Newsom pumping money into affordable housing hasn’t helped California’s crisis
Eden Villalovas
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California is failing to build enough affordable homes to meet the needs of lower-income residents, even though the state has been trying to address the problem for years.
The California Housing Partnership conducts an annual report every May, and its most recent analysis found the state is still falling short.
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“Although California has more than tripled production of new affordable homes in the past four years, the state is only funding 20% of what is needed to meet its goals,” the 2023 report states.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has pushed numerous programs aimed at strengthening affordable housing, and he promised to “lead the effort to develop the 3.5 million new housing units we need by 2025” in a 2017 Medium post.
As of November 2022, however, only 13% of the 3.5 million homes he campaigned on building have been permitted, let alone built, according to data from the Construction Industry Research Board.
“More than half of California’s 5.9 million renter households are lower income, with nearly 1.2 million extremely low-income renter households,” the CHP report states, showing little to no change from the 2022 California Affordable Housing Needs report.
Traci Mysliwiec, director of communications for the California Housing Partnership, told the Washington Examiner that “solving California’s affordable housing crisis requires a long-term, comprehensive, evidence-based set of policy solutions at scale.”
California cities are projected to have permitted a total of about 452,000 homes over the four years Newsom has been in office, according to data from the Construction Industry Research Board.
In 2021, Newsom signed 31 bills as part of a $22 billion housing affordability effort.
In February, he unveiled plans to use $825 million to build affordable housing through a speedy approval process, proposing 9,550 new homes.
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“By pairing clear goals with synergistic policy and systems-change strategies that can have an effect over time, the investments made today will bring about the outcomes many Californians have been longing for,” Mysliwiec said.
Although Newsom unleashed a flood of measures intended to address the housing affordability crisis, California still has the greatest “deficit” of affordable housing units of any state in the country. The state has “a deficit of 1.4 million affordable and available housing units for households earning at or below 50% of area median income,” according to a December 2022 analysis from Fitch Ratings.