In response, state leaders have passed a wave of laws aimed at pushing cities to clear the way for more affordable apartment construction. But even in places that have loosened zoning restrictions, the basic economics of building in California remain a stubborn obstacle. According to a 2025 RAND study, the average cost to build an apartment unit in California is about $430,000 — nearly three times the $150,000 average in Texas. For income-restricted units aimed at low-income renters, California’s costs run more than four times higher than comparable projects in Texas, with some developments in expensive coastal cities topping $1 million per unit.

Facing pressure to produce affordable housing without shouldering the cost themselves, many California cities have turned to a strategy known as inclusionary zoning. Under these policies, developers building market-rate apartment complexes are required to set aside a portion of units for lower-income tenants at below-market rents. More than a third of cities in the state have adopted some version of this approach, though the details vary widely from one municipality to the next.

The policy hasn’t been without legal turbulence. In 2009, a state appellate court sided with a developer, Palmer Sixth Street Properties, in a dispute with the city of Los Angeles, ruling that requiring affordable units in a rental project effectively violated California’s ban on rent control. That decision froze cities’ ability to impose inclusionary zoning requirements on rental housing — though it left such rules intact for for-sale housing developments.

The pendulum swung back in 2015, when the California Supreme Court upheld inclusionary zoning for for-sale housing. Then in 2017, state lawmakers passed what became known as the “Palmer fix,” legislation specifically designed to override the earlier appellate ruling and restore cities’ authority to require affordable rental units in new developments.

Since then, cities across California have once again required developers to include below-market apartments in their projects. But nearly a decade later, a new academic study is raising serious doubts about whether the strategy actually works.

Noah Kouchekinia, an economist at UC Irvine, conducted an extensive city-by-city analysis of inclusionary zoning programs and their effects on housing production. His conclusion: the policy tends to backfire, shrinking the overall housing supply rather than expanding access to affordable units.

According to Kouchekinia’s research, a typical inclusionary zoning ordinance reduces annual new residential construction by nearly 32 percent. He estimates that the true cost of producing one affordable unit through inclusionary zoning — factoring in the higher rents paid by market-rate tenants as a result of constrained supply — comes to roughly $800,000. That figure, he notes, exceeds what it would cost to simply fund affordable housing units directly through public subsidy.

The findings raise uncomfortable questions for city officials who have leaned on inclusionary zoning as a politically convenient way to appear responsive to the housing crisis without committing public dollars. Kouchekinia’s data suggests the policy may function less like a solution and more like a hidden tax — one ultimately paid by renters who don’t qualify for the below-market units, while overall housing production slows.

The study also underscores a broader pattern in California policymaking: officials frequently adopt housing measures with confident promises of impact, but rarely circle back years later to rigorously assess whether those policies delivered the results intended.

Original source: CalMatters

The post State Housing Incentive Meant to Boost Low-Income Rentals May Be Slowing Apartment Development appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Every eight years, the California Department of Housing and Community Development hands local governments a homework assignment few of them relish: draft a plan showing how they’ll accommodate a state-assigned share of new housing across four income categories, from housing for the wealthiest buyers down to units affordable to the poorest residents. Those targets are meant to reflect how much housing each region needs to keep pace with population growth and chip away at a shortage of affordable homes that has plagued California for decades.

This summer marked the halfway point in the current eight-year cycle, giving officials, developers and housing advocates their first real chance to check the state’s progress against a report card. The results were not encouraging.

Fewer than a third of California’s cities and counties are on pace to permit enough “above moderate” housing — generally market-rate homes — to hit their targets by the end of the cycle, according to data local governments reported to the state. The numbers get worse from there. Only about 10% are keeping pace on moderate-income housing. About 13% are on track for low-income units. And a mere 6% of jurisdictions statewide — just 32 out of more than 500 — are on pace to meet their targets for housing affordable to very low-income households, generally defined as those earning less than half the local median income.

Only five jurisdictions in the entire state are permitting housing fast enough to stay on track across all four income categories. Four are sparsely populated, unincorporated areas of rural counties — Plumas, Napa, Yolo and Mono. The fifth is Placerville, a Sierra foothill town of roughly 11,000 residents east of Sacramento.

Southern California, unsurprisingly, is not faring any better. Of the 212 cities and counties in the region that had passed the halfway mark in their planning cycle this year, all but four had missed at least one of their housing benchmarks — and are now subject to a state law meant to punish underperforming jurisdictions by fast-tracking development approvals.

Take Irvine, in Orange County, as a case study in how uneven the progress can be. State regulators told the city to plan for 8,671 market-rate homes by 2030. Halfway through that timeline, Irvine has already issued permits for more than 6,000 units — putting it on pace to hit that particular goal, a rare accomplishment among California cities.

But when it comes to housing that ordinary residents can actually afford, Irvine looks a lot like the rest of the state: badly behind. The city has permitted only about 9% of the very low-income units it needs to reach its 2030 target, and just 3% of the housing aimed at households earning up to 80% of the area’s median income.

**Why isn’t more housing getting built?**

For anyone who has tracked California’s homebuilding trends over the past half-century, the gap between what’s planned and what’s actually built is nothing new. The state’s current housing target totals nearly 2.5 million units over eight years — itself a scaled-back version of the 3.5-million-unit goal Gov. Gavin Newsom campaigned on in 2017. Hitting 2.5 million would require building roughly 312,500 homes a year, a pace California has never sustained, not even during its biggest housing booms in the early 1960s and mid-1980s.

Despite a wave of state legislative and policy changes meant to jumpstart construction, California’s annual homebuilding total this decade has hovered only slightly above 100,000 units — nowhere close to what’s needed.

Critics of the state’s planning process argue the targets themselves are unrealistic, and that local governments have limited power to force anything to actually get built.

“Cities can’t compel developers to build, and cities themselves don’t build housing,” said Jason Rhine, a lobbyist with the League of California Cities. Local officials, he noted, can rezone land and clear regulatory hurdles, but they can’t make a developer break ground.

Housing advocates counter that the sluggish production numbers are proof cities aren’t doing enough to make development attractive in the first place.

“Cities may say they don’t control production directly, but they do control fees, zoning and permitting,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action. The entire state housing-allocation process, she said, “only works if there’s the political will to hold cities accountable.”

Foote also faulted state housing regulators for not pushing harder to force cities to adopt more development-friendly policies.

In a written statement, HCD spokesperson Jennifer Hanson said the department is “actively monitoring and enforcing” the commitments jurisdictions made in their state-approved housing plans. She pointed to two recent state laws — one exempting many urban infill housing projects from environmental lawsuits, and another requiring cities to allow taller buildings near major transit stops — that have already helped “advance approved projects representing thousands of proposed homes.”

Hanson also noted that plenty of factors driving whether a project gets built are entirely out of local or state control. “Whether a project moves forward depends on interest rates, construction and land costs, access to capital, insurance, and expected rents or sale prices,” she said.

**A limited safety valve**

Affordable housing faces an added hurdle: a lack of public money. With few exceptions, building homes affordable to below-median-income Californians requires public subsidies, philanthropic capital or lenders and investors willing to accept lower returns. State support for that kind of financing has dried up since funds from a 2018 voter-approved housing bond ran out, which helps explain why affordable housing production numbers remain so low.

Affordable housing developers and advocates are hoping voters will approve an $11.25 billion state bond measure this November to refill that funding pipeline.

Middle-income housing faces its own unique financial squeeze — often ineligible for subsidy programs that prioritize the lowest-income households, yet not lucrative enough to attract developers looking to turn a profit without public help.

The state does have one tool to punish jurisdictions that fall behind. A 2017 law requires cities and counties that miss the halfway mark on their above-moderate, moderate or very-low-income housing targets (affordable “moderate” income housing is excluded) to fast-track approval for most apartment and condo projects. In exchange, developers must set aside a share of affordable units and pay higher wages to construction workers.

But history suggests that alone won’t be enough to spark a building boom. Developers have long argued that the law’s affordability and wage requirements make many projects financially unworkable outside of the state’s highest-rent neighborhoods. Since 2018, the law has been used to approve roughly 28,000 homes statewide, according to state housing officials — a meaningful number, but nowhere near enough to close the gap between what California is building and what it actually needs.

Original source: CalMatters

The post State Report: Nearly No Community in California Is Building Enough Housing — Here’s Why appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

State regulators require every California city and county to plan for housing across four income categories, from market-rate development down to units affordable for the lowest earners. Newsom’s overall goal calls for 2.5 million new homes statewide over eight years, or roughly 312,500 units annually. With this summer marking the halfway point of that timeline, the results paint a discouraging picture.

Of more than 530 jurisdictions statewide, fewer than a third are permitting enough “above moderate” housing — generally market-rate homes — to stay on pace. The numbers are even more troubling for the state’s poorest residents: just 32 jurisdictions, less than 6%, are on track to meet targets for “very low” income housing, meant for those earning less than half of their area’s typical income.

There are a few bright spots. Five California localities are currently permitting enough housing to hit all four of their state-mandated income targets. But taken as a whole, the data shows that nearly every corner of the state is falling behind on the housing production needed to keep pace with demand.

Local government officials have pushed back on the criticism, arguing that state-imposed targets don’t account for real-world constraints. Jason Rhine, a lobbyist for the League of California Cities, noted that cities themselves don’t build housing and have limited power to compel private developers to break ground on new projects.

But housing advocates counter that local governments still hold significant sway over whether construction happens at all. Laura Foote, executive director of the pro-housing group YIMBY Action, said cities may not control developers directly, but they do control the fees, zoning rules and permitting processes that can make or break a project’s feasibility.

For Southern California communities already grappling with high housing costs and long permitting timelines, the figures underscore a broader statewide challenge: turning ambitious housing goals into homes that actually get built.

In other news from Sacramento, the California Supreme Court handed down two rulings this week with implications for courtrooms and taxpayers statewide.

In one decision, the court ruled that judges must be allowed to make exceptions to a state law barring electronic recordings during most hearings — a setback for labor unions that had fought to preserve jobs for professional court reporters. The shortage of certified court reporters has left millions of hearings without any official written record, complicating efforts by everyday litigants to appeal their cases. Recordings offer an alternative, allowing parties to later have proceedings transcribed by certified professionals when a full-time reporter isn’t available.

Court reporter unions maintain that trained professionals produce more reliable transcripts than recordings. But critics say requiring court reporters — who can cost thousands of dollars to hire privately — has created an unequal system where wealthier litigants have far greater access to accurate case records. Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero wrote that the ongoing failure to provide low-income litigants with a way to obtain an official transcript denies them meaningful access to the judicial system.

In a separate ruling, the state’s high court sided with Marathon Petroleum in a tax dispute with the city of Carson, a decision that could reshape how local governments across California handle business tax refund claims. The dispute stemmed from a 2022 assessment in which Carson determined that a Marathon subsidiary owed additional money under the city’s oil-industry business license tax. The company paid the disputed amount but sought a refund under state law, while Carson insisted the refiner follow the city’s own internal refund procedure instead.

The Supreme Court ruled in Marathon’s favor, finding that local governments cannot force taxpayers to first exhaust a city-specific process before filing a claim under the state’s Government Claims Act. Guerrero wrote that local agencies cannot lawfully require compliance with such internal procedures as a precondition for submitting a tax refund claim — a ruling likely to influence how cities and counties throughout the region, including here in the Inland Empire, handle similar tax disputes going forward.

Original source: CalMatters

The post Newsom’s Housing Targets Are Going Unmet in Most California Cities appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Every eight years, the state hands local governments a housing to-do list. Under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, cities and counties are assigned targets for how many new homes they should plan for across four income tiers, from housing for the wealthiest buyers down to units affordable to the poorest residents. The goal is to keep pace with population growth while making a dent in California’s long-running affordability crisis.

This summer, a large swath of the state — including all of Southern California — hit the midpoint of its current eight-year planning cycle. The results, based on state housing data, are underwhelming at best.

Fewer than a third of California’s cities and counties are building enough market-rate housing to stay on pace with their targets. The numbers get worse from there. Only about 10% are keeping up with their goals for “moderate” income housing, roughly 13% for “low” income units, and a mere 6% — just 32 jurisdictions statewide — are on track for housing affordable to residents earning less than half the local median income.

Only five places in California are hitting all four of their targets, and most are far from the region: the unincorporated areas of Plumas, Napa, Yolo and Mono counties, plus the small Sierra foothill town of Placerville. Not a single Southern California city makes that list.

Take Irvine, one of the rare local success stories on market-rate housing. The Orange County city was told to plan for 8,671 above-moderate units by 2030 and has already permitted more than 6,000 — putting it ahead of most cities in that category. But when it comes to housing for lower-income residents, Irvine mirrors the broader statewide struggle: just 9% of its very-low-income target and 3% of its low-income target have been permitted so far.

Why the gap between paper plans and actual construction? For one thing, the numbers themselves are enormous. California’s current cycle calls for nearly 2.5 million new homes over eight years — more than 312,000 per year. Even during the state’s strongest building booms, in the early 1960s and mid-1980s, annual construction never approached that level. Despite a wave of new state laws designed to speed up housing approvals, California is still adding only a bit more than 100,000 homes a year.

Local government advocates argue that cities are being blamed for something outside their control. “Cities cannot require developers to develop and cities don’t build housing,” said Jason Rhine, a lobbyist for the League of California Cities. Local officials can rezone land and streamline permits, he said, but they can’t force builders to break ground.

Pro-housing advocates see it differently, arguing cities still aren’t doing enough to encourage development. “Cities can argue that they don’t directly control production, but they do control fees, zoning and permitting,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action. She said the state’s housing allocation system “is only as good as we have the political will to actually hold cities accountable,” and faulted state regulators, too, for not pushing harder on cities to adopt more development-friendly rules.

A spokesperson for the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, Jennifer Hanson, said the agency is actively monitoring cities’ progress and enforcing commitments made in their housing plans. She pointed to recent state laws that exempt many urban infill projects from environmental lawsuits and require cities to allow taller buildings near transit stops, saying both have already helped move forward projects representing thousands of proposed homes.

Hanson also noted that plenty of factors driving whether homes get built are simply beyond any government’s control. “Whether a project moves forward depends on interest rates, construction and land costs, access to capital, insurance and expected rents or sale prices,” she said.

Affordable housing faces its own distinct obstacle: money. With rare exceptions, building homes priced for lower-income households in California requires public subsidies or investors willing to accept slim returns. State funding has been scarce since a 2018 voter-approved bond that fueled California’s main affordable housing subsidy program ran dry. Housing advocates are now hoping voters will approve an $11.25 billion state bond measure this November to refill that funding pipeline.

Housing for middle-income earners has its own bind. Moderate-income projects typically don’t qualify for the subsidies aimed at lower-income housing, yet the rents they can charge are often too low to attract developers seeking a profit without public support.

State lawmakers tried to create a workaround in 2017 with a law that fast-tracks approval for apartment and condo developments in cities that fall behind on their above-moderate, low- and very-low-income targets. In exchange for streamlined permitting, developers must include a share of affordable units and pay higher wages to construction workers.

Of the 212 Southern California cities and counties that reached the midpoint of their planning cycle this year, all but four missed their targets and are now subject to that streamlining law.

Even so, don’t expect a construction boom overnight. Developers have long argued that the law’s affordability and wage requirements make many projects financially unworkable outside of the most expensive rental markets. Since 2018, the law has helped approve nearly 28,000 units statewide — a meaningful number, but nowhere near enough to close California’s housing gap.

Original source: CalMatters

The post California Housing Falls Short of State Targets Almost Everywhere — Here’s Why appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Proposition 45 would overhaul how the California Environmental Quality Act, commonly known as CEQA, applies to projects like affordable housing developments, water infrastructure, schools and clean energy facilities. Backers argue the law, while well-intentioned, has increasingly become a tool for delay rather than environmental protection.

Jenna Abbott, executive director of the California Council for Affordable Housing, says her organization sees the consequences of that dysfunction every day. Members of her trade group work to build housing for veterans, seniors and working families who have been squeezed out of the communities where they grew up or work. But instead of moving quickly, many projects get bogged down for years in a permitting system Abbott describes as outdated, unpredictable and increasingly disconnected from its original purpose.

“The result is fewer affordable homes, higher costs, and more Californians wondering if they’ll ever afford a place to live,” Abbott said. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Prop. 45, she argues, would preserve the state’s environmental, worker and tribal protections while creating clearer timelines and a faster process for resolving legal disputes tied to essential development projects.

Abbott stresses she is not opposed to environmental review itself. She says thorough evaluation of a project’s impact on air quality, water resources, traffic and wildlife is important, and that communities deserve input before shovels hit the ground. Prop. 45, she says, keeps those safeguards intact.

But she points to what happened in Redlands as an example of how the system can be exploited. Nearly a decade ago, a nonprofit developer proposed an all-affordable apartment community for veterans, families with special needs and working households. The 80-unit project, which included on-site support services, was the kind of development many residents say the region desperately needs.

Instead of moving forward smoothly, the project was hit with a lawsuit — not over water quality, habitat loss or pollution, but over complaints about noise and aesthetics. A court dismissed the suit in 2018, but the legal fight had already set off a cascade of delays. By the time the dust settled, the project’s cost had ballooned by $21 million, a 70% increase that worked out to roughly $266,000 in additional expense per affordable unit.

The development, known as Liberty Lane Apartments, didn’t open its doors until this past April — nine years after it originally received approval.

Abbott says that story isn’t unique. Citing research from the law firm Holland & Knight, she notes that 87% of CEQA-related lawsuits target infill housing — projects built in already-developed urban areas near jobs and transit, rather than in open space. Many of the groups filing these suits, she said, have little track record on environmental issues, suggesting the law is sometimes used as leverage for unrelated grievances rather than genuine environmental concerns.

The financial toll of these delays, Abbott argues, ultimately lands on the people who can least afford it: veterans waiting for supportive housing, seniors hoping to age in place, and essential workers forced into ever-longer commutes because they can’t afford to live near their jobs. Taxpayers also end up footing a larger bill, since delays often mean the same publicly funded projects cost far more by the time they’re finally built.

Statewide, Abbott said, permitting delays alone tack on more than $75,000 to the cost of the average new home — a significant burden in a state facing a housing shortfall in the millions of units.

And it’s not just housing that suffers, she added. Clean drinking water upgrades, road and transit improvements, new schools, health clinics and renewable energy projects can all get caught in the same bureaucratic bottleneck.

Abbott is careful to note that Prop. 45 would not repeal CEQA or strip away the state’s environmental standards. Local governments would still retain authority over what gets built in their communities, and the public would still have opportunities to weigh in. What would change, she said, is the introduction of firm deadlines and a more efficient system for resolving lawsuits, replacing years of open-ended litigation with a clearer, faster path to resolution.

She acknowledges the measure won’t single-handedly solve California’s housing affordability crisis. But she believes it targets one of the most persistent obstacles: a permitting and legal review process that too often works against the very projects meant to help struggling residents.

“California has a choice,” Abbott said. “We can continue accepting a broken status quo, or we can update our project approval process while preserving the strong protections Californians value.”

For voters across the Inland Empire and beyond, Prop. 45 will pose a fundamental question — whether the state can find a way to protect its environmental standards without letting the review process itself become the biggest barrier to building the homes and infrastructure communities need.

Original source: CalMatters

The post California Voters Could Fix Misused Environmental Law to Speed Up Vital Projects appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Assembly Bill 2748, introduced by Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva, would let developers of new affordable housing projects follow the state’s 2022 building code standards for EV charging infrastructure rather than the updated 2025 requirements. Supporters frame the measure as a straightforward way to ease the financial burden on builders at a time when California desperately needs more low-cost housing.

But Michelle Pierce, founder of the advocacy group EV Nirvana and a co-leader of the National Charging Access Coalition, argues the bill misses the mark — and could backfire.

Pierce speaks from experience. She bought her first electric vehicle back in 2012, drawn by the promise of lower fuel and maintenance costs and cleaner air in a region long plagued by poor air quality. But after she moved into an apartment in 2019, she learned firsthand how difficult life becomes for EV owners without a home charger. She found herself driving out of her way to track down a working public charger, waiting in line for a spot to open up, then rushing back to her vehicle to avoid idling fees once it finished charging.

That inconvenience comes with a steep price. Unlike residential electricity rates, which are regulated by the state, public charging stations can set their own prices — often charging up to six times more than what it costs to plug in at home. The renters most affected by this gap, Pierce notes, tend to be younger residents and Black and Latino Californians, populations that make up a disproportionate share of the state’s apartment dwellers.

That’s what worries her about AB 2748. While the bill’s stated goal — reducing housing construction costs — is a worthy one, an analysis by the National Charging Access Coalition found that in some cases the legislation could actually increase costs down the line, not lower them. And in every scenario, it would mean fewer charging options for residents who most need affordable transportation.

The 2025 building code that the bill would roll back was specifically crafted to strike a balance: expanding charger access for tenants while keeping expenses down for builders. Under that code, when apartments come with assigned parking, developers aren’t required to install pricier charging stations — they can instead wire simpler, cheaper outlets directly into a resident’s own electrical meter.

According to the coalition’s analysis, that approach nearly doubles the number of available charging outlets compared to the 2022 code, without adding to overall costs. It also means residents’ charging is billed through their own meters, qualifying them for regulated utility rates and state discount programs that make plugging in even more affordable.

Rolling that requirement back, Pierce argues, would cut charging access roughly in half in new affordable developments and set both tenants and property managers up for steeper costs later on. Retrofitting a building with EV charging after the fact is far more expensive than building it in from the start — potentially tripling costs, and in at least one documented case, driving expenses up 30-fold compared to installing the infrastructure before concrete is poured and electrical systems are sized.

That bill for retrofitting, Pierce warns, doesn’t disappear — it typically lands on taxpayers and utility ratepayers, as state agencies and utility companies spend millions later to add charging capacity to buildings that lacked it from day one. Delaying this kind of infrastructure isn’t really saving money, she argues; it’s simply pushing the expense down the road, with interest.

Pierce also pushes back on the idea that EV charging is a major driver of high housing costs in the first place. Charging infrastructure, she points out, accounts for less than 1% of total construction costs for affordable housing — a fraction of the 10 to 15% typically consumed by development fees alone. The real drivers of California’s expensive construction costs, she says, are lumber, labor and land, not charging outlets.

For the families who will eventually live in these buildings, however, the presence or absence of home charging can determine whether they enjoy the full cost savings that come with EV ownership, or remain stuck paying premium prices at public chargers or the pump for years to come.

As Pierce puts it, affordable housing residents deserve the same basic convenience already available to tenants in market-rate developments: the ability to charge their vehicle overnight at home, without ever needing to visit a gas station again. Housing affordability, she argues, shouldn’t stop at the construction budget — it has to extend to the cost of actually living there.

Original source: CalMatters

The post California’s Push to Cut Apartment Construction Costs Shouldn’t Come at the Expense of EV Charger Requirements appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

The bill is set to become law automatically just after midnight Saturday, thanks to a quirk of the Constitution rather than a presidential signature. President Trump had pledged not to sign the housing measure until Congress first passed a national voter identification proposal — legislation that has stalled in the Senate. With that impasse continuing and Trump reiterating his refusal to sign as recently as last week, the housing bill will take effect without his approval, simply by running out the ten-day clock the Constitution allows for presidential action.

Despite the anticlimactic path to passage, housing advocates say the substance of the bill is anything but minor. Rather than one bold stroke, the legislation bundles together 56 separate provisions — regulatory tweaks, pilot programs, low-cost loans and grants — aimed at chipping away at the nation’s housing affordability crisis from multiple angles. No single piece is likely to transform the market on its own. Supporters are betting that, together, they might.

“We don’t often get together to celebrate federal housing legislation,” Stephen Russell, president of the Housing Federation of San Diego, said at a press conference last week. “I think the last time Congress passed something of this magnitude, a lot of you weren’t even born yet… this is close to a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

The bill’s momentum reflects a growing bloc of lawmakers aligned with the “Yes In My Backyard” movement, many of them from California, a state that knows a thing or two about sky-high housing costs. But the push to link affordability to housing supply has become a bipartisan cause nationally. Tellingly, the legislation was born out of a partnership between Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, one of the Senate’s most progressive members.

Though none of the bill’s provisions target California specifically, several stand out for the mark they could leave on the state.

BUILD NOW, OR ELSE

For expensive cities that have chronically underbuilt — a description that fits much of urban California — the bill pairs incentives with real consequences.

The legislation reworks the Community Development Block Grant program, one of the federal government’s primary funding streams for affordable housing and local economic development. Cities with high housing costs, measured through price and vacancy data, that have a history of sluggish construction and continue to build below-average levels of housing will see their block grant funding cut by 10 percent. Those savings will be redirected to cities building at a faster clip.

That could carry “real implications for cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, which have traditionally lagged” in expanding housing supply, said David Garcia, deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

According to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data, the city of Los Angeles received $48.4 million in its most recent block grant allocation in 2024. San Francisco received $18.9 million. Those figures alone wouldn’t make or break either city’s budget.

“I think this will be a small nudge,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, in an email. “Which, applied nationally, could have a big impact! Small nudges add up.”

Beyond the dollar amounts, the precedent may matter more. Even in California, where the state has aggressively pushed cities to plan for more housing and penalized those that don’t, lawmakers have never before punished municipalities for failing to actually build — an outcome not always within a city’s control.

Garcia called the idea “inconceivable in past Congresses.” Even so, the provision hasn’t drawn much public pushback from local government groups. In an online summary, National League of Cities lobbyist Michael Wallace praised the broader housing bill as an example of the federal government “choosing collaboration with local governments over the imposition of laws,” highlighting other provisions that give cities more flexibility in spending block grant funds and new incentive programs to boost supply.

LOSING THE CHASSIS

Manufactured homes are often casually called “mobile homes,” but in practice, they rarely move. Built on assembly lines and trucked to their final destination, these naturally affordable homes — the type policymakers across California and the country say the market desperately needs more of — are typically installed on permanent foundations. Fewer than 10 percent are ever relocated again.

Yet the federal building code governing manufactured homes still requires a costly holdover from their mobile origins: a permanent steel chassis.

That chassis — a massive steel undercarriage complete with removable axles and wheels — is technically there to make transport easier. In practice, it functions as a bulky, 10-to-12-inch-thick floor that can’t be removed once the home is delivered. It adds thousands of dollars to the cost of each unit and makes it far more difficult to stack manufactured homes into two-story buildings or multifamily apartment complexes, according to Jess Maxcy, president of the California Manufactured Housing Institute.

The new federal law eliminates the permanent chassis requirement — a change manufacturers and housing policy experts have pushed for since the mid-1980s.

“That relatively small change will expand access to one of the most affordable paths to homeownership,” said Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, at last week’s press conference.

Maxcy said she doesn’t expect the rule change to spark an overnight boom in manufactured housing. But especially in California, where high land costs make it more likely that new single-family homes will be built stacked on small lots, the change “gives us more opportunities and helps us bring the price down.”

DISASTER RECOVERY, MADE PERMANENT

In the months after a natural disaster, long after emergency federal funds run dry, Congress has historically stepped in with long-term rebuilding grants through the Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery program. Over the past three decades, the program has funneled more than $100 billion into long-term recovery work — building housing, repairing infrastructure, and helping with rental and relocation assistance. The money is typically reserved for low-income residents and communities “that won’t be able to recover without these funds,” said Marion McFadden, who ran the program under the Biden administration and now works at IEM, a disaster preparedness and recovery consulting firm.

Unfortunately for California, the program has never had a permanent, guaranteed existence. Since the mid-1990s, it’s been authorized and funded on an ad hoc basis, tucked into individual spending bills. That makes it difficult for communities trying to plan long-term recovery, and it means the rules governing the money — who gets it, when, under what conditions and for what purposes — get rewritten with every new administration, often slowing the process considerably. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Los Angeles has yet to receive any disaster recovery block grant funding following the 2025 wildfires. Congress has not yet appropriated any.

The new housing bill would permanently authorize the program in law for at least three years.

“This allows HUD to have funds ready before a disaster and make a decision within 15 days on whether it will provide funding,” McFadden said.

What the bill doesn’t do: provide additional funding. Disaster-prone communities will still have to wait for Congress to address that separately.

CLEARING A BOTTLENECK

For the past two decades, public housing authorities in Los Angeles and the Bay Area have relied on the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration program to repair and modernize their aging public housing stock. The program works by diversifying funding sources, giving local agencies more flexibility to secure loans and attract private investment.

Until just after midnight on July 11, the federal government was only authorized to approve 455,000 of these conversions nationwide. The new bill raises that cap by another 100,000 units.

“This has been a bottleneck in California for years, and that bottleneck has just been removed,” Russell said.

Not every affordable housing advocate is celebrating. The National Low Income Housing Coalition has consistently opposed expanding the program, arguing that shifting funding sources could weaken existing tenant protections. It’s unclear how much truth there is to that concern — a study last year found no evidence that conversions under the program lead to increased evictions.

KEEPING WALL STREET OUT OF THE SUBURBS

If there’s one thing most people have heard about this bill, it’s that it bars “large institutional investors” from buying up more single-family homes.

The final version includes some significant caveats. The bill defines “large” as any corporate entity controlling more than 350 single-family homes. It’s not retroactive, so investors who already hold large portfolios don’t have to sell them off. There are exemptions for new construction, renovations and senior housing. In California specifically, where corporations and other large investors don’t play an outsized role in the housing market, the impact is likely to be modest.

The provision “takes an issue that resonates deeply with people across the country and applies a fairly modest fix,” said Chad Maisel, a fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress and a former housing policy adviser to President Biden.

Still, the measure enjoys broad bipartisan support. Earlier this year, Trump called for even tougher restrictions on so-called corporate landlords. Gov. Gavin Newsom made a similar call that same week.

The anti-investor language in the final bill was softened considerably from an earlier version that threatened to undercut “build-to-rent” developments — well-financed subdivisions of single-family homes built specifically for renters. That earlier draft sparked backlash from developers and YIMBY advocates who otherwise strongly supported the bill, arguing that such communities are among the fastest-growing sources of new housing in the country and offer renters rare access to suburban-style, single-family living.

After that provision was stripped from the federal bill, state Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Fremont, now a congressional candidate, introduced state legislation reviving the idea. Her bill, SB 880, would have barred the bulk sale of multiple single-family homes, striking directly at the build-to-rent business model. That measure was rejected by the Assembly Judiciary Committee in late June.

Original source: CalMatters

The post What California’s “Once-in-a-Lifetime” Federal Housing Bill Would Mean for the State appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

The bill didn’t arrive with the fanfare typically reserved for major legislation. It became law just after midnight without a signing ceremony, after President Trump declined to formally sign or veto it. The White House had actually scrapped a planned bill-signing last month amid a dispute over an unrelated voter ID measure stalled in the Senate. But under constitutional rules, a bill that sits unsigned for 10 days automatically becomes law — and that’s exactly what happened.

Despite the anticlimactic rollout, supporters describe the measure as historic: a rare bipartisan effort, born from a partnership between Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, aimed at chipping away at the nation’s housing shortage through dozens of smaller policy changes rather than one sweeping fix.

“We don’t often gather to celebrate federal housing legislation,” said Stephen Russell, president of the San Diego Housing Federation, at a press conference last week. “The last time Congress passed anything of this magnitude, many of you weren’t even alive. It’s almost a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

The law contains 56 separate provisions — regulatory adjustments, pilot programs, new loan products and grant incentives. None of them, on their own, is expected to solve California’s housing affordability crisis. But taken together, backers argue they could meaningfully shift the trajectory for cities that have struggled for years to build enough homes.

A carrot-and-stick approach for slow-growth cities

One of the more consequential changes targets the Community Development Block Grant program, a major federal funding stream for affordable housing and local development projects. Under the new law, expensive cities that consistently underbuild housing — based on measures like median home prices and vacancy rates — could see their grant funding cut by 10 percent. Those dollars would then be redirected to nearby cities that are building housing at a faster pace.

Housing policy experts say the change could have real consequences for cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, both of which have long lagged behind housing production goals. Los Angeles received roughly $48.4 million through the block grant program in 2024; San Francisco received about $18.9 million.

“I think this will be a small nudge,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action. “Which, taken across the country, could still have a good impact. Little nudges add up.”

More significant than the dollar amounts, experts say, is the precedent being set. Even California, which has aggressively pushed cities to plan for new housing, has never directly penalized municipalities for failing to actually build it — an outcome that isn’t always within a city’s control. David Garcia, deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, called the idea “inconceivable in previous congresses.”

Still, local government advocates haven’t pushed back hard against the change. The National League of Cities praised the broader law, noting it also includes new flexibility for how block grant dollars can be spent and new support for local planning efforts.

Easing rules for manufactured housing

The law also eliminates a long-standing federal building requirement that manufactured homes — often called mobile homes, even though most never move after being installed — be built on a permanent steel chassis.

Originally intended to make the homes easier to transport, the chassis in practice adds a bulky, expensive layer beneath the floor that serves little purpose once a home is placed on a permanent foundation. Removing the requirement, something industry advocates have sought since the 1980s, is expected to lower costs and make it easier to build multi-story manufactured homes or stack units into apartment-style buildings.

“That relatively minor change will expand access to one of the most affordable forms of home ownership available,” said Rep. Scott Peters, a San Diego Democrat.

Jess Maxcy, president of the California Manufactured Housing Institute, said the shift won’t spark an immediate building boom, but in a state where land costs push builders toward denser development, it “provides more opportunities and helps us reduce the price.”

More certainty for disaster recovery funding

For communities recovering from wildfires and other disasters, the law formally establishes — for at least three years — the Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery program, which has funneled more than $100 billion nationally into long-term rebuilding efforts like housing construction and infrastructure repair.

Until now, the program operated on an ad hoc basis, requiring separate congressional funding after each disaster — a process that has left communities like Los Angeles, still recovering from the 2025 firestorms, without any allocated funds so far. The new law won’t immediately send fresh dollars to fire-affected areas, but it does create a framework allowing the Department of Housing and Urban Development to have funding ready in advance and make decisions within 15 days of a disaster.

“It creates the ability for HUD to have money on hand before a disaster and then make a decision within 15 days about whether they’re going to provide funding,” said Marion McFadden, a former HUD official who ran the program under President Biden.

Removing a cap on public housing conversions

The law also lifts a longstanding cap on the Rental Assistance Demonstration program, which allows public housing authorities — including those in Los Angeles and the Bay Area — to tap private financing to renovate aging public housing stock. The previous 455,000-unit cap will rise by another 100,000 units.

“This has been a bottleneck in California for years, and that bottleneck just got removed,” Russell said.

Not everyone is celebrating the expansion. The National Low Income Housing Coalition has raised concerns that shifting funding sources could weaken tenant protections, though a recent study found no clear evidence that such conversions lead to increased evictions.

A modest curb on corporate homebuying

Perhaps the most talked-about provision bars “large institutional investors” — defined as entities controlling more than 350 single-family homes — from purchasing additional houses. The rule doesn’t apply retroactively, exempts new construction, renovations and senior housing, and is unlikely to have much impact in California, where large investors play a relatively small role in the housing market compared with other states.

Chad Maisel, a fellow at the Center for American Progress and former housing adviser to President Biden, described the provision as “a pretty modest intervention” to a politically popular issue. Still, it drew support from across the spectrum — Trump called for even tougher restrictions on corporate landlords earlier this year, and Gov. Gavin Newsom voiced similar concerns days later.

An earlier, tougher version of the provision had threatened to disrupt “build-to-rent” developments — planned communities of single-family rental homes — prompting pushback from developers and pro-housing advocates who argued such projects help address a shortage of family-sized rental housing. That language was ultimately removed from the federal bill.

In California, state Sen. Aisha Wahab of Fremont, now a congressional candidate, introduced a related bill, SB 880, that would have banned bulk sales of single-family homes to investors — striking directly at the build-to-rent business model. That legislation died in the Assembly Judiciary Committee in late June.

Original source: CalMatters

The post What California’s “Once-in-a-Lifetime” Federal Housing Bill Would Mean for Residents appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Summer brought a different danger. In the unincorporated Coachella Valley, afternoon temperatures routinely climb past 110 degrees, and the mobile home park’s old electrical system often could not keep up with the demand from air conditioners. When the power failed, the aging, poorly insulated homes became stifling. Rubi Castro, a mother of four, recalled cooling her young children in large buckets of cold water while waiting for electricity to return.

That changed in late April, when Shady Lane reopened after a major renovation backed in part by a state program created to preserve and improve California’s aging mobile home parks.

The rebuilt community now has an upgraded electrical system designed to handle dozens of air conditioners, connections to local water and sewer utilities, paved roads and a shaded playground. The park’s 32 older mobile homes were replaced with new manufactured units, and eight additional homes were added. The project now provides 40 homes for more than 140 residents.

Castro, speaking on a June day that reached 113 degrees, said she had been comfortable since moving back in April. Inside her new home, she said, “it feels like we live in winter.” After years of dreading storms, she added that she now “can’t wait to experience the rain.”

The transformation of Shady Lane under the ownership of the nonprofit Caritas Corporation is one of the first visible results of a major revamp inside California’s housing bureaucracy.

For years, a state program intended to help struggling mobile home parks was so difficult to use that it sat largely dormant. In 2023, the state reworked and renamed it the Manufactured Housing Opportunity and Revitalization program, known as MORE, giving it a broader mission and more money to address one of California’s most overlooked forms of affordable housing.

Shady Lane received $10.6 million through the program, along with support from Riverside County and the city of Coachella. It was one of 28 parks awarded funding and is the first rehabilitation project completed under the revised program. Another 19 projects have broken ground, according to the state Department of Housing and Community Development.

For a state struggling with high housing costs and an affordable housing finance system often criticized as slow and expensive, the completion of Shady Lane is a rare success story. But the early record of the MORE program also shows how difficult it remains to repair and preserve older mobile home communities.

California has 4,635 mobile home parks, according to the state housing department, with space for nearly half a million homes. Most units are owner-occupied, and they are often far less expensive than comparable single-family houses or townhomes. For many lower-income Californians, they represent one of the few realistic paths to homeownership.

“While it’s not as shiny or flashy as a big beautiful new rental apartment, it’s a vital source of affordable housing,” said Betsy McGovern-Garcia, vice president of Self-Help Enterprises, an affordable housing developer in the San Joaquin Valley that manages two parks.

Still, even projects that secured MORE funding have run into permitting delays, funding gaps or reduced ambitions. The state awarded nearly $140 million to more than two dozen parks with more than 1,000 mobile homes, but advocates say that addresses only a small portion of the need. No new major funding round is currently expected.

The MORE program grew out of a 1980s state loan program called the Mobile Home Resident Ownership Program. Its original purpose was to help mobile home residents buy the land beneath their homes and operate parks as resident-owned cooperatives. Later, the program was expanded to help nonprofits and local governments acquire parks.

After early activity, the program faded. From 2013 to 2023, it issued only one loan despite tens of millions of dollars sitting available.

The 2023 overhaul widened the program’s purpose. Money could now be used not only to buy parks, but also to repair and replace infrastructure and, in some cases, dilapidated homes. Private owners became eligible to apply. The application process was simplified, and loan terms became more generous, with the possibility that many loans could eventually be forgiven.

Lawmakers also added $200 million through two one-time budget measures.

“It’s more responsive to the range of challenges that park residents and park owners are seeing,” said Brian Augusta, a housing policy lobbyist who supported the changes. About two-thirds of the money awarded through the program has gone to repair and rehabilitation work.

Caritas Corporation was the only organization to receive money through the previous version of the program in the decade before the revamp. State housing officials encouraged the nonprofit to return that money and reapply under the new program.

“It’s a great program, much easier,” said Tracy Bejotte, Caritas’ chief operating officer. “They really got their act together.”

For residents, the change is visible. Joel Beltran, a produce vendor who lives at Shady Lane with his wife and five children, said the park had once been a difficult place to live. He remembered sparks coming from outlets in his old mobile home.

“Today, it’s like Disneyland,” he said.

The need for repairs in California’s mobile home parks is widespread. Lower-income residents often lack the savings to fix their homes and may have fewer options for insurance or loans than traditional homeowners. Manufactured homes, especially older ones, are often difficult to insure affordably, and lenders may be reluctant to use them as collateral.

Homes built before 1976, when stronger federal manufactured housing standards took effect, are especially vulnerable to moisture, mold and fire damage. They often have poor insulation, making them uncomfortable and potentially dangerous during extreme heat or cold.

Andrew Rumbach, a mobile home park researcher at the Urban Institute, said many pre-1976 units are “probably no longer suitable to be living in.” California has an especially large share of those older units. Rumbach and his colleagues estimate that nearly 40% of the state’s mobile homes were built before the federal standards took effect, one of the highest shares in the country.

Even where the homes themselves are sound, the parks often rely on aging infrastructure. Many were built on cheaper land at the edges of communities and may not be connected to public utilities. Some are increasingly exposed to wildfire risk. Water, sewer and electrical systems are frequently owned and operated by park owners rather than public agencies.

“These systems tend to be run by whoever runs the park, which may be an absentee owner or a property manager,” said Gregory Pierce, a UCLA researcher who studies urban planning and water insecurity. “Even if they have the best of intentions, that person may not be well-equipped to run a water system.”

While Shady Lane has been largely completed, other MORE-funded projects have moved more slowly. Buena Vista Mobile Home Park in Palo Alto, owned and managed by the Santa Clara County Housing Authority, received the largest award among the 28 funded rehabilitation projects: $24.6 million.

The money, awarded in winter 2023, was originally intended to support a broad redevelopment. Plans called for replacing decades-old mobile homes, leaky gas lines and deteriorating roads. For renters living in the park, the housing authority proposed a mid-sized apartment complex with a community center.

By 2024, however, the project had been sharply reduced. Housing authority officials cited cost overruns, insufficient funding, resident opposition and a state deadline requiring the mobile home park funds to be used by mid-2027. Under a revised plan released late last year, the work will focus only on shared infrastructure, including water, gas, electric and sewer lines. Residents in 49 homes are expected to relocate during about eight months of construction and then return to their existing units.

The move-out date was initially set for February but has since been delayed to September.

“It keeps getting pushed back and pushed back,” said Sabrina Ramirez, a childcare worker who has lived at Buena Vista since 1999. The uncertainty has been stressful, she said, though the delay has benefited the many outdoor plants she began tending during the pandemic around her 1960s-era home. “My jungle’s loving it. I did not want to move them during the beginning of the year.”

Ramirez and other residents with plants are working with neighbors outside the park to care for flowers, succulents and fruiting vines while construction is underway.

The MORE program awarded $136 million in repair, replacement and acquisition funding in 2023, while denying applications totaling another $186 million.

That gap reflects the scale of the need, said Kate Rose, deputy director of the California Coalition for Rural Housing. It may also understate the problem. Some park owners may not have known about the revamped program in time to apply, while smaller owners may not have had the capacity to complete applications before the deadline.

For parks that were not funded, there is little immediate relief available. Much of the program’s money came from one-time state budget allocations, and the next state budget does not include another infusion. The remaining source is a special fund supported by park permit fees. At last count, that fund held $27 million and had grown by less than half of 1% over the previous two years. Rose called that amount “peanuts” compared with the statewide need.

That leaves owners of older parks with limited options.

When Self-Help Enterprises acquired La Hacienda Mobile Home Park in Fresno, McGovern-Garcia said the organization did not have a complete long-term revitalization strategy. “We simply knew there had to be an intervention,” she said.

The park had endured years of legal conflict and tension between residents and the previous owner. Its condition reflected that history. All but one of the units were built before 1980, McGovern-Garcia said. Nearly two dozen homes had been abandoned and boarded up, and many of the remaining units had water damage and mold.

Self-Help applied for a $3.7 million MORE grant to help homeowners replace their units with low-cost or interest-deferred loans. The application was denied.

“It would have changed the entire trajectory of the community,” McGovern-Garcia said. “It really is like getting Willy Wonka’s golden ticket for the mobile home world.”

Original source: CalMatters

The post California Offered Aging Mobile Home Parks a Lifeline. Did It Work? appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

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

The post California treats homelessness spending as action. That’s not a measure of success appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.