Costa-Hawkins.

Aguilar thinks it is possible that many people with decision-making power do not know about the Costa-Hawkins rule and how it hurts people. “I wish the authorities knew about Costa-Hawkins,” she said. “It would reduce families having to live on the street. Police treat them so badly, like criminals.”

Fiduciary responsibility

CEPR’s Appelbaum, who has written a book called Private Equity At Work, said there is not much pension funds can say to influence the investments of the private equity funds in which they are invested.

“Pension funds are told they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximise returns for retirees. Doing anything else would hurt that,” she said.

However, in 2018, state law was amended to expand the meaning of fiduciary duty of Calpers, the state’s largest public pension fund, allowing it to “take into account harmful external factors when determining the overall return of an investment”. In other words, pension funds had to keep in mind harmful factors and not just returns.

Jordan Ash, the housing director at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, said an earlier analysis by the group had found that aside from California’s public employees and teachers’ pension funds, several city utilities’ pension funds – including the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water Employees Pension Fund and San Diego and Santa Barbara county employees retirement systems – have also invested in Blackstone funds that contributed to opposing the repeal of rent control in previous years.

Since then, several cities across the state, including Pasadena, have voted to expand rent control.

Shanti Singh, the legislative director for Tenants Together, a statewide tenants’ rights group, said more cities would look to expand rent control because she believes having volunteers such as Aguilar in communities helps reach out to voters, even without as much money as the opposition.

Aguilar lived in her shared room in Daly City for more than a year, commuting to organise tenants in city apartments and working as a cleaner in a city gym. She struggled to find a place in the city she could afford and still be able to send money to her children, whom she had not seen since she left home 18 years ago. They were children when she left, she said. Now, they have their own children.

“I came here to support my children in their careers,” Aguilar, who almost only speaks Spanish, said. The thought of them had kept her going through her hardest times. “That is what it is to love as a mother.”

Earlier this year, Aguilar had an accident that restricted how much she could work and made the long commute into the city harder. Recently, she moved back to the city but pays more in rent than she earns every month, leaving her in a growing pool of debt as well as the constant worry of being evicted again.

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The bottom half of the state is spending the longest time on the road. A new study analyzing U.S. Census data, released by Apartment List, found that Southern California had more than 300,000 supercommuters in 2022 — more than any other region in the country. In recent years, as residents have moved to outlying towns surrounding Los Angeles seeking more-affordable housing, commutes have shot up in tandem. 

Palmdale ranked as the No. 1 supercommuting town in the U.S., with 16.9% of residents making the long trek on a regular basis. Hesperia and Apple Valley, two midsize San Bernardino County towns northeast of Los Angeles, also ranked high on the list, coming in at No. 3 (with 14.6% of residents supercommuting) and No. 5 (with 13.2% of residents supercommuting) respectively.  

Victorville, known for its booming population, also ranked in the top 10, with 11.8% of people supercommuting. Lake Elsinore, Hemet, Temecula and Lancaster — all towns surrounding the L.A. metro — also came in in the top 20. 

Many California towns more than doubled the national average of 2.7% of residents who supercommute. The San Francisco Bay Area came in just above this average, with 3% of all commuters making a supercommute. But many surrounding counties had a much higher proportion of supercommuters — people who are driving from well outside the Bay Area’s nine counties to the SF metro area. These included Lake (10%), San Joaquin (10%) and Stanislaus (8%) counties.

A 2023 study from the University of Southern California and other researchers found that supercommuting has been on the rise across the state of California, especially in the Central Valley, with Merced, Solano, Stanislaus, El Dorado and San Joaquin counties having the highest share of supercommuters. The growth is likely to continue as high-wage earners with jobs centered in the coastal metros seek larger homes inland.

The number of supercommuters still remains lower than it was historically, however. The population of supercommuters in the Bay Area grew by 112.7% between 2005 and 2016, according to a previous Apartment List study of census data.

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ADUs are one of the few bright spots for the state’s housing market at a time of rising construction costs, high interest rates, and continued local resistance to greater housing density. These unassuming units, often basement apartments, backyard cottages, and converted garages, are far more affordable to build than other housing options and have become a politically palatable infill alternative to apartment complexes.

With median construction costs of about $150,000 in California, ADUs cost less than a third of traditional, federally subsidized affordable housing. As a result, the median ADU in the San Francisco Bay Area and Central Coast is affordable (costs less than 30% of income) for a low income family, 31% of ADUs in Los Angeles County are affordable, and large numbers of ADUs are affordable in other regions, as well.

Over the past eight years, ADU construction has skyrocketed. California went from about 1,000 ADU permits in 2016 to 5,000 in 2017 to 25,000 in 2022.

This boom did not come easily. Many local governments have resisted ADUs, fearing they would overcrowd single-family neighborhoods. While some of these concerns are legitimate, the state’s housing crisis has persuaded state lawmakers that cities must allow more housing construction, even in built-out areas — and ADUs are one way to achieve that.

California lawmakers have worked for decades to limit local governments’ authority to block construction of these units. The effort began in 1982 when the legislature prohibited cities from categorically barring ADUs. Local governments responded by placing what a report from the Furman Center at New York University called “cumbersome and unpredictable discretionary  review requirements on applications for ADUs.”

Local resistance prompted the state in 2002 to mandate ministerial (rather than discretionary) local approval of ADU permits. Yet ADU production remained low.

Reforms in 2016 finally made inroads. That year, the legislature adopted two bills, AB 2299 and SB 1069. These required cities to allow ADUs on single-family lots. They also prohibited them from requiring design features such as direct pathways to the street and setbacks for garages converted into ADUs. These laws also eliminated parking requirements for ADUs near transit stops and for ADUs attached to existing houses; prohibited cities from requiring new water, sewer or utility connections for ADUs, or from charging utility fees for ADUs; and required ministerial permitting of ADUs to occur within 120 days.

More state laws followed, as legislators and advocates identified and removed other barriers to ADU construction.

Suddenly, ADU production surged across the state. According to the California Department of  Housing and Community Development, ADUs will meet 3% of the state’s housing needs for the period from 2021-2028.

Yet this growth has been uneven. In a recent study, the Rose Institute of State and Local Government analyzed differences in ADU production in Long Beach, San Diego, Anaheim, Pomona, Ontario, and Corona in light of the state’s assessment of these cities’ housing needs. In  Long Beach, the state’s per capita ADU leader, these units have met 5% of housing needs. By  contrast, ADUs make up only 2.6% in Anaheim. Within the Inland Empire, only 1% of housing needs are met in Ontario, 1.1% in Corona, and 2.2% in Pomona.

The report found that variations in ADU production can result from several factors, including the local housing market. For example, Ontario, like other cities in the Inland Empire, is still developing outward into greenfield sites, potentially reducing the demand for ADUs due to the availability of new single-family homes.

Familiarity with ADUs also matters. Planners in Long Beach, a leading producer of ADUs, describe these units as part of the fabric of their city, and say the knowledge they have gained processing ADU applications helps them approve permits faster than in some other cities. By contrast, other cities have less experience with this form of housing.

Local policies can affect ADU production, as well. Although the state has limited local control over ADUs, standards can still vary on several important dimensions. This is where local governments can most make a difference.

To help meet housing production goals, cities should assess where their regulations may be holding back ADU production and consider loosening standards in those areas. In particular, local lawmakers should look closely at three factors: parking requirements, structural setback requirements, and fees.

Parking requirements can add significant costs to new development, making them infeasible for homeowners without access to large capital flows. Structural setbacks can make larger ADUs geometrically infeasible, limiting the variety of options available to would-be buyers and renters. Finally, fees place high up-front costs on ADU developers, who often are individual homeowners,  further dissuading them from realizing their property’s potential.

Giving homeowners a little more wiggle room in how they build their ADUs could make the difference between catching up to statewide ADU production levels and missing out on a powerful tool to meet housing needs.

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To continue expanding the state’s affordable housing stock and increase capacity for additional climate-smart infill housing, Governor Gavin Newsom today announced the first funding awards under a new streamlined application process aimed at accelerating the development of new projects while saving time and money at the local level.

What you need to know: Approximately 58 communities across California were awarded more than $825.5 million to build 9,550 homes as part of a new funding approval process that eliminates the need for a developer to submit multiple applications. This includes roughly $700 million in funds for multifamily development and $125 million for infill development. Today’s funding announcement will ultimately benefit an estimated 187,500 people over the total lifetime of all projects combined.

Why it’s important: The application process to receive state housing funding in California was needlessly complex, and time consuming, resulting in delayed projects and extra cost. Under Governor Newsom, this process has been overhauled. Now, what previously required four separate applications has been narrowed down to just one submission. What Governor Newsom said: “As we demand more housing to be built at the local level, it is incumbent upon the state to reimagine and modernize our own approval process,” said Governor Newsom. “State applications that were once redundant, and overly bureaucratic, are now streamlined to ensure projects are not stalled in an endless bureaucracy that favored process over production.”

This new process was made possible when Governor Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 434 by former Assemblymember Tom Daly (D – Anaheim), which allowed for multiple housing applications to be narrowed down into a single award process. Under this new approach, requests for housing development funds have soared. The first round of new Multifamily Finance Super Notice of Funding Availability (Super NOFA) received more than $3.5 billion in developer requests – a sharp contrast to years of undersubscription. ““The California Multifamily Super NOFA transformed a once burdensome and lengthy funding application process into an accessible and smart one-stop shop that will get more housing built faster,” said Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency Secretary Lourdes Castro Ramírez. “This results in new homes for struggling working families, veterans, farmworkers, and people exiting homelessness.

California will continue to act with urgency to find new, innovative solutions to fast track housing development.” The California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) last year combined state-funded multifamily housing programs to make them accessible to more communities, more equitable in serving the lowest-income Californians, and more targeted toward achieving better outcomes in health, climate, and household stability. “California continues to advance our commitment to building 2.5 million homes — with one million affordable homes — by 2030, as outlined in our Statewide Housing Plan,” said HCD Director Gustavo Velasquez.

“Our simple approach to funding helps us accelerate much-needed construction and ensure the lowest-income Californians have access to quality homes near jobs, transit, schools, and other necessities that will make our communities more inclusive for decades to come.”

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Joy Silver | Contributor

Who is to blame for the epidemic of houselessness? Opinions swirl endlessly around us. We are treated to them regularly, via print, social and other media. 

Some believe that addiction is the root cause of houselessness. But addiction itself is caused by an amalgamation of factors, including chronic stress, a history of trauma, PTSD, mental illness, or a family history of addiction. According to the Phoenix Recovery Center 2020 report “The Root Causes of Addition,” 59% of the addicted population have suffered debilitating childhood trauma.

For many, houselessness is just one disaster away. A medical emergency, loss of a job, car trouble, abandonment, divorce, lack of affordable housing, poverty, psychological, or physical disability can render individuals and families, the largest growing population, houseless.

Reasons for being unhoused vary, and often require different resources based on the cause. These four categories describe the types of houselessness: transitional, episodic, chronic and hidden. Not all categories initially relegate people to the streets.

In efforts to understand the issue, blame is often directed at nonprofit agencies, church groups, city councils, counties and law enforcement. Some believe that state agencies are at fault for insufficiently addressing the problem. Then there are those who condemn those experiencing houselessness as responsible themselves.

How did we get here? Currently, no one in any state in this country, earning minimum wage, can afford market-rate rent for a two-bedroom apartment. Who are the poorest renters? According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s “Housing Needs by State,” they are seniors, people with disabilities, veterans with PTSD, women and children escaping from domestic, physical and sexual violence. They are working people, students and caretakers.

Why do we have this crisis in a country with so much wealth? The contributors are income inequality, policy decisions, government budget priorities, societal trends and our attitudes toward public assistance. One such societal trend? We seek to fix the unhoused person rather than fixing the underlying structural issues.

At its source, today’s houselessness crisis is a socioeconomic problem rooted in 1980s politics. Only 1% of the unhoused were families, but by 2020 the number jumped to 30% due to policies enacted in this era. Poverty was criminalized and solutions were centered on policing and ultimately, prison. In March 1981, President Ronald Reagan presented a proposal to cut $47 billion from the federal budget, making major cuts to Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment and food programs for children.

Ultimately, a $35 billion cut was enacted. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funds were cut by 70% between 1980 to 1987 according to Marian Moser Jones’ “Creating a Science of Homelessness.” These cuts were enacted while the unemployment rate was averaging 9.7%. This major cut was never restored to the budget, by any president after, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Simultaneously, construction of new subsidized housing stopped, rents increased on those already built and the “cheaper” housing voucher program was introduced. Those who had been deinstitutionalized from mental hospitals in numerous states were discharged and given Greyhound bus tickets for California. Deinstitutionalization was often blamed for houselessness. The research focused solely on the individual and cultural pathology, rather than the economic and political causes of poverty.

Even before these budget cuts, the 1979 U.S. Government Accountability Office warned that a lack of affordable housing engendered a national crisis. HUD did not accept these findings, opting to accept a 1980 Rand Corporation study, which “found no evidence of a shortage in rental housing.” Instead of seeing the structural problem, the Reagan administration continued to produce policies that punished “character flaws.”

The exponential growth of the unhoused population proves how ineffective that criminalization was. Releasing jailed and fined people makes the problem unsolvable and is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Providing affordable housing and services has repeatedly proven to be more socially and economically feasible. While affordable housing does not solve the problem, it is an important and effective measure that prevents the descent into houselessness for those at risk.

As a society, we are not currently aligned on the root causes. Many still view houselessness as the individual’s fault and seek to further criminalize them. But understanding the socioeconomic basis of houselessness is critical. By providing services to interrupt the cycle that generates houselessness, we can anticipate positive change. Then it becomes our responsibility to elect representatives who reflect this position to carry our voice forward. After all, housing is a human right.

Based in Palm Springs, Joy Silver currently serves as the chief strategy officer for the Community Housing Opportunities Corporation, a nonprofit affordable housing developer that currently has two communities under construction, in Palm Springs and Coachella respectively. Her email is jsilver@chochousing.org.

• DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author’s articles on this Opinion piece or elsewhere online or in the newspaper where we have articles with the header “COLUMN/EDITORIAL & OPINION” do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints or official policies of the Publisher, Editor, Reporters or anybody else in the Staff of the Hemet and San Jacinto Chronicle Newspaper.

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The people who build the badly needed projects call on Sacramento to work with them to make the RHNA goals possible. Newsom’s administration hasn’t even responded.

This is how bad California’s housing policy has become: An affordable housing group in San Francisco is asking the state to please, please work with local folks on affordability issues—because otherwise there’s no possible way this city can meet its state-mandated goals.

And nobody in the state seems to care.

The state is investigating San Francisco’s plans to meet its Regional Housing Needs Assessment. But nobody is talking to the folks who are building the affordable housing that is a central part of those goals.

That’s the opposite of what should happen: The state Department of Housing and Community Development should be reaching out to the affordable housers.

Instead, the Council of Community Housing Organizations has written a letter to HCD explaining, in great detail, that the entire premise of the state’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment is false.

In a Sept. 13 letter to HCD, CCHO notes:

We welcome a thorough and comprehensive review or San Francisco housing policies; however, we are concerned about HCDs narrow focus on development constraints on overall housing production without stressing that over half of the next RHNA cycle’s housing production goals are for below-market-rate affordable nosing units.

Moreover, HCD fails to provide any guidance on protecting and strengthening the city’s existing affordable housing programs and strategies.

San Francisco produced 150 percent of its state and regionally mandated goals for market-rate housing in the most recent RHNA cycle but produced less than half of its goal for affordable housing. In light of this distressing performance, we call upon HCD to partner with us to identify the funding and policy solutions that ensure we meet our affordable housing production and preservation goals in the new cycle.

That would seem to make perfect sense, right? The state is demanding more affordable housing, and there are 21 organizations in San Francisco who build affordable housing. But the state is offering no help at all:

Without a significant change in direction, San Francisco will likely repeat past mistakes, continually underproducing affordable housing, exacerbating our displacement and climate change pressures, and preventing our city from adequately housing our local workforce. We believe this change in direction will not come from a singular focus on removing constraints to market rate development. In fact, in 2021, according to data provided by the Mayor’s Office of Housing & Community Development, only 29 percent of new affordable units in San Francisco came about through inclusionary obligations of market rate development. This is far short of the state and regionally mandated targets for affordable housing that conclude 57 percent of new housing should be affordable to very low, low, and moderate income households. We are concerned that HD’s one-size-fits-all approach that focuses on market rate development and stays silent on affordable housing funding and policies will only result in San Francisco falling short, once again, in meeting our state and regionally mandated targets for affordable housing.

Those targets are ambitious:

In order to meet the RHNA goals, San Francisco should be building at least 6,000 new affordable units each year, dedicating about 45-60 new sites to affordable housing, and spending an average of $2 billion annually on housing production and preservation. The price tag for the 46,000 units of affordable housing required under RHNA is $19 billion over the next 8 years.

In order to achieve these goals, it is imperative that HCD, regional, and local leaders create new sources or revenues to ensure that we can achieve our goals.

The RHNA goals are, CCHO says, basically impossible and the state’s position is a contradiction in terms:

The State’s actions do not align with the state’s goals. The state’s guidance puts SF on a collision course with upzoning San Francisco to create housing that is approximately 20 percent affordable and 80 percent market rate, while at the same time actual housing production goals set by the state and region conclude that 57 percent of new housing should be affordable to very low and moderate income households.

And, of course, just plunking new luxury housing in existing neighborhoods is a recipe for disaster:

Deregulation of our housing market is an inequitable strategy for creating affordability. San Francisco’s affordable housing standards have raised the bar, and we need to do more, not less, to uphold our affordable housing standards. The State is over-emphasizing the removal of government constraints without recognizing San Francisco’s policies and resources that serve as an essential line of defense to safeguard affordability and prevent displacement. Without critical policies like our inclusionary program and processes to regulate the housing market for affordability, San Francisco would not have been able to slow the tide of displacement and would have fallen even further short of our affordable housing goals. Moreover, simply lifting all government constraints as a strategy to facilitate the production of new housing development overall will still empirically never achieve the 57 percent below-market goals under San Francisco’s RHNA obligation.

I talked to John Avalos, director of CCHO, today, and he told me there has been no response from HCD, or from the Planning Department, which also has a copy of the letter.

“We don’t expect they are going to change their policy and address the needs of working people instead of speculators’ need for profit,” he told me.

The state, he said, “never attempted to reach out to us. They are not interested in affordable housing.”

Which is so short-sighted: Of the more than 80,000 housing units the state wants to see built in SF, 57 percent are supposed to be below-market-rate. “That’s a significant amount of housing,” Avalos said. “We need to identify the land and resources, now.”

But no. From the letter:

Future investments in affordable development and preservation strategies must not leave behind frontline working class communities that have historically faced displacement pressures. The current draft of San Francisco’s Housing Element mentions the word “equity” more than 121 times, yet when one adds up all the policies that encourage demolition, streamlining, and cut costs for developers without prescribing equity measures or price controls, the cumulative effect is accelerating housing development that increases displacement pressures BIPOC communities. We encourage the HCD to make every effort to identify the policies and resources that will enable San Francisco to build housing to sustain working class, BIPOC communities to have sustainable futures in San Francisco instead of creating a system that would further imbalance housing development against such a future.

Is Gavin Newsom even paying attention?

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William Gallagher | Contributed

As part of its continued financial contributions to creating affordable homes, Apple is celebrating the new communities that are being formed from its partnerships with Californian housing organizations.

Apple has been contributing increasing sums to help with California’s housing issues, starting with $400 million in 2020, then over $1 billion by 2021. Now the company says that it has committed $2.5 billion, of which over $1.3 billion is directed to what it describes as a diverse array of projects.

“We’re incredibly proud to see families and neighbors moving into new homes as a result of our partnership with affordable housing organizations across California,” Kristina Raspe, Apple’s vice president for Global Real Estate and Facilities, said in a statement. “Apple is committed to finding real solutions that can help our communities thrive, and these new projects represent tangible progress toward making that promise a reality for so many of our fellow Californians.”

Apple’s partnership with the California Housing Finance Authority (CalHFA) has seen the company assist with mortgage and down-payments for thousands of low or moderate-income first-time home buyers.

The fund has launched an affordable housing investment program that so far has supported almost 2,000 new home units across California. Those include 315 in Los Angeles, almost 340 in Berkeley, and over 230 for families in Chico’s Cedar Village.

Apple has singled out the newly opened Veterans Square housing complex in Pittsburgh, California, where it claims “a new community is blossoming.”

Opened in March 2022, Veterans Square is a 30-unit building created both for veterans and for individuals who the housing organizations have identified as having the greatest need for homes. “For the vast majority [of the new homeowners], it is a world away from the streets they recently called home,” says Apple.

“I didn’t know if I was going to get in, so I prayed about it,” 85-year-old veteran JC told Apple. “I love my apartment. They even put me on the first floor because it’s easier with my walker. That meant a lot to me.”

Veterans Square is a result of Apple’s collaboration with Housing Trust Silicon Valley, a community development financial institution. Working for both organizations is Marcus Ferdinand, 39, who is the building’s service coordinator – and counselor for the residents.

“I remember growing up in a community where there were a lot of problems,” Ferdinand told Apple. “I just never thought it was the way life should be for people.”

“I feel like everyone has the potential to lead a life that they enjoy — and for some of us, it’s just harder to get there,” he continued. “And so if I can help someone to get to that point, it makes it all worthwhile.”

Through its separate work with Destination: Home, Apple provided financial and rental assistance to over 20,000 families during the coronavirus pandemic. This partnership has also helped Destination: Home fund almost 1,700 housing units for extremely low-income families in the Bay Area.

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