Despite moving in to her new digs just a month ago, Darlene Pizarro and her white dog, Angel, are already regulars at the local dog run.

Pizarro’s new place is not quite a city neighborhood and where she lives isn’t quite a home, but a tiny home, one of 94 city-funded units for the homeless at that lot. But Pizarro, who last lived as a squatter in an abandoned house, was relieved to be there.

“Tiny home” describes a specific type of housing more permanent than a tent or disaster shelter, but less than a single family home, townhouse, apartment, or something else thought of as permanent housing. The structures — smaller than 400 square feet, often lacking either a kitchen or private bathroom — have become increasingly common in California’s response to homelessness over the past five years, though opinions are split on how much to rely on them in years to come.

The site of Pizarro’s tiny home, on Guadalupe Parkway in the city’s downtown, opened in May as the newest of San Jose’s six sites that aim to fill the steps between traditional, congregate homeless shelters — think “room full of bunk beds and cubicles” — and an apartment of one’s own.

It boasts all the fixings of what homeless advocates say are best practices for temporary housing:

• Individualized case management allowing residents to stay as long as they need to get permanent housing

• Laundry and kitchen facilities

• The privacy of individual rooms that lock, with personal bathrooms

• Other elements that emphasize residents’ dignity, like the dog run and weekly community events.

Tiny homes are sometimes called modular homes or, in the case of San Jose, “emergency interim housing.” The city is all in, operating more than 600 such beds across six sites and building more. Mayor Matt Mahan attributes to them a recent 10% decline in the city’s unsheltered population, and notes that of the 1,500 people the city has sheltered in its tiny home sites, 48% moved to permanent housing. That’s compared to an average rate of 34% across Santa Clara County’s shelters over the past three years.

Tiny homes are increasingly California cities’ shelter option of choice for new sites to house the homeless. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration earlier this year said it is sending out 1,200 units statewide. San Jose and Sacramento, each set to receive hundreds, recently said they had selected their sites; as of October the state is still selecting vendors to build the homes.

The rise of the tiny home

Mahan’s zeal to open more tiny home sites got him in hot water this year in an age-old debate over which end of the housing shortage to focus on: temporary or permanent.

Advocates of tiny homes say they’re fast, cheap ways to get people sheltered immediately. Other longtime homeless advocates applaud tiny homes as improved shelter options, but are wary about over-relying on them in the long-term solution to homelessness.

“Non-congregate tiny homes are better than congregate shelter, but people are still homeless when they live there,” said Jennifer Loving, CEO of the nonprofit Destination: HOME, one of the primary agencies coordinating Santa Clara County’s response to homelessness. “You may be getting some more homeless folks into temporary shelter, but what about the hordes of people dying for an affordable place to live?”

In June, San Jose officials diverted $8 million of the city’s $137 million in homelessness and housing funding from developing affordable housing to running and building more tiny homes.

Mahan initially proposed putting 36% of the housing funds, which come from a 2020 property sales tax, toward temporary housing and 53% toward permanent housing for low- and middle-income households (the remainder would go toward rental assistance and administrative costs). He called it a one-time diversion to address the homelessness crisis on the streets, while waiting on affordable housing that can cost more than $1 million a unit in the Bay Area and take years to build.

Advocates and several city council members pushed back on what would have been a dramatic shift from past spending plans, which put three-quarters of the funds toward developing affordable housing and 15% on shelter. The city passed a compromise budget that put 68% of the funds toward permanent housing and 21% toward temporary.

Loving said the only way to keep temporary sites successful is to keep developing permanent housing for residents to move into.

“People are tired of seeing homelessness and they’re saying, ‘Do something, now,’” Loving said. “I think these non-congregate shelters are being positioned as the, ‘We’re doing something now.’”

While California cities have been installing tiny homes for at least the past five years, it was the pandemic that thrust the potential solution into the spotlight.

California has for the past decade been shifting its focus from temporary shelter towards building permanent supportive housing: affordable, long-term living options that come with social services. Permanent supportive housing units have been on the rise since 2008 in California as the number of temporary spots fell, according to an analysis of federal data by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

California temporary housing growing faster than permanent

But with a global pandemic and a record number of Californians falling into homelessness faster than the state could house them, officials turned toward non-congregate but temporary options like hotel rooms and tiny homes to keep people sheltered. In 2021, interim housing spots in California again exceeded permanent supportive housing units for the first time since 2015.

A sense of privacy

Also making the sites attractive are a host of modular housing companies springing up to offer tiny homes that are more livable.

Compared to flimsier and less fireproof prior models that evoked disaster zones, many tiny homes now include double-pane windows that can open, individual thermostats and doorbells. In San Jose, one site where the city broke ground this year will include some tiny homes that have private kitchenettes.

Though not all cities use them, many companies build modular units with en suite bathrooms, which residents say provide significantly more privacy and dignity.

It was the bathrooms that convinced Pizarro to accept an offer of shelter at the San Jose site last month.

The 67-year-old has been homeless five years and did not trust traditional shelters, where she said “you have to sleep with one eye open” to evade theft. With a stable place to sleep, Pizarro says she plans to look for retail work and apply for a housing voucher to get her own permanent place.

“I’m very hyper and active, and I like to work because I know if I sit around, I’m going to fade away and I’m not ready for that yet,” she said.

Others aren’t ready to plan their next steps yet. Monica Rojo, 50, moved into her room in May after having lived at a creekside encampment with about 70 others.

As a woman camping alone, she feared violence constantly. She now feels safer, and since getting her own shower, she no longer feels the disdain of others when she walks into stores. She’s personalized her room with photos of her three adult children in Mexico — two engineers and a nurse, she beams.

Rojo, a former janitor, said she’s recovering from leukemia and depression and working on getting her IDs after most of her documents were stolen.

“This program opens the doors, for work, for everything,” she said.

Advocates split on tiny homes

The more each tiny home feels like a real one, the more it costs — and the closer it inches to the “real housing” that advocates say is what actually solves homelessness. In San Jose, plumbing and utilities for the Guadalupe Parkway site drove the cost of each unit from $30,000 for the structure itself to more than $175,000. (Some of the cost was covered by philanthropy, city officials said.)

Mahan’s aware of the tradeoffs. But he said he’s striking the right balance by pushing for temporary shelter that is dignified, while folks wait for permanent housing.

“We all know the two extremes,” he said of the spectrum of housing options, from camps to permanent supportive housing. “One is kind of the perfect solution, or as close to it as you can get. The other is abject human misery and totally unacceptable. I am of the opinion that we have to spend more, we have to put more of our emphasis on the lower rungs of the ladder, the side of the spectrum that is improving on sanctioned encampments.”

Some in the tiny homes movement would take it even further.

Elizabeth Funk is CEO of DignityMoves, a nonprofit advocating for tiny home shelter sites. More than two years ago the nonprofit got San Francisco’s only tiny homes village so far set up in mere months, with donated structures on a sliver of a city parking lot. Residents can stay as long as they need, with regular access to social and health care workers at the 90 structures. Funk said the site takes advantage of a lot that’s in the yearslong wait of being developed into housing; the structures can be easily relocated when the project breaks ground.

DignityMoves pushed a bill in the state Senate this year to allow non-congregate, relocatable tiny home projects to bypass certain permitting procedures, and direct cities and counties to make available empty land for those uses. The bill initially defined such projects under the state building code as a type of housing, rather than as temporary shelter. Funk even suggested using housing vouchers to pay for them.

She said she didn’t expect the controversy she sparked. A group of advocates pushed back on the bill, arguing that, as Alex Visotzky of the National Alliance to End Homelessness put it, “it blurred the line between housing and shelter.” Sharon Rapport of the Corporation for Supportive Housing pointed out that certain shelters already can bypass permitting restrictions.

“It should be that that kind of expedited process is reserved for housing projects or any other kind of projects that are really promoting good policy,” Rapport said.

Despite some amendments requiring the projects to include plans for residents to get permanent housing when the land is needed for other uses, the bill died in the Senate appropriations committee in May. Its author, San Mateo Democratic Sen. Josh Becker, said he intends to bring it back next year.

Even Pallet Shelter, an early tiny homes builder that has supplied units for 36 sites across 32 California cities, was opposed to Becker’s bill. Amy King, CEO of the Washington-based company, said she asked for the bill to be amended to prohibit such sites from charging rents to tenants. No such change was made.

“I am not a supporter of this type of housing becoming a substitute for permanent housing,” King said.

Funk said she wasn’t trying to divert resources from one end of the housing spectrum to the other, but said the lines between the two may be too rigid when permanent housing is so scarce.

If someone needs or wants to stay in a tiny home for multiple years until they’re “ready” to move into a permanent apartment, she says, why shouldn’t it count as their housing?

The site DignityMoves opened in San Francisco illustrates both her point and her skeptics’.

Mia Salvaggio moved in two and a half years ago. She became homeless in 2020, after couchsurfing and battling a drug addiction. After bouncing around different campsites in the Bay Area, Salvaggio chose the offer of shelter space at DignityMoves because it afforded her some privacy, she said.

Being there has allowed her to meet a caseworker who helped her get her Social Security card. In an interview, she rattled off a long list of goals to focus on next: drug treatment, getting evaluated by a mental health provider, landing a part-time job. She was waiting for news about a permanent housing placement in early October.

She said she was grateful for the stay at the site, but some aspects still make it a far cry from a home: There’s no kitchen, the communal restrooms are porta-potties and the showers are on a trailer, which staff only keep open until 2:30 p.m. each day.

Salvaggio was also tired of living in close quarters with other residents, whom she accused of stealing her things and dirtying common areas. The rooms at that site are only 64 square feet, smaller than San Jose’s structures, and guests aren’t allowed.

“As long as I can prepare my own food and have my own bathroom,” she’ll be satisfied, Salvaggio said. “I haven’t literally sat on a toilet seat for probably two and a half years.”

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ANDREW KHOURI | STAFF WRITER

In the last decade, California home prices and rents have soared, an upswing that’s put homeownership further out of reach and helped drive thousands into homelessness.

This escalation coincided with a unique moment in California history. For much of the last decade, the state’s population growth was historically low.

In the last few years, it ground to halt and then dropped — and all the while developers continued to build.

Given the laws of supply and demand, one might think fewer people and more homes would equal lower prices. But California housing costs remain stubbornly high and have barely fallen — if at all.

California hasn’t added enough housing to meet demand, creating a backlog so large that it can’t be corrected by a few years of population loss.

Making the situation more acute: a generational bulge of Millennials who — in larger numbers than the preceding Generation X — have exploded into a housing market that wasn’t ready for them.

What exactly is happening?

In 2020, the Golden State recorded its first population decline on record and the number of Californians has slipped ever since, according to data from the California Department of Finance. At the start of 2023, California had nearly 709,000 fewer people than it did in January 2020, while the total number of housing units had grown by nearly 378,000, state data show.

In Los Angeles County, the population started to drop in 2018. Today, there are about 431,000 fewer people and 117,000 more homes in L.A. County than five years ago, data show. John Boyne, a researcher with the state Department of Finance, said that although the state and Los Angeles County are adding homes and losing population, the trend is probably exaggerated because of data issues that will soon be corrected. When those are resolved in coming months, Boyne said, the population losses — and to a lesser extent the housing gains — will probably be smaller even though they will still exist.

Although people looking for housing might not notice, the trend of fewer people and more homes has had some effect, experts said. In L.A. County, the median rent for August is 17% higher than the start of 2018 but is down 2.4% compared to a year ago, according to data from Apartment List. Nationwide, rent soared 31% since 2018 but is down 1% from a year earlier. Home prices in Los Angeles County are up 52% since 2018 but down 2% from the peak last year, according to data from Zillow. Many renters and aspiring homeowners want big dents in housing costs.

But population loss hasn’t been enough, according to Hans Johnson, a senior fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California. He noted less expensive Rust Belt communities have seen much greater declines over a prolonged period. Wayne County — home to Detroit — has seen its population plunge 34% since 1970. Gary, Ind., dropped 39%. Los Angeles County, on the other hand, has lost 4.2% of its population since its peak several years ago and statewide there are 1.8% fewer people — drops that state number crunchers consider somewhat inflated. People think the “sky is falling and everyone is leaving California,” Johnson said. “That is not true.” Total population isn’t the only factor affecting the crisis. That’s because when it comes to the desire for a house or an apartment, not everyone is created equal.

A newborn baby doesn’t want their very own housing unit, but in 20 years they probably will. If one particularly large generation enters their 20s at the same time, the demand for housing can soar even if the total population stays the same, or declines slightly. That’s exactly what happened with the Millennial generation over the last decade and a half, according to Dowell Myers, a professor of policy, planning and demography at USC. Noticeably bigger than the preceding Generation X, Millennials ignited demand surges that sharply lifted housing costs despite subdued population growth since the Great Recession. Between 2009 and 2014, a very large cohort of Millennials was in their 20s, a prime time for renting your first apartment, Myers’ research shows.

In the years since, those Millennials have increasingly entered their 30s, when many people in California buy a home for the first time. The nation’s economy further amplified the Millennial effect, Myers said. The Great Recession not only hammered housing construction but also delayed many Millennials from striking out on their own. When job prospects improved, those people jumped into the rental market, and later the for-sale market, at the same time as younger Millennials who could afford to follow a more traditional timeline. In effect, this created a bulge on top of a bulge at a time when housing construction was still far below pre-recession levels. Myers called it a “double bang.”

To some extent, the current level of housing construction serves as a lid for how many people live in California, because there’s a limit to how much people can, or want to, cram together into one unit. But there’s still high demand to live in a state with a temperate climate, diverse economy and 1,200 miles of coastline. So the rich tend to win out, experts said, grabbing the housing that does exist and, in the process, gentrifying older low-income neighborhoods as affluent couples or singles move into apartments formerly occupied by larger families that left for cheaper housing elsewhere.

In such a scenario, an area’s population immediately declines, but the demand for housing does not. “The cost of living in California and Los Angeles is so high … that we know a lot of people can’t move here and we know a lot of people can’t remain here, because they are priced out,” said Michael Lens, a professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA. Other factors also contribute to rising — or constant — housing demand as the overall population drops, according to the Public Policy Institute’s Johnson. Some might be short-lived. As the pandemic wore on, many young adults — tired of being cooped up with others and armed with stimulus checks — moved out of shared living situations and found places of their own.

On a long-term basis, birth rates have fallen, people are delaying marriage and the population is aging — all factors that tend to reduce the number of people living in one unit. Johnson’s research found that since 2020, many large California cities — including gentrification hotbeds of Los Angeles and Oakland — have lost population, but the number of occupied housing units has actually increased.

Just how far behind are we on housing construction?

There is no universally accepted measure, but throughout the years multiple studies have found California hasn’t built enough. According to the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, California added about 120,000 homes each year between 1980 and 2010 and saw home prices grow from 80% higher than the nation to 100%, twice as expensive.

For prices to have stayed just 80% higher than in the U.S. as a whole, California needed to build at least 70,000 more homes annually than it did, the study found. That would be a total of 190,000 new homes each year. Construction has picked up lately, but since 2010, the high water mark was still just 123,350 new units in 2022, according to the Department of Finance.

Most years came in under 100,000. Though demographic experts say population is an imperfect measure of housing demand, it clearly plays a role. Despite the most recent population declines, California still has more people than it did in 2010 and far more than 1980. “A couple of years of population loss is not going to be enough to offset three decades or more of under supply,” said Brian Uhler, a deputy with the Legislative Analyst’s Office. Yes.

The rise of short-term rentals has taken some homes off the traditional housing market, and tenant advocates in recent years have raised concerns that large corporations are gobbling up an increasing share of the housing stock. Jordan Ash, a research director with the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, said large companies demand a quicker and greater return than mom-and-pop landlords and use analytical pricing software to push rent as high as they can — even if it results in a few more vacancies. “It’s not just a supply issue,” said Ash, who advocated for more expansive rent control.

Johnson said corporatization could be driving up housing costs to some extent, but he said the main reason for the escalation is that California hasn’t built enough to meet demand. “There are three primary solutions” to our housing crisis, Johnson said. “One, build more housing. Two, build more housing. Three, build more housing.”

What will happen next?

It’s unclear. Predicting requires a variety of assumptions on construction, birth rates, immigration policy and numerous other factors.

According to preliminary projections from the state Department of Finance, Los Angeles County’s population is expected to decline each year to at least 2060, when it will be nearly 18% lower than today, with the largest declines occurring in later years. California’s population is expected to resume growing in 2024, the forecast finds.

Then in 2045, it should decline each year to end 2060 about where it is today. Walter Schwarm, the department’s chief demographer, said both forecasts predict people will move out of L.A. County and California at rates similar to pre-pandemic levels, while low rates of international migration persist. What’s different is when the baby boomer generation starts to pass away, there probably will be too few babies born to replace them — hence why most population loss occurs in later decades.

Schwarm said Census Bureau data released last week indicate L.A. County might see a slightly smaller decline than 18% by 2060, but the population loss should still be significant. Myers of USC called the department’s forecast unlikely, in part because he believes international migration will increase, the birth rate will tick up and the state’s diverse economy and natural resources will still attract a fair number of workers from other states. Even so, Myers predicts some relief for renters.

Apartment supply is expanding at a time when Millennials are aging into homeownership and a smaller Gen Z is entering the rental market. “The problem is not solved, but it’s moving in the right direction if you are a tenant,” Myers said.

He expects less of a generation impact on home prices. Baby Boomers will leave behind homes when they pass away, but there are currently more Millennials than Boomers, and Myers said there just might be enough backlogged demand for homeownership from Generation X, Millennials and Gen Z to largely backfill those vacated homes. “Everyone who is a renter who is middle class is aiming to be a home buyer,” Myers said. “So all the demand is moving toward home buying.”

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Convinced that the boom in leisure travel is permanent, Airbnb aims to expand its listings by convincing more people to turn their homes into short-term rentals.

The company said Wednesday that it will increase the amount of liability coverage for hosts, up to $3 million, in a play for owners of nicer houses in high-cost places such as California. It will also pair newbies with a “superhost” to guide them through the process of becoming a short-term landlord, from signing up through welcoming their first guest.

More listings would not seem to be Airbnb’s biggest challenge. CEO Brian Chesky says the San Francisco company is taking steps to make price more transparent when consumers browse Airbnb listings, and he predicts that will reduce sky-high cleaning fees that many hosts tack on well into the booking process — a major complaint of consumers.

The company also continues to try to crack down on large parties at rentals, a few of which have turned violent. And it faces efforts to increase regulation of short-term rentals. Through it all, Airbnb has fared better than most travel companies during the pandemic. This month, it reported a record $1.21 billion profit for the third quarter.

Its stock fell, however, because earnings and bookings were less than Wall Street expected and the company gave a cautious fourth-quarter outlook. Investors worry that consumers paying more for food, gas and housing — and facing predictions of recession — will cut back on discretionary spending like travel, hurting Airbnb. Some current hosts are worried that might already be happening.

Last month, a post on a Facebook page for Airbnb “superhosts” asked, “Has anyone seen a huge decrease in bookings over the last 3 to 4 months? We went from at least 50% occupancy to literally 0% in the last two months.” Other hosts on social media have suggested theories ranging from a fragile economy to pent-up travel demand finally running out, and some think the problem might be that Airbnb already has too many listings. AirDNA, which tracks short-term-rental numbers, said Airbnb listed nearly 1.4 million rentals in the U.S. in September, a 23% jump from a year earlier and 9% over 2019.

Nearly two-thirds were added since 2020. The trends are similar for global listings. Chesky said in an interview that Airbnb has enough hosts now — he didn’t say it has too many — but needs more because leisure travel will keep growing. And, he said, a recession could push more people to turn their homes into Airbnbs. After all, he likes to point out, Airbnb launched during the great recession in 2008. “People are pulling back spending in tons of areas, but not travel,” he said. “And with a looming recession, we felt like more people than ever are going to want to make extra money.”

Potential hosts sometimes hesitate, Chesky said, because they are uncomfortable having strangers in their homes. The company’s response is to triple the amount of coverage for hosts — from $1 million to $3 million — against damage, including to vehicles, boats and a wider range of art on the property. Chesky is betting that will persuade more owners of nice homes to list them on Airbnb. “Exactly, and home values have increased since we wrote the $1 million plan,” he said. “We just noticed more than 20% of the homes on Airbnb, and maybe even more than that, were over the $1 million limit in value.”

The company said it is also launching a system to verify the identity of guests and flag potential parties, immediately in the U.S. and Canada and worldwide by next spring. Chesky said the system is “not a silver bullet,” and he didn’t provide many details but said in the U.S. it will include a check of criminal and sex-offender records.

In the meantime, the company is working on a plan to display the all-in price of a stay up front on its app and website — an amount that would include cleaning fees, which can be very high and only appear later in the booking process. Chesky said he didn’t want to bar or cap cleaning fees — that’s a decision for hosts, he said. But including fees in the upfront price — and in the order in which search results are displayed — “is going to correct the market,” he said.

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Manuela Tobias | Contributed

It’s difficult for housing advocates to criticize Gov. Gavin Newsom because he’s done more to boost production than any other governor in recent memory — but that’s mostly because the bar is so low. Measured against the goal he set for himself, Newsom’s record is less impressive.

Just 13% of the 3.5 million homes he campaigned on building have been permitted, let alone built. He’s walked back the goal many times, settling on a new target earlier this year: Cities need to have planned a combined 2.5 million homes by 2030. So, a million fewer homes planned for, not built, and over a longer time frame. Newsom can point to some accomplishments: He signed bills that capped big rent hikes statewide, legalized duplexes and fourplexes on most developable land and unlocked millions of potential apartments on empty strip malls.

He sheltered tens of thousands of people experiencing homelessness amid a generational pandemic and dedicated more dollars to housing and homelessness than ever before. But as he finalizes his first term and coasts into the second, Newsom finds himself mired in an even deeper housing and homelessness crisis than the one he inherited. Running for governor in 2017, then-Lt. Gov. Newsom pledged to spur a never-before-seen tsunami of homebuilding in California to bridge the gap between the growing population and shrinking stock of housing driving the affordability crisis. “As Governor, I will lead the effort to develop the 3.5 million new housing units we need by 2025 because our solutions must be as bold as the problem is big,” Newsom wrote on Medium. The goal was true to character: big, hairy and audacious.

It would have required building an average of 500,000 homes a year in a state that has only surpassed the 300,000 mark twice in more than 50 years. Newsom didn’t get even close. In the nearly four years since he took office, California cities are projected to have permitted a total of about 452,000 homes — less than he pledged he’d build in one year alone, according to local data collected by the Construction Industry Research Board. When asked about his shortcomings at a recent press conference, Newsom wrote off his original goal as he has many times before, by paraphrasing Michelangelo. “The biggest risk in life, however one defines risk, is not that we aim too high and miss it.

It’s that we aim too low and reach it,” Newsom said. “It was always a stretch goal.” Housing advocates acknowledge that policy change is by nature slow and incremental, and like many other proposals, long-term housing goals took a backseat to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the reality on the ground — that there aren’t enough houses for everyone and the ones that exist are hideously expensive — continues to exasperate Californians who repeatedly rank housing and homelessness among their top concerns. State Sen. Brian Dahle, the Republican candidate for governor, and other state Republicans have routinely attacked Newsom’s record on housing, including calling for a special session on homelessness. “We need government to treat this the way we treat a natural disaster, because that’s how it’s impacting people’s lives,” said Chione Lucina Muñoz Flegal, executive director of Housing California, a housing advocacy organization. “And that’s not what we see happening.”

A Marshall Plan for housing? Housing policy advocates described Newsom’s stated goal of 3.5 million new homes in four years the same way he has: aspirational. They say that’s because the state doesn’t build housing in California — private developers do, with the approval of local governments. So what really grabbed advocates’ attention was the “Marshall Plan for affordable housing” Newsom pledged to launch during his inaugural speech, recalling the multi-billion dollar program to rebuild Western Europe following World War II. “As much as the number was important, the idea of building a streamlined process of building, that was amazing, because that’s really the challenge of California,” said Dan Dunmoyer, president of the California Building Industry Association.

He said that dream remains elusive. California has some of the highest housing costs in the nation because of how little “marshaling” there is, Dunmoyer said. Land costs are prohibitive, and zoning rules limit much of what can be built. Housing must get approved at the local level, which has ample opportunity for community input. Those communities can then block unpopular projects, such as multi-family or affordable housing. Another culprit: impact fees cities charge to fund infrastructure that can exceed $150,000 a home, some of the highest in the nation. The closest Newsom may have gotten to bulldozing those barriers is Project Homekey. After COVID-19 hit, the administration scrambled to turn 94 hotels and motels into more than 6,000 shelter units for people experiencing homelesnsess, which would later become permanent homes, within record-setting months.

The projects bypassed local land use rules and a marquee environmental law often blamed for slowing or killing controversial projects. The state has since expanded the $800 million project with more than $2.75 billion in new funding. Newsom signed more than a dozen bills allowing housing types that met certain conditions to skip lengthy approval processes at the local level. Two are expected to have the biggest impact: one which legalized duplexes and fourplexes on the two-thirds of developable land in California previously zoned for single-family homes, and another that allows apartments on land previously allotted for retail centers, parking lots and offices along arterial roads. While a zoning change doesn’t build housing, it’s a first step to making it legal.

Combined, the two laws could open up previously blocked space for more than 2 million housing units. “The effect of legislation is often hard to prove, because it’s only one factor of many in the development process,” said Louis Mirante, vice president of public policy at the Bay Area Council. “To stop a project, you only need one red light. But to make a project go, you need at least 100 green lights. A lot of the legislation the governor has been signing has been those green lights.” But yellow and red lights abound, including rising interest rates and prohibitive material costs. While it took political courage to sign a controversial measure like the one streamlining duplex and fourplex construction, Newsom remained largely quiet on those bills until they reached the finish line, and hasn’t championed a more sweeping production policy proposal on his own. “He can step in and resolve the problems if he really wanted to prioritize the issue,” said Chris Martin, policy director at Housing California. “He has the power to do it but politically, it’s challenging. He’s going to have to make some uncomfortable decisions.”

Moving the goalposts While Newsom has repeatedly called the 3.5 million goal taken from a 2016 McKinsey study a moonshot, he has put his weight behind another number: 2.5 million. That’s how many homes the Legislature has mandated California cities to plan for by 2030, and Newsom’s team is making sure they do. “Before we can reach our stretch goals, before you can reach the moon, you’ve got to get off the launch pad,” said Jason Elliott, Newsom’s senior counselor on housing and homelessness. The planning law has been on the books for decades, but it wasn’t until 2017 that the state Legislature gave the process teeth by creating standards and penalties cities must abide by. The plans for the housing that those standards and penalties apply to weren’t even due for most cities until this year. And the deadlines are different for different regions. It’s a slow process. Cities now have to zone for more than double the housing they did in previous years, and it has to be on sites where housing could actually be built. And if they don’t do it, they risk losing affordable housing dollars or even forgoing housing approval decisions.

But having laws on the books — even if they feature new penalties — doesn’t mean anything unless someone is there to enforce them. To that end, Newsom staffed up a $4.65 million accountability and enforcement unit within the housing department, with reinforcements at the state’s Justice Department. Cities seem to be paying heed, but it’s all fun and games until actual homes get built. “For many years in California, the Regional Housing Needs (Allocation) process was an afterthought at best,” Elliott said. “It was not taken seriously because there were largely no consequences for local governments failing to meet their responsibilities. And that’s not ancient history, but through a very concerted effort by this governor and the administration in partnership with the Legislature, RHNA is now very serious. And I think communities are taking it seriously.”

But planning isn’t building, and a recurring complaint about the process from cities is that while it requires a lot of affordable housing to be planned for — 1 million of the 2.5 million units must be affordable to the lowest earners — the state doesn’t provide nearly enough tax credits and other subsidies to build it. “We’re funding a quarter of that, at best,” said Paavo Monkkonen, associate professor of urban planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. “So that’s an interesting conundrum, where their own goal is unattainable. And there’s not really a Manhattan Project to make that happen.” With the Legislature, Newsom has dedicated unprecedented dollars to affordable housing, including $10.3 billion in 2021.

Funding the current affordable housing need alone, however, would require nearly $18 billion a year over a decade, according to a recent estimate from Housing California and California Housing Partnership. And there is no long-term source of funding for housing in California.

As budget projections for next year sour, affordable housing advocates worry those funds might dry up. “In these years of good budget outlook, the administration has done a really good job,” said Marina Wiant, vice president of government affairs at the California Housing Consortium, a non-partisan housing advocacy organization. “It’s going to be interesting to see what they do when they have to make tough budget choices.”

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NEW YORK (AP) — Most U.S. gun owners say they own firearms to protect themselves and their loved ones, surveys show. But a study published Monday suggests people who live with handgun owners are shot to death at a higher rate than those who don’t have such weapons at home.

“We found zero evidence of any kind of protective effects” from living in a home with a handgun, said David Studdert, a Stanford University researcher who was the lead author of the Annals of Internal Medicine study.

The study has several shortcomings. For example, the researchers said they could not determine which victims were killed by the handgun owners or with the in-home weapons. They couldn’t account for illegal guns and looked only at handguns, not rifles or other firearms.

The dataset also was limited to registered voters in California who were 21 and older. It’s not clear that the findings are generalizable to the whole state, let alone to the rest of the country, the authors acknowledged.

But some outside experts said the work was well done, important and the largest research of its kind.

“I would call this a landmark study,” said Cassandra Crifasi, a gun violence policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “This contributes to our understanding of the potential causal relationship between guns in the home and homicides,” she said.

California is unusual in that it offers gun ownership data and other information not obtainable in almost any other state. That allowed the researchers to follow millions of people over many years to try to better establish what happens when a person begins living in a home with handgun, they said.

The study focused on nearly 600,000 Californians who did not own handguns but began living in homes with handguns between October 2004 and December 2016 — either because they started living with someone who owned one or because someone in their household bought one.

The researchers calculated that for every 100,000 people in that situation, 12 will be shot to death by someone else over five years. In comparison, eight out of 100,000 who live in gun-free homes will be killed that way over the same time span.

“The rates are low” and the absolute risk is small, but it’s important to consider the increase in a person’s risk of being killed, Studdert said.

Those numbers suggest the risk rises 50%, but Studdert said it’s actually higher: In a separate calculation designed to better account for where people live and other factors, the researchers estimated the risk was actually more than twice as high.

Separately, the researchers found that those who lived with handgun owners had a much higher rate of being fatally shot by a spouse or intimate partner. The vast majority of such victims — 84% — were women, they said.

The study was confined to California, but the risk is likely even greater in states with less stringent gun laws and where gun ownership is more common, Crifasi said.

Previous research estimated that nearly 3% of U.S. adults became new gun owners between January 2019 and April 2021, which translates to about 7.5 million Americans. Of those, about 5.4 million previously lived in a home with no guns.

For decades, studies have shown guns in the home raise the risk of a violent death. Much of that work, including an earlier study by Studdert and his colleagues, focused on suicide.

The new study goes further in addressing the perception that handguns are still worthwhile because of the safety they provide against being murdered, some experts said.

“The reason people have guns in their home is for protection from strangers,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard University’s Injury Control Research Center. “But what this is showing that having a gun in the home is bad for people in the home.”

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VA encourages researchers, organizations and individual technology developers to apply for SAHAT grant funding via Grants.gov. by 11:59 p.m., ET, March. 11, to develop specially adapted housing assistive technologies that will improve the livability of Veterans’ adapted residences.

VA issues the Notice of Funding Opportunity in the Federal Register to foster competition among technology developers, funding innovation that will best serve the needs of certain seriously disabled service members and Veterans.  

Since 2016, when VA awarded its first SAHAT grant, VA has awarded 22 grants. To date, these grants have resulted in the introduction of new products to the accessibility industry used to improve the lives of Veterans, including:

• AI-powered mobile scanner and reader enabling blind and visually impaired users to read text independently.
• Smart guidance: a customized disability-adapted bathroom module designed to bring users closer to independent living by providing a safer bathroom environment and permitting home care.
• Robotic overbed table for beds, recliners and wheelchairs allowing users to independently deploy, position and store mobile devices using accessible switches or a remote from a bed or chair.

“Awarding up to $200,000 per grant to develop technology will ultimately help make homes more livable for seriously disabled service members and Veterans,” said Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Benefits Mike Frueh. “In addition to the SAHAT program, VA also administers Specially Adapted Housing grants to eligible service members and Veterans with certain serious service-connected disabilities to purchase or adapt a home that suits their individual needs.”

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Homeowners throughout Southern California can now sell their home to the most trusted name in real estate. Zillow Offers, launched on December 9, lets sellers skip the hassle of listing their home by selling directly to Zillow.

Zillow Offers is now available to homeowners across a large portion of Southern California including the Inland Empire (Riverside) and San Diego. In just 19 months since Zillow Offers first launched in Phoenix, it has grown to a total of 221 markets across the country – with Los Angeles, the nation’s 2nd largest housing market, representing the largest market where Zillow Offers is available to-date.

Selling a home is a major life experience, full of emotions and significant financial implications. Most (64%) home sellers are also looking to buy a home at the same time, and uncertainty around the timing of a sale and price cause the most stress for them2. With Zillow Offers, sellers have control over their timeline and can choose the close date that fits their schedule. Sellers also don’t have to deal with making repairs or improvements to get their homes sale-ready, a stressful prospect for more than half of sellers2.

Homeowners who request an offer from Zillow can expect a fair market value offer on their home. A recent Zillow analysis found that sellers who declined a Zillow Offer and went on to sell traditionally within the next few months sold their homes for an average of just 0.22 percent more than Zillow’s offer.

Homes in the Los Angeles metro now take about a week longer to sell than they did a year ago, and local home value appreciation is nearly flat over the past year3. Zillow Offers provides another choice for sellers looking at all of their options to sell their homes.

Homeowners interested in Zillow Offers can simply enter their address on Zillow’s website or app and answer some basic questions about their home. If eligible, they will receive a preliminary cash offer within about 48 hours. Potential sellers don’t have to make any binding decisions until their home has been evaluated by a Zillow representative in person. Zillow has dedicated support from English- and Spanish-speaking representatives to help sellers through the process.

After closing on a home, Zillow will take care of necessary repairs, working with local contractors to complete projects like a fresh coat of paint, servicing HVAC units and other work a typical homeowner would do to get their home ready for sale.

“We know how difficult and stressful it can be to sell a home, so we are rebuilding the experience of buying and selling a home to make it a much simpler, smoother process,” said Jeremy Wacksman, Zillow Brand President. “In the 20 months since we first introduced Zillow Offers, we’ve seen that there is a strong appetite for another option when it comes to selling a home. We’re thrilled to launch Zillow Offers in one of the largest markets in the country, and look forward to easing the friction and helping sellers move to the next stage of their life without the hassle and uncertainty of a traditional home sale.”

“I needed extra funding to work on my movie, and needed to sell my property in Las Vegas,” said James Su of Arcadia, Calif., who sold his home in July 2018. “The whole process of selling through Zillow Offers was so easy. From start to finish, there were no surprises, and I didn’t have to deal with all the troubles that are associated with selling a home. Zillow made the stressful undertaking of selling a home much smoother and easier, and fast enough to use the proceeds to fund my movie.”

As Zillow works to build a seamless, integrated real estate transaction, consumers can get financing from Zillow’s owned affiliate lender, Zillow Home Loans, making it simpler for Zillow Offers buyers and sellers to get pre-approved for their next home purchase.

Zillow has also announced that the home-selling service will be coming to Cincinnati, Jacksonville, Fla., Oklahoma City and Tucson, Ariz. by the middle of 2020.

A Los Angeles-based broker will represent Zillow in each transaction when buying or selling a home. Home sellers who request a Zillow offer but decide to sell traditionally can be connected with a local real estate agent to represent them in the sale.

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ABOUT SOLD.COM
SOLD.com is the first-of-its-kind free, unbiased, educational resource and comparison engine for homeowners researching the best method to sell their homes. The SOLD.com platform aggregates disruptive real estate services and top local brokers in one place to inform and educate users about the many options available to them. SOLD.com then uses its proprietary technology and personal concierge services to analyze objective and subjective factors – including local market characteristics, customer service rankings and personal preferences – to provide users with a free and unbiased recommendation for the most efficient, cost-effective route to selling a home.

For more information, please visit https://www.SOLD.com/.

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